Musée Bourdelle

The Musée Bourdelle is an art museum dedicated to the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), located at 18, rue Antoine Bourdelle, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, France. Housed in the artist's former studio, it preserves one of the most significant examples of a Parisian atelier from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum holds more than 500 works and is one of the fourteen Museums of the City of Paris incorporated into the public institution Paris Musées. Admission to the permanent collections is free, and the museum is open daily except Mondays.

Bourdelle worked at this site from 1885 until his death in 1929, and as early as 1922 he began planning to transform his studio into a museum. The realization of this project depended on the patronage of Gabriel Cognacq, nephew and heir of Ernest Cognacq, founder of the Parisian department store La Samaritaine. In the early 1930s, when the property was put up for sale, Bourdelle's widow Cléopâtre Bourdelle-Sévastos could not afford to purchase it. Gabriel Cognacq advanced the necessary funds to prevent the dispersal of the artist's works, and Cléopâtre and their daughter Rhodia Dufet-Bourdelle became the owners. Cognacq never demanded repayment. After several offers to donate the site to the state were initially refused, the city of Paris finally accepted, prompted by the director of the Beaux-Arts de Paris. The planned route of the rue de Saxe, which would have cut through the museum grounds, was immediately diverted. The museum opened on 4 July 1949, twenty years after Bourdelle's death, with construction directed by Henri Gautruche, architect of the city of Paris. It was expanded in 1961 on the occasion of the centenary of Bourdelle's birth, again under Gautruche, and a second major expansion followed in 1992 designed by Christian de Portzamparc. The museum underwent extensive renovation in the early 2020s, reopening on 15 March 2023 with a special exhibition of Philippe Cognée. A second Bourdelle garden-museum was established by his heirs in Égreville in the late 1960s, housing another 56 of his sculptures complementary to the Paris collection.

The museum's collection encompasses more than 500 works in marble, plaster, and bronze, alongside paintings, pastels, fresco sketches, and Bourdelle's personal collection of works by other artists. The holdings include pieces by Eugène Carrière, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Adolphe Monticelli, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Auguste Rodin. The collection also preserves document archives, Bourdelle's copies of Greek and medieval works, and original plaster casts of some of his finest creations. Since June 2012, visitors follow a restructured path through the permanent collections that is educational, chronological, and attuned to the work, designed to highlight Bourdelle's artistic evolution. This reorganization brought forth works from storage by contemporary artists and Bourdelle's pupils, including pieces by Auguste Rodin, Jean Arp, Germaine Richier, Henri Laurens, Ossip Zadkine, and Alberto Giacometti, as well as a Japanese Nō mask from Bourdelle's own collection.

Among the museum's signature works are 21 studies of Ludwig van Beethoven, preserved as original plaster casts. The monumental plaster works displayed in the Grand Hall include the Monument au général Alvéar, La France, Héraklès archer, Le Fruit, Sapho, and Centaure mourant. The garden gallery added in 1951, built with bricks from Montauban, Bourdelle's birthplace, displays bronzes including Le Fruit, a second version of Héraklès archer from 1923, the bas-reliefs from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Adam, and Pénélope. The 1992 extension by Christian de Portzamparc provides dedicated space for two major works: the Monument aux Morts de Montauban and the Monument à Mickiewicz (L'Epopée Polonaise). The museum also preserves Bourdelle's apartment, where he lived from 1895 to 1918, with one room kept intact containing his bed, a pastel cabinet, and a casting of the David from Reims Cathedral.

The museum complex preserves Bourdelle's original ateliers at its center, where the parquet floors, woodwork, and furniture remain original. The Grand Hall, or Hall des Plâtres, was created in 1961 by Henri Gautruche on the site of the former studio of Jules Dalou, who had been Bourdelle's neighbor. The 1992 extension by Christian de Portzamparc added four levels with a total surface of 1,655 square meters, including a large ground-floor sculpture gallery, a graphic arts cabinet and children's workshop on the first floor, and documentation and conservation offices on the top floor. The financing of this extension was partially secured through the sale of a bronze Héraklès archer to Japan by Rhodia Dufet-Bourdelle, then director of the museum. The entrance was moved from the garden to a new reception hall continuous with the Grand Hall. The museum includes both a street-facing garden on the rue Bourdelle and an interior garden.

The Musée Bourdelle is located in the Necker quarter of Paris's 15th arrondissement. The nearest metro stations are Falguière and Montparnasse-Bienvenüe. The museum is open daily except Mondays, with free admission to the permanent collections. Since 1 January 2013, it has been one of the fourteen city museums administered by Paris Musées, the public institution responsible for managing the buildings and collections of fourteen of Paris's seventeen municipal museums. The museum's official website is https://www.bourdelle.paris.fr/.