The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, a short distance from and overseen by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, houses the gift of the movie theater magnate Jules E. Mastbaum, and supplements it with long-term exhibitions built around the collection as well as works by other artists. The latest is “Rethinking the Modern Monument,” organized by Alexander Kauffman, the Andrew W. Mellon–Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.1 Given the fraught nature of commemorative art in our day (see Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial) the subject couldn’t be more timely.

The core of the show is, outside, a cast of the Burghers of Calais (1884–89), and inside, a representative array of studies and models for many other monuments: most famously the Balzac (1897), but also such masterpieces as Call to Arms (1879), Rodin’s unsuccessful submission for a work commemorating the dead of the Franco-Prussian War, and his monument to Claude Lorrain (1889), with its magnificent pedestal showing Apollo and three horses exploding out of it as they haul up the morning sun—an apt homage for the painter of light. (It’s also, possibly, something of a play on words and images. It is the same subject as the relief Horses of the Sun, 1736–37, over the stable doors at the Hôtel de Rohan in Paris by Robert Le Lorrain, a work Rodin surely knew.) To these have been added works by Picasso, Giacometti, Hepworth, Lipchitz, and others.