Yesterday I decided to visit the Museum of Hendrick Christian Andersen. I have to admit that I didn’t really know anything about him beforehand. In fact, I kind of assumed someone had misspelled Hans Christian Andersen and there would be Little Mermaid replicas and immersive fairy tale exhibits. Turns out not!
Hendrick Christian Andersen(1872-1940) was a Norwegian-born American sculptor who travelled to Italy in his youth (with his painter brother Andreas) and finally settled in Rome. These days he is probably most famous for his unusually warm correspondence with Henry James, which provide subtle hints about the latter’s sexuality, cryptic clues such as “I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment.” Colm Tóibín has written a novel about their relationship from James’s perspective called The Master.
The pink, three-storied museum called Villa Hélène for Hendrick’s mother stands between Piazza del Popolo and the Tiber. Built in 1922, it was Hendrick’s home and studio for the final two decades of his life. Here he received an array of fashionable visitors including writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), aviator Umberto Nobile (1885-1978), feminist poet Sibilla Aleràmo (1876-1960), inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), comedian Ettore Petrolini (1884-1936), art critic and dealer Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) and various magnates.
In a few moments I went from a bright, busy city street to a luminous studio filled with monumental figures worked in marble and bronze. The figures were nude, muscular, grinning, athletic and amorous. It looked as if they’d been frozen mid-rave. Even the horses looked frisky, if I’m being honest, especially the pashing centaurs.
All the frenetic thrusting and flexing on a grand scale made me feel a bit nervous. I’m so used to associating massive, sporty grinning figures with mid-twentieth-century political movements that I started looking around for clots of secret police.
In fact, these pieces were almost all created for a Utopian city that never even got the chance to go horribly wrong. Andersen teamed up with architect Ernest Hébrard and got the idea of creating The World Center of Communication. Between 1901 and 1911 these two busy boys made detailed plans for their project, putting together a kind of manifesto (that can be read online) and drawing up a city plan. Hendrick seems to have been in charge of the statues, which were designed to decorate the fountains, halls and streets of a magical place in which elite members of different nations of the world might peacefully coexist together. The citizens would be the crème de la crème of the world’s artists and scientists (which doesn’t sound like a recipe for harmony if you ask me). Hébrard’s job was to draw up the architectural plan.
They cooked up an Arts Center, a Science Center, a Gym and things like a ‘fountain of life’ and ‘Tower of Progress’ (had it been built, it would have been the tallest building in the world at that time). The two of them kept trying to shop it around. Despite their best efforts, though, the funding never came through. Even Mussolini thought it too much of a crackpot idea to support. It remains one of the several unbuilt utopian cities of history.
All in all, I preferred the non-whacko pieces, particularly this portrayal of the Judas kiss, where Judas’s desperation, fear and shame are painfully evident.
Then there is whatever this is.
And this rendering of the young daughter of the villa’s doorman.
Even if the art wasn’t totally my cup of tea, I’m really glad I visited this place. It’s intriguing and a window into a certain period of time in Italy’s modern history. Plus it’s free to visit, pretty close to the big-ticket attractions and not crowded.
