Big changes are afoot at the Rodin Museum in Paris. There is a new and more spacious entrance on the Rue de Varenne, and a new and more generously stocked bookshop. Orientating oneself through the gardens and into the main body of the museum in the Hotel Biron feels less bemusing than in the past. What is more, a new director, Dominic Vieville, has just been appointed, and the museum's 19th-century chapel, closed for restoration for almost a decade, has reopened as a space for twice-yearly temporary exhibitions.
The first exhibition of sculpture (and supporting photographs) in the chapel, Sculpture in Space, asks important questions about the relationship between sculptural objects and their public display. At what height should we ideally observe a sculpture, and what effect is this likely to have on our reading of it? What materials should its supports be made from? What kinds of sculptures benefit from being raised up high, and which ones are more profitably read by being displayed at ground level?
Since antiquity, sculpture has been raised up from the ground, on columns, plinths and bases of varying heights. In the 1960s there was a revolution against this orthodoxy. Anthony Caro and others abolished the plinth altogether, displaying sculptures at ground level in order, as they argued, to present an art that was on a par with its audience. Sculpture was no longer to be seen as something set apart from its viewers. It was to play its part in the real world. That point was emphasised by the simultan-eous introduction of new materials for sculpture - steel, cloth or just any old "stuff" (a key word for Caro) salvaged from here, there and everywhere.
Since that time many sculptors have reintroduced bases and plinths, but they have used them in much more self-conscious ways. In the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois experiments with a plinth made from a material that differs dramatically from the object displayed upon it; Giacometti (long before Caro) uses the support as a sculptural element in its own right; and Richard Wentworth asks us to contemplate the possibility that the support itself might constitute the entire sculptural story.
Sculpture in Space shows us more than 100 examples of sculptures, from the Hellenistic period to the present day, and invites us to look at them anew in relation to such issues. Rodin is pivotal to the investigation because he was obsessively concerned throughout his long working life with the question of how sculpture might be displayed to best effect.
The show opens with a bang. As we walk into the chapel, which seems to be flooded with a bright white light, we see, displayed directly in front of us, a huge white sculptural group of figures that we are almost sure we recognise very well . . . The dramatic difference is that it is raised about four metres up from the ground, and stands on a wooden scaffold. This is one of the plaster maquettes for the "Burghers of Calais", and it is shown here at the height at which Rodin wanted it to be displayed. (Elsewhere in the chapel, you can see proof of this - a faded photograph dating from 1913, which shows the sculpture on a similar scaffold in Meudon.)
This reconstituted display gives us the message of the exhibition in little. Our sense of what the sculpture means - how it weighs upon us, how it affects us emotionally - is utterly different from the way we connect with the bronze cast that can be seen today in London's Victoria Embankment Gardens, where it is displayed on the lowest of low plinths, so that the figures seem to be walking towards us like trudging pilgrims whose significance remains a little unclear, to be almost mingling with a populace that includes ourselves.
In the Rodin Chapel we are obliged to peer skylight-wards. The gestures of the figures seem to be more exaggeratedly affecting, and to be rendered more distinctively heroic and defining, by their positioning above our heads. The burghers look more self-affirming, more emphatic, more as if they are not merely human any longer, but part human and part symbol. They seem to want to proclaim things - messages relating to courage, clemency and the like. Is this a good thing? Maybe, maybe not, but it is how Rodin wanted it.
Behind the Rodin there is a Giacometti group called "La Forêt" of 1950. A group of tiny figures is set into a very low base, which is itself displayed on a white rectangular plinth. We look across at them, and down a little. By comparison with the Rodin, this display feels anti-heroic: we experience this through the height and the size of the figures, and in their minimally reduced forms, and in the way in which they relate to their base - the bodies, for example, seem to taper, as our eye strays from head to foot, to fragile and ever-thinning columns, down as far as what passes for feet, which is in fact a kind of muddy rectangular ooze of bronze, set into an irregular bronze platform.
The way in which a support echoes a form, or in part seeks to replicate it, sets up rhythms and, in their wake, expectations. Brancusi demonstrates this convincingly in a sculpture called "Le Coq" (one of a series) of 1935. Here the movement is from a plinth of wood and granulated stone up to an arrow-like bird form of highly polished bronze - an ever ascending, heaven-ward movement from rough and blockish beginnings to increasing refinement.
This important exhibition provokes a whole series of fascinating reflections upon the relationship between a sculpture and its support. To argue, as Caro once did, that to abolish the plinth is to do away with a device that did nothing but come between the viewer and the sculptural object seems an act of gross over-simplification.
'Sculpture in Space', Rodin Museum, Paris, until 26 February. Tel +33 1 44 18 61 10
