The Thinker in downtown Barrie, Ontario Canada

The Thinker was replaced outside MacLaren Centre in Barrie with new work.

The original concept of the artist was Dante sitting looking into the gates of Hell.

 

To me, the replacement piece shown below in a link is spiritless.

 

By Bob Bruton, Barrie Examiner

 

Thursday, September 15, 2016 3:53:20 EDT P

 

The Thinker might no longer be brooding outside Barrie's MacLaren Art Centre.

 

It's board of directors has plans to replace the August Rodin bronze reproduction with a more contemporary statue in time for Canada's 150th birthday – July 1, 2017 – Kosso Eloul's 'Shlosha'.

 

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“It's contemporary work, in stainless steel, and it's a more modernist work, so it fits with the architecture of our contemporary wing,” said Carolyn Bell Farrell, the Maclaren's executive director.

 

“It's going to be fresh, it's going to be exciting,” said Coun. Mike McCann, who sits on the board as city council's representative, along with Coun. Arif Khan.

 

“It's going to integrate very well in the downtown core.”

 

Bell Farrell said the MacLaren submitted an application Tuesday to Ontario's Trillium Foundation to secure funds to make this happen. She expects to know by January.

 

The replacement still requires board approval.

 

The Eloul piece is in the MacLaren's permanent collection, and has been stored in Toronto for 10 years.

 

“It's time to revitalize our outdoors,” Bell Farrell said of the Mulcaster Street site. “And we want something that's also contemporary Canadian art that reflects our mandate, and something that could be revitalizing the whole sculpture garden, and becomes a really wonderful kind of legacy project for the 150th anniversary of Canada.”

 

Eloul (1920-1995) was born in what's now Russia and first came to Montreal in 1964, before settling in Toronto.

 

He's known for his minimalist rectangular box-shaped pieces made from stainless steel, and his sculptures grace public spaces in many Canadian cities.

 

Rodin (1840-1917) was a French sculptor, illustrator, graphic artist and painter; he's considered to be the founder of impressionist style in the art of sculpture.

 

McCann was asked why The Thinker would be replaced with any other sculpture.

 

“It's probably the most popular statue we have in Barrie, or at least at the MacLaren,” the Ward 10 councillor admitted. “I guess having a change is the direction the MacLaren wants to go, and they want to bring an exciting piece to the downtown and change is sometimes good.”

 

“It's (the Thinker is) a contemporary reproduction of a period piece,” said Bell Farrell, “Rodin bronzes we have had on loan, and the plans are to return them to their owners, from a private collection in Toronto.”

 

The bronze reproduction of The Thinker which sits in front of the MacLaren is part of a collection of Rodin replicas that are part of the art centre's controversial past.

 

In mid-2000, a deal to acquire more than 500 Auguste Rodin bronzes and some sculptures - involving registered charity Ideas Canada Foundation - was hatched.

 

A display of the Rodins was considered a significant achievement for the MacLaren, and there were hopes it could be a major revenue generator for the art centre.

 

But the deal fell apart because those donating the money to buy the Rodins were denied tax breaks by Revenue Canada.

 

This led to major financial hardship for the MacLaren, which was moving from its Toronto Street facility to the revamped Carnegie building - where its annual operating budget would increase to $3 million from $500,000.

 

In 2006 the city agreed to throw the MacLaren a financial lifeline, assuming the annual operating costs of the Mulcaster Street building. This is approximately $200,000 to $225,000 a year.

 

The MacLaren also receives an annual cultural grant from the city; in 2016 it was $133,000.

 

The MacLaren does not pay rent on the city-owned building.

 

On the city’s financial statements, there is an 'allowance for doubtful accounts' set up against the full amount of the MacLaren Art Centre loan of $3.9 million. The allowance for doubtful accounts is required from an accounting perspective.

 

bbruton@postmedia.comThe Thinker in rehab

 

James Adams

 

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

 

Published Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2007 12:00AM EST

 

Last updated Friday, Mar. 13, 2009 9:07PM EDT

 

He's one of the most famous (and most parodied) figures in the history of art and now he's pondering the future in all his naked glory on a street corner in Barrie, Ont.

Last month,, officials with the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, a lakeside city of 150,000 about 100 kilometres north of Toronto, unveiled a large bronze reproduction of The Thinker, Auguste Rodin's masterpiece of manly, moody meditation, the original plaster version of which was created in 1880, 37 years before Rodin's death. The Barrie bronze, which is believed to have been cast in 1999, stands more than two metres tall, plinth included, and weighs more than 540 kilograms.

 

The unveiling marked a homecoming of sorts for the dark behemoth, which has not been displayed in public for close to five years, and a controversial one at that. Indeed, for many, The Thinker probably will serve, at least for a time, as a painful reminder of a bold, multimillion-dollar art deal gone bad -- so bad, in fact, that it almost destroyed the gallery on whose corner it now sits.

 

The unveiling is part of a rehabilitation effort by John Lister, who became the MacLaren's director in late 2005. He is hoping that sheer public exposure of The Thinker and some of the 23 other Rodin reproductions owned by the MacLaren will help to dispel the aroma of negativity that has hung over the gallery for more than five years. Already a large Eve stands in the rotunda at Barrie City Hall, kitty-corner from The Thinker, and more recently two local businesses agreed to display smaller Rodins on their premises, in exchange for donations to the MacLaren.

 

"We've spent a lot of time distracted by and dealing with the Rodin issue. This is a sign we're moving on," Lister said. "We're an art gallery with an arts mission. Let's just enjoy it."

