Chilly Woman from out, a weblog by George Girton

Chilly Woman . . . . . dec 14 2003 — o36.dat

Today I nipped up to The Getty (www.getty.edu) to see Houdon's sculptures of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and as I discovered when I got there, John Paul Jones, Voltaire, Diderot, the emperor Napoleon and his wife Josephine, and many others, including the happy wife of Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Arriving in a rush at sunset, only an hour and a half before the museum's Sunday closing time of 6.00 p.m., I took the rain-soaked marble steps two at a time, quickly reaching the second level. I was guided by banner after banner of Houdon's sculpture of the handsome American steamship developer Robert Fulton, which has been chosen as the emblem of the exhibition.

The climate-controlled second level is an area normally devoted to the display of two-millenium-old fragile antiquities. Two sets of doors serve as an airlock against the changing Los Angeles climate, so there's a slight delay as you go in ... I strode purposefully towards Houdon's sculpture of Jefferson, and had almost reached it when I was brought up short by a hooded woman.

Crouched, hooded, perfectly formed, Houdon's sculpture in brass of La Frileuse ('Chilly woman') brought me to a halt, a complete stop, a full transport out of modern life.

And into winter.

At that moment, warmly dressed in Los Angeles, I stopped and I shivered.

I spent quite a bit of time looking at that statue, and others in the exhibit. If you don't plan to visit Los Angeles before January 25, 2004, you can still learn a great deal from the catalog of Houdon's exhibition, which has been published by the U. of Chicaga Press: Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment [buy at amazon] . by Anne L. Poulet.

If you ARE in Los Angeles, you must take the tram to Valhalla on the hill, and glimpse these three-dimensional portraits of our American founding fathers, who sat for Houdon, and by extension, since Houdon was the premiere sculptor of his age, for you.

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