After a three year and $9 million renovation, The Rodin Museum has reopened in Philadelphia, with all of its sculptures, arts and interior and freshly renovated French garden, fountain and reflecting pool.
It will have a slew of visitor services and public programs that will enhance learning opportunities for visitors. Hand-held multimedia devices will soon be available in the welcome center and the multimedia content will also be available through a downloadable app on personal devices.
Tables and chairs in the library accommodate visitors as they explore Rodin in greater depth through publications and access to the redesigned Rodin Museum website. Over time, a growing number of web features will provide deeper layers of content-rich information and imagery about the sculptures, Rodin's biography, and the history of the Museum. Family guides will also be available. Public tours led by guides will take place daily at 1:30 p.m.
The Rodin Museum is a historic building surrounded by formal gardens, showcasing the French artist's monumental sculptures and history that can be felt at looking to it.
The sculptures are renovated at their original locations inside and out, refurbished almost all of them except the "The Burghers of Calais" that has yet to be cleaned up.
The museum was first opened in 1929, and is located between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the new Barnes Foundation on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
"It was long overdue," Timothy Rub, director and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which runs the Rodin, told the reporters at a preview event Thursday. "We have a beautiful site and building and a great collection that had, frankly, lost some of its luster."
The inside galleries of the museum were rearranged to highlight its most famous "The Gates of Hell" with a lot of other iconic sculptures like "The Kiss" to "The Thinker."
A new air-conditioning system will add a lot more comfort for the visitors arriving in the summers.
The museum is also a house for the largest collection of Auguste Rodin's sculptures outside of the Musee Rodin's collections in Paris and Meudon.
Jules Mastbaum, the tycoon of the movie theatre of that time gifted the collection to the city who was introduced to Rodin's work during a 1923 trip to Paris.
In the octagonal galleries, visitors can find comfortable couches and take the opportunity to respond to a changing array of "creative prompts," submit sketches or share written reflections about the Museum and its collection.
"Everything you see here, the interior in particular, is a true restoration of one of the most sophisticated buildings ever," curator Joseph Rischl said. "This is as sophisticated as a Parisian dress of 1929."
Sally Malenka, conservator of decorative arts and sculpture, headed the team to find out the museum's past by digging deep into the history. Sally's inspection explored the history of the painted wall surfaces and other obliterated elements through examination of paint chips, Crét's drawings and accounts, and contemporary newspaper descriptions.
"It's interesting that for a building as recent as 1929, some of the history of what the original interior looked like is really not known," Malenka told The Inquirer. "We had some old black-and-white photographs and some correspondence. So we knew there was fabric on the walls. We didn't know at that time that the rooms were red, so there was a combination of looking for archival materials and other historical or contemporary accounts, and also investigating what the finishes were by what remained in situ."
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