BW: What intrigued you about doing a documentary video of the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Rodin collection?

AH: The fact that there were so many new angles. The relationship with a Rodin collector and benefactor to the Museum. Curator David Steel tending and nurturing this collection. Architect Thomas Phifer and director Larry Wheeler working with landscape architect Walt Havener and planning director Dan Gottlieb to develop a new home for the permanent collection. I’m a native to Raleigh and grew up at the Museum. It’s been fascinating to watch the NCMA evolve over time.

BW: The video also provides a glimpse behind the scenes at the thoughtful work being done by conservators, registrars, exhibition designers, and art handlers to bring the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Court and Garden to life.

AH: Yes, the back story is compelling, but you may not know to ask about it if you aren’t familiar with the workings of an art museum.

BW: The video also documents a moment in time. We’ll never have The Three Shades arriving on a truck and being transported through West Building and out into the Rodin Garden again. It’s nice to have that moment captured permanently.

AH: And the permanence of these gifts to the state of North Carolina makes the story so relevant. The Rodin collection is here to stay. North Carolinians can visit the museum 50 years from now and wonder how these sculptures came to Raleigh—and the video answers some of those questions. That’s why the iPad app is so important, too. It’s another vehicle for sharing information about art with a very global public (at this writing, people in 38 countries, including the Netherlands, China, Russia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and Kuwait, just to name a few, have downloaded the free iPad app).

BW: Do you have a favorite moment in the video?

AH: I like watching people get excited about what they do, whether they’re a farmer, a surgeon, or in this case a curator or a conservator. The look on people’s faces when those crates full of Rodins came off the art delivery trucks was a special moment. Another moment was getting to sit down and talk with Iris Cantor about how passionate she and her husband were about building this collection.

BW: Yes, one of my favorite moments is Iris Cantor telling the story of her late husband Bernie first seeing The Hand of God as a marble sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and how that sparked what he called his “magnificent obsession.” AH: What I love about directing and producing documentaries is how everything relates back to people. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it takes an artist and a viewer responding to that artist. The building didn’t put itself up. The collection didn’t form itself. There are teams of people working to make all of those things happen. As a documentary filmmaker I can bring all of those elements together and help people understand and appreciate the art in a new way. Hopefully we’ve created pathways into the Museum and the art that weren’t there before.

BW: Are there challenges to capturing bronzes on film?

AH: NCMA photographers Karen Malinofski and Christopher Ciccone did a great job working with a variety of sizes, textures, and nooks and crannies within the collection, and it shows. The light in the new building made my job easier. It bathes the bronzes in light in a special way.

BW: I know you spent a whole lot of time at the Museum while it was being built and after the art was in place. There’s a thoughtfulness to your approach that is made visible in the video. The sculptures and the people whose story we tell are very lovingly filmed.

AH: The only way that you can show someone looking comfortable on camera is to spend a lot of time with them and develop a trusting relationship between the camera and that person. Maybe that’s true of art and the camera as well?! Everyone involved was so passionate about what they do, and I hope that comes out.

BW: For technical people who might be interested, what kind of cameras are you using?

AH: The still photos that the staff took were done with a medium-sized camera to capture high-resolution stills for the book and the app. For the filming we used digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras because the resolution is high and they’re small and easy to maneuver in and out of tight spaces. You have to be careful about what you’re bumping into at the Museum! We needed to keep the gear and the crew to a minimum but still come up with great visuals. We did use a dolly in the gallery space. We didn’t set up track because of the oak floor, but we used a “doorway” dolly and tried to light each piece to make it look on video like it does to the human eye as a visitor in this unique, naturally-lit setting.

BW: The video is an interweaving of facets of the story, which gives you multiple entry points into the works of Auguste Rodin depending on what you’re interested in.

AH: You can enter the story through one door and find out there are lots of other rooms to discover.

BW: Which reminds me of the multiple entry points into our permanent collection in West Building. You can literally come upon the Rodin sculptures by strolling through the garden, or come in through the front entryway and follow a passageway of classical sculptures toward the Rodin gallery.

AH: To continue the metaphor, both the building and the video give you places to stop and ponder, and places to move through more quickly, opportunities to make new connections between art and nature, and see relationships between art. Hopefully we’ve captured the sense of discovery that is inherent in a visit to the Rodin collection at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Barbara Wiedemann is Associate Director of Publications at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Art Howard is the owner of ARTWORK, Inc., a multimedia production company specializing in video, stills, and stock.

Curator John Coffey’s remarks on the cell phone tour make the house in Andrew Newell Wyeth’s Weatherside (1965) come alive. He points out “the little specks of red in Christina’s window”—the geraniums that she always loved—and the tiny knot on the clothesline that show Wyeth’s obsession with detail.

As a new editor at the Museum, I knew I had a lot to learn. (I’m a newspaper veteran, not an art historian.) In my first days on the job, I’d hear coworkers rattling on about “the Steinkamp” or “the Archipenko.” I would nod sagely. Back at my desk, I’d look up those names in the Museum database. Aha! The Steinkamp is not some intimidating thing—it’s that flowing, ever-changing tree image projected on a wall of West Building. And the Archipenko is, of course, the Blue Dancer, balancing tirelessly on one pointed toe.

Well, two down, 3,834 to go.

Fortunately, I learned early on, not all of the Museum’s art is on display at once. For the moment I’d forget about the works in storage and focus on the 700 or so I could see.

