Exhibition: the making of statues  

What were the "ingredients" of 19th-century sculpture? Plaster, bronze, marble?
Not just plaster, bronze and marble: in Auguste Bartholdi's time, the making of a statue involved many stages and as many materials, techniques and people.
Far from the romantic myth of the artist creating alone in his studio, the practice of sculpture is by nature collective, especially when it is monumental. While the sculptor can produce a sketch on paper, in clay or in plaster on his own, he still has to win over and satisfy the clients, sometimes even modifying his project. He would also need other technicians to transpose the model into another material and multiply its dimensions or editions.
Auguste Bartholdi used the conventional methods of his time, although he was sometimes able to give them extraordinary proportions, as in the case of Liberty Enlightening the World and the Monument to the Defenders of Belfort during the Siege of 1870. The workshop collection bequeathed by his wife Jeanne-Emilie Bartholdi to the City of Colmar, as well as recent acquisitions, illustrate all these stages and the diversity of media that could be used to create a work.