A New Jersey town hall has been storing a lost Rodin bust for 80 years. A Rockefeller heir had decorated the town hall in Madison, NJ with many of her own works, including a Rodin bust of Napoleon that had fallen into obscurity after Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge’s death:
For around eight decades, the imperial bust silently gazed down from a plinth in the building’s main committee room, scarcely noticed by local legislators or passersby. It was not until 2015, when the foundation hired an archivist, a 22-year-old graduate student named Mallory Mortillaro, that the sculpture’s full provenance came to light. “She was running her finger along the base,” Platt says, “and felt a chiseled mark, and got a flashlight, got on a chair and peered over, and there was the signature of A. Rodin.”
Long-lost Rodin sculpture turns up in New Jersey town hall (The Art Newspaper)
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