Rodin Museum in Philly reopens with look from 1929

Now, for the first time since the museum opened in 1929, the public will get to see it as its architects intended. The Rodin Museum reopens Friday after a more than three-year, $9 million renovation that returned all its sculptures to their original locations inside and out, refurbished almost all of them - only “The Burghers of Calais” has yet to be cleaned up -- and restored the grounds’ formal French garden, fountain and reflecting pool. “It was long overdue,” Timothy Rub, director and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which runs the Rodin, said 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 were rearranged to emphasize the way many figures in “The Gates of Hell” -- Rodin’s colossal masterwork that dominates the museum entrance -- inspired his later iconic sculptures from “The Kiss” to “The Thinker.” Behind the scenes, a new air-conditioning system will mean a swelter-free visit for summer tourists for the first time in decades. Located between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the new Barnes Foundation on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the classical Beaux-Arts building contains the largest collection of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures outside of the Musee Rodin’s collections in Paris and Meudon.