Recasting Rodin’s Life and Work

Recasting Rodin’s Life and Work

By DOREEN CARVAJAL OCT. 30, 2015

After a $17.7 million restoration, the Rodin Museum will open in Paris on Nov. 12. Credit Guia Besana for The New York Times PARIS — At the end of his life, the sculptor Auguste Rodin ceded his valuable art collection and plaster molds to the French state, part of a deal he negotiated to save the palatial 18thcentury mansion that housed his studio and create his own museum on the Left Bank.

Now, he and his vintage molds have again come to the museum’s rescue. The sales of newly cast Rodin bronzes are helping to finance a $17.7 million restoration of the Rodin Museum, where cracks in the walls have appeared over the decades and where the oak parquet floors have warped with the weight of sculptures including the marble lovers entwined in “The Kiss.”

It is the first major renovation for the two-story Hôtel Biron, which stands within a seven-acre formal garden in view of the golden dome of Les Invalides. The museum has been closed since January as part of a three-year construction project that is nearing completion, with a public reopening scheduled for Rodin’s birthday, Nov. 12.

The aim of the restoration, according to the museum’s architects, is to evoke the creative atmosphere that inspired the sculptor, who retreated here because, he said, “my eyes encounter grace, sitting here surrounded by light.”

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Catherine Chevillot, the director of the Rodin Museum in Paris. Credit Guia Besana for The New York Times The makeover features more natural light, new colors and the reappearance of Rodin’s personal art collection, which also includes ancient Greek sculpture fragments. Many of the marble sculptures, including “The Kiss,” have been cleaned for the first time and restored to their original luster.

“We want visitors to be immersed in sculptures,” said Catherine Chevillot, the museum’s director, who took charge of the construction when she started in 2012.

The museum also has other grand plans: an $11 million restoration of the gardens surrounding the mansion and an $8.8 million renovation at the site of Rodin’s former home in Meudon, outside Paris.

But those ambitions may be constrained by the museum’s unusual income, which will eventually reach its limits.

Rodin’s “L’Homme au Nez Cassé.” Credit Guia Besana for The New York Times The museum holds the rights to any works cast from its molds, allowing it to sell the pieces to raise money. Because of that revenue, the Rodin mansion is the only national museum in France that finances its operating budget ($14.34 million this year) without government subsidies. More than half of the budget is generated by sales of limited edition bronzes made from the molds and the rest by ticket and store sales and other usual forms of museum revenue.

While the museum has zealously guarded its right to the casts with lawsuits in France and other countries for copyright violations, that revenue stream is limited. French regulations cap the number of sculptures created from original molds to 12. So the museum is running out of opportunities to cast almost all of Rodin’s major works, although it can still cast from hundreds of molds for other smaller works.

The lucky recovery of part of the mold for a theater decoration, one of Rodin’s last works, has helped extend the potential for castings. After the museum found the mold for the upraised hands of the figure, Aphrodite, a work was cast last year for the first time. The museum sold that bronze for more than $1.1 million this summer at Christie’s in London to a Chinese collector.

“They don’t have many more big pieces, because most editions are sold out,” said Gilles Perrault, an art expert for France’s high court, the Cour de Cassation, who has tracked fake reproductions of Rodin. “They may have a few more examples left. But today, what the Rodin museum makes are mostly little pieces and variations.”

“Vertumne et Pomone” by Camille Claudel. Credit Guia Besana for The New York Times At first glance, the Hôtel Biron looks largely unchanged from the renovation. Yet within its interior, with exhibition space for 600 works spread across 18 rooms, it has undergone a structural makeover to recreate the period when Rodin worked in a south-facing, ground-floor studio.

Built in 1732, the mansion housed a wealthy wig maker and financial speculator, then waves of aristocrats until 1820 when it was turned into a Catholic boarding school before the French state took possession. After it was put up for sale in 1905, the building was ultimately rented out to artists and became a refuge for tenants like Rodin; his lover, Camille Claudel; Henri Matisse; and the dancer Isadora Duncan, among others.

Rodin began renting studio space there in 1908 and worked there until the end of his life.

Before he died in 1917, he negotiated the agreement with the French state, which still owned the building, to turn it into a museum. It now attracts 700,000 visitors annually, 80 percent of them foreign tourists.

Using black-and-white photographs from that period, the curators have recreated Rodin’s spacious studio. The salon is filled with Rodin’s busts displayed on his original wooden pedestals, a 14th-century figure of the Virgin Mary from his collection, bronze Japanese incense burners and a newly renovated tapestry screen behind which his models disrobed.

Rodin's studio is being reinstalled, piece by piece. Credit Guia Besana for The New York Times Throughout the mansion, the architects have followed the same meticulous approach.

Workmen disassembled the creaky oak parquet floors on two levels, which were braced and put back together again with original parts and wooden nails. An English paint company, Farrow & Ball, burrowed through layers of wall paint to unearth the original colors from Rodin’s time, which were shades of gray with blue and green tones.

Within the salons, all of the tall windows were fitted with custom molten glass to filter the natural light as Rodin saw it. The architects also added a computer-generated lighting system to alter the mood with light sensors that track the changing weather, seasons and hours of the day.

Long unseen works from Rodin’s personal collection are also emerging from storage, including about 50 restored pieces, including “Théâtre de Belleville” by Eugène Carriére.

Other works on display include works by van Gogh and an Edvard Munch painting from 1907, “Rodin’s Thinker in Dr. Linde’s Garden.”

The government contributed 49 percent of the money for the renovation. In addition, the museum received a donation of $2.2 million, or 2 million euros, to pay for new displays from an American collector, Iris Cantor.

It was the first gift of that size for the museum, which is also experimenting with new forms of fund-raising so it is not overly reliant on sculpture sales. Museum officials organized a “1 Euro for 1 Rodin” campaign, in which visitors were asked to support art acquisitions.

Officials are also considering a crowdfunding plan to support renovations of the formal garden.

In the meantime, Rodin’s gift is still keeping his wishes alive. At the end of the year, the museum is to deliver a new casting of his monumental bronze of “The Gates of Hell” to the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim for display at the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, Ms. Chevillot said.

Museum officials point out that “The Thinker,” “The Burghers of Calais” and “Monument to Balzac” have been cast the maximum allowable number of times, but, they said, four more editions of “The Gates of Hell,” and two of “The Kiss” remain available.

Milan Schreuer contributed reporting.