A Rodin Hiding in Plain Sight in a New Jersey Suburb
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Version 0 of 1. MADISON, N.J. — The borough council meets every other week in a room on the second floor, handling the usual affairs of a small suburb — hiring traffic engineers, leasing copy machines for the Police Department — in an unusual space that feels more like a museum than a municipal hall. The floor is a chessboard of black and white marble. Silver-plated chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Oil portraits of American forefathers line the walls, and by the windows, there is an old wooden desk that once belonged to Abraham Lincoln. It is a rare environment where a bust of Napoleon on a pedestal in the corner, chiseled from marble and weighing some 700 pounds, could blend in. “Look at this room,” said Mallory Mortillaro, who had been hired to take inventory of the art in the building. “It’s not like your eye goes right to the corner. It’s a spectacle itself, where you have really nice things hiding among other really nice things.” In 2014, Ms. Mortillaro was 22 with an undergraduate degree in art history when she answered an advertisement for a part-time archivist. Her job was to examine the paintings, photographs and sculptures, measuring and photographing them. It took her a few weeks to get to the bust, peeking behind the sculpture to find something that had apparently been overlooked for 80 years. The markings on the white marble were faint, but she saw a signature: A. Rodin. Her discovery turned into months of investigating — searching archives, calling experts only to be rebuffed, stumbling into leads — to confirm her suspicion that the bust was an authentic work of Auguste Rodin, the renowned French sculptor. “There’s no how-to-navigate-this book,” she said. “‘You Think You Found a Rodin. What Now?’” Madison is a New Jersey borough of 16,000 people about 30 miles west of New York City with a row of bistros and boutiques on a main thoroughfare and road after tree-covered road of colonial homes on spacious lawns peppered with autumn leaves. Yet its local government has headquarters, with its towering marble columns and polished bronze doors, that could rival state capitols (certainly the one in Trenton). The borough hall, named the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building, was built by the heiress Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge as a tribute to her son, Marcellus Hartley Dodge Jr., who died in a car accident in 1930. She filled the building with art from her own collection. A desk that had belonged to her father, William Rockefeller Jr., is now the mayor’s desk. A large portrait of her hangs in the council chamber, presiding over every meeting. She also left an endowment, funding a foundation that owns and maintains the art as well as the building. “When you pull up to the building, it’s a quite imposing, stunning building,” said Jennifer Thompson, a curator for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. “When you walk in, it suddenly makes sense that there might be a great Rodin marble in this place.” Still, Ms. Mortillaro initially had her doubts. She found it difficult to believe that the foundation, which had hired her, did not already know the piece was a Rodin. She was reluctant to ask. At one meeting where she updated the foundation’s board on her work, she waited until the end to bring it up. There had been rumors over the years that the sculpture might be the work of Rodin or his protégés, but there were no records to support it, said Nicolas W. Platt, the president of the Hartley Dodge Foundation. The bust had certainly not been handled as though it were a genuine Rodin. The marble was coated with fingerprints. The pedestal had become a handy leaning post at crowded meetings. During a building renovation, the board opted to simply cover the bust with a plywood box instead of removing it from harm’s way. “It was treated like your aunt’s coffee table,” Mr. Platt said. As Ms. Mortillaro kept digging, progress proved difficult. “Dead end after dead end,” Mr. Platt said. But over time, she was able to stitch together the bust’s journey to Madison, working her way back to Rodin’s studio outside Paris. The piece had been commissioned in 1904 by a collector from New York City, but it went unfinished until the American financier Thomas Fortune Ryan bought the bust after seeing it in the sculptor’s studio several years later. Mr. Ryan kept it in his home before loaning it the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, Ms. Mortillaro found, the bust had been displayed for more than a decade. After Mr. Ryan died, Ms. Dodge bought it at auction. Finally, another break came when Ms. Mortillaro was directed to the Comité Auguste Rodin in Paris, a group that could determine its authenticity. Jerome Le Blay, the head of the committee and a leading Rodin expert, said hundreds of applications come in every year — plaster, marble and bronze sculptures submitted for review. Most are not authentic. But he recognized the Napoleon bust. He knew the piece existed, he said, but its whereabouts had been unknown for decades. Mr. Le Blay traveled to Madison in 2015 to examine the bust. The authentication process was thorough, requiring more research in France. But almost as soon as he saw it, he believed it was genuine. “I had no doubt,” he said. He was taken by Rodin’s sympathetic portrayal of Napoleon, an emperor and conqueror. “This portrait of Napoleon is a very human portrait,” Mr. Le Blay said. “It’s a man who’s wondering what he should do and how far he should go. It’s very interrogative about his future. It matches perfectly with the spirit of Rodin.” The bust was authenticated nearly two years ago, but the Hartley Dodge Foundation did not start sharing what had been a tightly held secret until recently. The foundation has announced that the bust, which Mr. Platt said could be worth $4 million to $12 million, would be lent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ms. Mortillaro is now 26 and a sixth-grade language arts teacher. She has heard from friends and acquaintances surprised by her side job. “I feel like my secret identity has been exposed,” she said. The bust has become a topic of conversation around Madison and has generated attention in newspapers around New Jersey. The mayor said he has heard from some who mistakenly believed the borough owned the piece and suggested selling it for tax relief. “It has been fun,” said the mayor, Robert H. Conley. “It’s not too often a mayor’s on the front page of The Star-Ledger and I don’t have to worry about hiring an attorney.” The borough hall will be open this weekend, giving the public one last chance to see the bust in the room where it sat since the 1940s. Then, next week, it will be sent to Philadelphia. Ms. Mortillaro will return to work at the municipal building. She had been hired initially for a temporary assignment, but the work has not been finished. There is still plenty of art scattered throughout the building for her to photograph, measure and investigate. There are more stories to tell. “I love the history of the pieces,” she said, “how they were displayed and thinking of who saw it and where it was hanging and what was going on in the world when people were walking by those galleries.” |