 

This may prove easier said than done. After all, starting in the fall of 2001, The Thinker, now at the southeast corner of Mulcaster and Collier streets, spent almost six months in the rotunda of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum functioning as a mascot of sorts for From Plaster to Bronze, a MacLaren-organized exhibition of 40 plasters and 28 bronzes attributed to Rodin. It was an exhibition whose repercussions continue to be felt a half-decade later, not the least of which is an ongoing fraud investigation that Barrie police and the RCMP launched almost 10 months ago.

 

What made the ROM show controversial was the now-famous spat it generated between the MacLaren, a decidedly modest gallery not even 20 years old at the time, and the Musée Rodin, the mighty Paris-based, state-funded repository of the sculptor's most significant works. The Musée has been a two-fisted arbiter of all things Rodin since its creation in 1919, and here, in une petite ville anglaise in what used to called New France, was this itty-bitty art centre announcing its intention to create one of the biggest, if not the biggest, collection of Rodins outside Paris. Zut alors!

 

The Barrie plasters, the Musée argued, were "inauthentic," "too far from the master's [Rodin's]hand" and, in many instances, likely duplicates (as opposed to first-generation plasters) manufactured decades after Rodin's death. There were even intimations that several of the plasters were outright fakes.

 

The charges rocked the MacLaren's world. The Barrie gallery, after all, was the planned recipient of the majority of the works at the ROM, and as part of that plan, the ROM exhibition had been conceived as only the first stop in what was supposed to be a long-running, profile-raising international tour.

 

Just a year earlier, the gallery had become enmeshed in a complicated transaction linking Canadian investors, seeking big breaks on income tax through the donation of high-valued art to registered charities, with Gruppo Mondiale Est, an Italian firm that had agreed to sell the investors 52 Rodin plasters -- many of them purportedly made during the artist's lifetime (1840-1917) -- that Gruppo claimed to have obtained from Rodin's "preferred foundry" after the foundry declared bankruptcy in 1993.

 

(In sculpture, a plaster is to a finished bronze what a film negative is to a photographic print. It's the plaster mould that, through a complicated foundry procedure known as lost-wax casting, allows the sculptor and his assistants to make multiple copies out of molten bronze. Which is why, for instance, in the last 20 or so years of his life, Rodin permitted more than 300 bronzes of varying sizes of one of his most famous works, The Kiss, to be cast and sold worldwide.)

 

These plasters -- and their potential as the basis for a series of bronze casts -- were to be the foundation of something called ArtCity, a scheme to turn the MacLaren into a major public institution and unprepossessing Barrie into an international tourist draw -- "a vibrant, evolving outdoor museum" -- renowned for its presentation of great sculpture past and present.

 

A key element in the scheme was the planned production of more than 500 Rodin bronzes -- editions of 10, possibly even 12, cast from 51 plasters, including such famous pieces as The Age of Spring and Eternal Spring. Some of the bronzes, which the MacLaren expected to receive in 2003 from an Italian manufacturer, would be kept by the art centre. But the majority were to be sold to institutions and individual collectors worldwide for mega-dollars, thereby helping the MacLaren pay, among other expenses, the almost $3-million it had borrowed from the Barrie civic government for a capital expansion started in the late 1990s.

 

But the MacLaren never took delivery of the 500-plus bronzes and still hasn't -- even though, after transferring $5-million (U.S.) in 2000 and 2001 to the Italian manufacturer, it received papers granting it title to them, and even though at one point in the deal that was supposed to result in delivery, more than $150-million in tax-leveraged funding was bouncing around various accounts in Canada, the United States, Europe, the Caribbean and Britain.

 

Negotiations to resolve the matter collapsed in late 2003, with the result that last spring Lister and Jim Fairhead, then the chair of the MacLaren board, finally decided to "turn the issue over to the police because we believe we've been defrauded." (The manufacturer says it never received full payment for its services and as a result, whatever bronzes it did cast have since been melted down.)

 

Once the ROM exhibition closed in mid-March, 2002 -- it was considered a box-office failure -- no other institution dared pick it up in the face of the Musée Rodin's sang et tonnerre. In fact, a tour never will happen, because last year the 17 or 18 Canadians who had hoped to donate 34 plasters in exchange for tax relief were told that the MacLaren no longer wished to take the art into its permanent collection. The MacLaren has since asked the donors to take possession of their plasters, which the gallery has been storing on their behalf in a Toronto facility. To date, only two of the 34 plasters have been reclaimed, and these by an unidentified Barrie collector.

 

Twenty-eight of the remaining 32 plasters are the property of a group of 10 prominent Canadian businessmen, fronted by Toronto investment banker Robert Foster, who, with a handful of associates, was a significant supporter of the ArtCity concept in its earliest days. It was, in fact, the Foster group that, in late 2000, donated The Thinker and the majority of the other 23 bronzes (for tax relief estimated at more than $2.2-million) that are now the legacy of the MacLaren's ill-fated foray into the international art market.

 

But you won't find any donors' names -- besides Foster, the original cadre included Rolling Stones/U2 tour manager Michael Cohl, pollster Martin Goldfarb, Mad Catz Interactive founder Pat Brigham and Canada 3000 founder John Lecky (now deceased) -- on the temporary plaque at the base of The Thinker. Will they be there when the permanent marker is affixed this spring? "That's a good question," Lister said recently. He plans to ask, "but my guess is they'll say no."

 

For its part, the MacLaren seems intent on not overplaying the significance of The Thinker. In press materials issued to coincide with the unveiling, the art centre notes that the sculpture was estimated to be worth $1-million "at the time it was donated," and cast as "part of a larger independent commercial edition that was never completed." But, it adds, the Musée Rodin -- which the MacLaren calls "the legal heir to Rodin's works" -- "has not recognized the bronze castings," including that of The Thinker, since it's generally agreed they were "sourced" from the plasters the Musée aggressively disparaged in 2001.

Done