Meeting with Prof. Jacques de Caso, Univ. OF California, Berkeley (1)

Our team member Alida Kreutzer in
conversation with Jacques de Caso,
in La Bohème, Munich, 6 February 2003

On 11 January 2003, we received an email message from Jacques de Caso, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of California at Berkeley. Prof. de Caso announced he would give a lecture in Munich on 6 February 2003, and proposed we should meet personally during his stay in Munich to get acquainted more closely. We attended the lecture given by Prof. de Caso at the Institute for Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, then met with him informally in Munich-Schwabing.

Jacques de Caso is a widely renowned specialist for Nineteenth Century art, particularly sculpture and has published on artists like David d'Angers, Pradier, Géricault, Rodin and recently Théophile Bra. Théophile Bra was the subject of his lecture in Munich, "Romanticism and its Discontents".

In the municipal library of Bra's home town, Douai, de Caso recently discovered the totally forgotten mystical drawings of Bra. These surprising compositions do not fit the conventional categories of Nineteenth Century Art at all.

In 1977, de Caso, together with Patricia Sanders, published "Rodin's sculpture: a critical study of the Spreckels Collection, California Palace of the Legion of Honor". In this catalog, one of the largest collections of original Rodin bronzes and plasters worldwide is presented and analyzed. Most of these works have their origin in the private collection of Alma de Bretteville-Spreckels. 

Legion of Honor,
San Francisco

Alma was introduced to Rodin by their mutual friend, the dancer Loïe Fuller. 
Casts of The Thinker and of John the Baptist were two of the earliest acquisitions (1915), mostly from Rodin himself, who helped her selecting works from his studio, shortly before his death in 1917. During a period of nearly 35 years, Alma continued to expand her collection, finally comprising more than 80 bronze and marble sculptures, plasters and terracottas. The catalog by de Caso and Sanders is one of the authoritative descriptions of Rodin's oeuvre.

De Caso was born and raised in France and moved to the USA in the Fifties.
In 1962, he wrote his dissertation at Yale on French Sculpture from Neoclassicism to Rodin. As a scholar, de Caso has always maintained an independent position. In a 1968 article in Le Monde, he openly questioned the quality of posthumous casts - those commissioned by the Musée Rodin included -, addressing the absence of personal supervision by Rodin, with regard to chiseling, patination, etc.

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