Image: Musée Rodin, Paris
Musée Rodin has opened 'Regards et mots d’adolescents' in its Galerie des publics, presenting an education and outreach project built around more than 160 notebooks made by young people and inspired by Auguste Rodin’s own notebooks, notes and drafts. According to the museum, the display has been on view since 2 June 2026 and is part of an annual 2025-2026 edition of the project. The museum describes it as a project in artistic and cultural education that brings together the work of seven classes from the academies of Créteil, Paris and Orléans-Tours.
The presentation is framed by the museum as a way of showing Rodin through the eyes of students. In the announcement circulated by Musée Rodin, the Galerie des publics is said to be showing a selection of pages from the notebooks, offering a view of how the students interpreted the sculptor’s world through drawing, writing and observation. The museum says the installation allows visitors to discover the adolescents’ looks, words and creations, all rooted in Rodin’s creative universe.
The project is tied directly to the museum’s research work. Musée Rodin says its Centre de recherche has been leading a project on 'Les carnets, notes et brouillons d’Auguste Rodin', based on the transcription of the artist’s full notebook corpus, comprising 162 volumes. The museum notes that this research has been carried out over several years and has also involved students from the École du Louvre. In the museum’s account, Rodin’s notebooks form an intimate workspace of notes, sketches and fragmentary ideas, organized not chronologically but by associations of thought, with themes including nature, the body and architecture.
Built from that material, 'Regards et mots d’adolescents' invited students to explore the links between sculpture, writing and drawing. Each participant received a personal notebook to use across the year, during visits to the museum, in workshops and in everyday life. The museum says the students filled the books with sketches, texts, impressions and memories, creating a record of their engagement with Rodin’s work. With the support of teachers, artists in residence and museum staff, they used drawing and writing as tools for looking and creating.
The result, according to the museum, is 165 notebooks rather than 160, a figure that appears in the full page description on the museum website. The online text says the exhibition includes a collective display of selected pages from each notebook, revealing the diversity of the adolescents’ responses to Rodin. It adds that the Galerie des publics is a dedicated space for projects carried out with the museum’s audiences and for initiatives that encourage wider access to culture.
Musée Rodin also lists the partner classes involved. These include a lycée in Le Bourget, a collège in Neuilly-sur-Marne, another collège in Noisiel, a vocational lycée in Vitry-sur-Seine, a collège in Fresnes, a class in Paris’s 15th arrondissement linked to a cross-border educational programme with Athens, and a collège in Gien. The museum’s page gives the exhibition location as the Galerie des publics at Musée Rodin, 77 rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, with the installation presented from 2 June 2026.
