Fodor's Expert Review Rodin Museum
This jewel of a museum holds the biggest collection outside France of the work of sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). Occupying a 20th-century building designed by French architects Jacques Greber and Paul Cret, it reopened in June 2012 after a brief closing for interior renovations; the idea is to honor Cret's original idea that inside and out offer a "unified setting" for the presentation of sculpture. Entering the museum, you pass through a 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.