The Musée Rodin in Paris is lending its name and brand to a new museum due to open next month in Shanghai called Centre d’Art Rodin. The new institution will be privately funded by a board headed by Wu Jing, a French-Chinese private collector who opened the Museum of European Art in Hangzhou in eastern China in 2017, according to the South China Morning Post. The Shanghai outpost will be based in the French pavilion built for Expo 2010 located in the Pudong New Area, which previously housed the M21 art museum owned by the Minsheng bank.
“It is not a subsidiary, and the private centre that will operate it does not depend on the [Paris] museum,” Amélie Simier, the director of the Musée Rodin, told Le Monde. Simier signed an agreement with Wu Jing in April 2023. The Musée Rodin was contacted for comment.
Le Monde also reports that the inaugural show will include 40 works, some of which will be bronzes “ordered by Wu Jing from the Musée Rodin”, which have cost around €20m (the collector owns works such as La Petite Suzanne). Wu Jing confirmed that she is building a Rodin collection.
According to the museum’s website, “the Musée Rodin holds his intellectual property rights. Its mission therefore includes the enhancement and dissemination of Rodin’s work. In accordance with the artist’s wishes, the museum oversees the production of original bronze casts from the original models and moulds in the artist’s bequest and disseminates these bronzes worldwide.”
The debut show in Shanghai will also include 30 sculptures by other artists linked to Rodin, such as his teacher Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, and contemporaries including Aristide Maillol and Antoine Bourdelle.
In 2019, the Musée Rodin announced plans to open a satellite branch in the southern city of Shenzhen but the project was abandoned.
