Rodin Museum

Rodin Museum Review

This jewel of a museum holds the biggest collection outside France of the work of sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). You'll pass through a newly re-landscaped courtyard to reach Rodin's Gates of Hell—a 21-foot-high sculpture with more than 100 human and animal figures. In the exhibition hall, the sculptor's masterworks are made even more striking by the use of light and shadow. Here are The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and Eternal Springtime. A small room is devoted to one of Rodin's most famous sitters, the French novelist Balzac. Photographs by Edward Steichen showing Rodin at work round out the collection. The museum, which occupies a 20th-century building designed by French architects Jacques Greber and Paul Cret, was slated to close for interior renovations in fall 2011, and reopen in June 2012. The idea is to honor Cret's original idea that inside and out offer a "unified setting" for the presentation of sculpture.