The Rodin Museum in Paris reopened today, 12 November, after a three-year renovation of the 18th-century Hôtel Biron, where Auguste Rodin lived and worked at the end of his life. The museum had been closed since January 2015.
“The building was in a very bad state,” says Catherine Chaillot, the museum’s director. Most glaring was the damage millions of visitors’ feet had done to the parquet flooring. The museum also seized the renovations as an opportunity to re-organise its collection of more than 30,000 works. The 18 galleries now present around 600 objects—including plasters exhibited for the first time—with an emphasis on the sculptor’s creative process. One room juxtaposes sculptures by Rodin with the antique fragments he collected.
The project’s €16m price tag was funded 49% by the Ministry of Culture and Communication and 51% by the museum, with support from the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. Rodin left the copyrights of his oeuvre to the French state. By selling limited editions of his sculptures, the institution has become the only self-sufficient French national museum. Chaillot expects annual attendance to rise from 700,000 to 800,000 in the renovated space.