And fortunately our curators and educators hadn’t left me to learn on my own. Before the new galleries opened, they had put together a cell phone tour to guide me—or any visitor—to some of the Museum’s highlights. Press 236 in the African gallery, and I could hear Ledelle Moe telling how she sculpted each head in Congregation. Or press 235 near the Krater, and curator Mary Ellen Soles tells about “the great intellectual drinking parties of ancient Greece.”

Listening and looking became my favorite part of the new job. When I had a bit of time to spare, I’d head to the galleries, check out an audio wand, and scope out a painting or two. Exploring reassured me that my ignorance was not total: amid the mysteries I found old friends Degas and Wyeth and O’Keeffe—oh, and have you heard, we have Rodins?

So, four months I’ve been here now. A couple of newspaper friends came by for lunch, and when we finished I led them into the galleries.

“You’ve got to see this,” I urged. “Lines That Link Humanity. By a Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui. Isn’t it amazing? He made it of old liquor bottle labels and even pieces of old newspaper printing plates—thousands of them.—And look, over here, this is the Steinkamp­—”

“You really know your art!” one friend exclaimed.

“Well,” I replied, “I’ve been keeping an ear out.”

Listen to remarks by curators, educators, and scholars using your own cell phone in the galleries, gardens, or Museum Park. Or check out an audio wand at the Information Desk for $3 (free for NCMA members). To listen on your own MP3 player, download the Cell Phone Tour.

Modeled in 1880, greatly enlarged and installed outside Paris’s Panthéon in 1904, The Thinker was already used in an advertisement by 1908. The visual cliché has been around so long that, unless we see the sculpture in person, it’s hard for us to fully appreciate the one work Rodin deemed so vital he asked that it be put over his grave in Meudon, France. In April visitors to the NCMA will have the unique opportunity to see both the original and the enlarged versions of this most familiar of sculptures.

Before visiting, it might help to clear away some of the commercial cobwebs by considering what Rodin originally called the sculpture: not The Thinker but The Poet, according to Curator of European Art David Steel.

In his new book Rodin: The Cantor Foundation Gift to the North Carolina Museum of Art, Steel says The Poet was likely the first sculpture Rodin created for his famous The Gates of Hell. It sits high atop these bronze doors initially inspired by scenes in Dante’s Inferno. Steel tells us Rodin first imagined the poet to be Dante himself, “thinking of the plan of his poem.”

As an editor it touched me that this famous thinker was initially a writer, a poet facing the blank page. Rodin’s poet thinks so hard about his work of art that his toes grip the rock he sits on. Hardly cerebral, the poet is visceral, grounded, and heavy: the monumental cast installed in front of the NCMA’s new West Building, a loan from the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford, weighs nearly 1,500 pounds.

I was curious what a true poet would have to say about Rodin’s original title for the sculpture, so I cold called a fine translator of Dante’s Inferno, former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, who remarked on the deceptive ease of creating a poem, or any work of art. Pinsky likes Rodin’s original title “as a corrective to 19th-century and older notions of Orpheus or Dionysus or wild-eyed Highlands bards with their beards sideways in the Scottish wind.”

“It’s interesting,” Pinsky said, “to think about [Rodin’s] image of [The Poet]: hunched, not dancing or lyre-strumming, muscular, not epicene, and working hard. An image of composition and inner work, not of performance.”

Rodin labored on The Gates of Hell for more than 20 years. Gradually the work strayed from the Inferno, and Rodin included stories from the Bible and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. Slowly the Poet became the Thinker. “Guided by my first inspiration,” Rodin wrote, “I conceived another thinker, a naked man, seated upon a rock, his feet drawn under him, his fist against his teeth, he dreams. The fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He is no longer dreamer, he is creator.”

In April you can learn more about The Thinker and other figures on The Gates of Hell by visiting the NCMA’s new Rodin court and garden. After seeing these magnificent sculptures in person, pick up a copy of Steel’s book in the new Museum Store or online. Rodin: The Cantor Foundation Gift to the North Carolina Museum of Art also includes a DVD documentary on the collection, created by Emmy Award–winning producer-director Art Howard and coproducer Julie Dixon.

Rodin, The Kiss, modeled circa 1881–82, cast at a later date, bronze, 34 x 17 x 22 in., Gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation

As an “it” couple, we’re used to the red carpet treatment. The throngs of people, photo shoots, jet-setting, spa treatments and touch ups, exclusive parties, and front page headlines—it’s all in a day’s work really.

Since 1995, we’ve “honeymooned” across the globe visiting 36 cities in the United States, Canada, Singapore, and Australia. (See a map of our travels.) We’ve seen the bright city lights of Los Angeles, Vancouver, Singapore, and Perth. We’ve been to the Great White North and to college campuses across the U.S. There were fabulous ski trips to Utah and Calgary and a relaxing sea-side get-away in Sarasota.

It’s not all glitz and glamour, though. Being in the spotlight for some 14 years is a bit exhausting. Just when we’ve settled in at one venue, we’re off again. It’s practically a circus traveling with an entourage of 59 across the globe. We’ve hardly been able to steal a moment to ourselves, and it has definitely taken a toll on our relationship. And the jet lag . . . don’t even get us started.

Now we’ve found ourselves in a curious place. It’s incredibly drab. Just wide open spaces, barren concrete walls, and scattered crates. We spot a familiar friend or two across the way—the curious fellow always so deep in thought, that unfortunate headless torso, and the ever-preaching Saint John.

But where is the red carpet, the adoring fans, and the good lighting that hides our trouble spots? We sure hope we won’t be here long. Check back and we’ll fill you in on our dreadful current situation and the next leg of our journey.

This post is part of the series Follow Our Journey. Follow The Kiss and six other works of art on the Big Move to the Museum’s new building.