Rodin Museum
Bronze-cast gallery and garden built around a movie-theater magnate's sudden two-year passion for one sculptor's work.
This guide to the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia opens with a question: what makes a movie-theater magnate who has never bought art in his life walk into a Paris museum in 1924 and buy a bronze within the hour? It follows Jules Mastbaum's sudden, restless spree, more than one hundred fifty works by Auguste Rodin bought in two years, and his decision to give his hometown a free museum rather than scatter pieces through his cinema lobbies. He hired French architects Paul Cret and Jacques Greber and ordered a full bronze cast of Rodin's unfinished Gates of Hell for the entrance. Stand before those gates as you listen.
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