Earlier this month the Rodin Museum in Paris announced that it will partner with a soon-to-open Rodin museum in Shanghai. The French museum dedicated to the life and work of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) currently has two locations—in central Paris and Meudon; the Shanghai museum, which was masterminded by Chinese-French Collector Wu Jing and is set to open in late September, will be located in the former French Pavillion designed by Jacques Ferrier for Expo 2010 in the Pudong New Area. We caught up with Rodin Museum director Amélie Simier to hear more about this latest Rodin museum and how the institutions are working together.
What’s the relationship between your institution and the Centre d’Art Rodin in China?
In his lifetime, Auguste Rodin exhibited and sold his works both in France and abroad, to private collectors, museums and public bodies. As early as 1912, a Rodin Gallery was established at the Met in New York, followed by another at the V&A in London in 1914.
For over 100 years, the Musée Rodin, a French national museum, has encouraged the creation of Rodin collections around the world in its role as heir to Auguste Rodin. Consider, for instance, the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia (which opened in 1929) or the Rodin Wing at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum in Japan (inaugurated in 1994). Since 1919, our museum has overseen the production of bronze casts from the original molds and models from the artist’s bequest. Their sale spreads Rodin’s legacy as he intended and draws international visitors to the Musée Rodin when in Paris. We host the largest and most comprehensive reference collection of his works, and his masterpieces are showcased in a spectacular mansion and gardens that the artist himself chose for his museum.
Our visitor profile today mirrors this international outlook we have fostered since our inception: two-thirds of our 600,000 visitors annually come from outside France, and specifically, from the countries where Rodin is already present, with North American visitors alone accounting for 26 percent of the total. This is why we warmly welcomed a Chinese private collector’s wish to create the first-ever collection of Rodin’s works in China and to share it with their local audience.
Let me clarify that our museum is not opening an outpost or branch in China: all Rodin collections worldwide are autonomous. However, we have and are open to developing shared projects. This is why we are partnering with the new Chinese institution in Shanghai called Centre d’Art Rodin.
The museum will be located in Jacques Ferrier’s French Pavilion. How will this space enhance the work of Rodin?
The architectural setting of a collection endows it with a particular identity and offers new ways of looking at beloved works; you may recall how you felt when seeing the Thinker as it is displayed in the courtyard entrance of the San Francisco Legion of Honor and in the garden of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Ferrier’s iconic architecture in Shanghai provides both light and space—qualities that Rodin was attentive to in his own displays. We’re very much looking forward to discovering how the space will interact with the artwork on display.
The museum’s initial show, “Rodin: The Inheritance of Modern Sculpture,” will feature sculptures by Rodin. How will these be selected?
The sculptures have been carefully selected by the collectors from their own collections. They will be exhibited alongside sculptures by other artists who have a connection to Rodin. The show will also feature pieces from Rodin’s personal collection of Chinese art, on loan from the Musée Rodin—specifically Ming and Qing dynasty porcelains, Tang dynasty terracotta figures and a statue of the Buddhist deity Guanyin, to which the sculptor was deeply attached.
Do you anticipate cultural barriers to the project? Are Chinese audiences familiar, for example, with the works of Balzac?
When the Musée Rodin organized the first exhibitions of Rodin’s sculptures in China, in 1993 and then in 2014, the emotional power of the works deeply resonated with visitors; Chinese artists and academics have since shared this feeling with us.
The Centre d’Art Rodin in Shanghai is a Chinese initiative, born from Chinese collectors with the aim of sharing Rodin’s art with a Chinese audience: our partners there have devoted considerable thought and care into how his works will be displayed and mediated. Though Balzac does belong to the curriculum of translated literature in China, one does not need to read his novels to appreciate Rodin’s sculpture. The sculptor conceived his Monument to Balzac with no reference to the great writer’s oeuvre or trade, and the expressiveness of his towering figure essentially relates to a shared experience of monumentality. That is what made the monument such a radical proposition, which was first rejected in Rodin’s time, before being cast in bronze and collected in major modern art collections such as those at MoMA and the Met.
With the departure of galleries from the West Bund, the cultural landscape of Shanghai is shifting. How do you see the new museum fitting into the cultural fabric of the city?
This you should ask our partners. All I can say is that the on-site experience should offer what attracts galleries and visitors to this part of Shanghai—namely, wide natural spaces with high-quality artistic proposals.
The Rodin Museum’s two locations in France are so linked to the sculptor’s biography. How will the new museum’s lack of biographical ties affect its programming?
The Musée Rodin Meudon was the artist’s home and studio, so his life plays a major role in our narrative there. This is not the case, however, at the Musée Rodin Paris, where his major works and the harmonious setting he chose for them take center stage.
As you know, the Centre d’Art Rodin in Shanghai is not an outpost nor a branch of the Musée Rodin; it’s an autonomous collection that will develop its own identity, adapted to the region’s public, much like the collections in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, London, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Mexico, Stanford, Sao Paulo, Madrid, Melbourne, Cambridge, Johannesburg and Washington.
As partners, we’ll enjoy sharing some of our experiences, such as “L’Atelier Rodin,” our most recent hands-on and very popular project that appeals to young people and their grown-ups. But we are also very interested in seeing what new programming will be developed in Shanghai for the local audience. For example, part of the Chinese Rodin collection was exhibited last winter in a show put up by Shanghai University alongside remarkable bronze artifacts from the Sanxingdui civilization. I’m convinced the Centre d’Art Rodin in Shanghai will foster new dialogues that we never would have thought of, engaging with contemporary artists and global as well as local art forms.
