The Rodin Museum, a little jewel box of a building surrounded by formal gardens and showcasing the French artist's monumental sculptures, had by most accounts lost a certain je ne sais quoi in the 83 years since it was built.
Now, for the first time since the museum opened in 1929, the public will get to see it as its architects intended. The Rodin Museum reopens Friday after a more than three-year, $9 million renovation that returned all its sculptures to their original locations inside and out, refurbished almost all of them — only "The Burghers of Calais" has yet to be cleaned up — and restored the grounds' formal French garden, fountain and reflecting pool.
Full StoryA retrospective of Japan's reclusive living legend Yayoi Kusama, 83, opened at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, complete with her signature spots.
Running through September, the exhibit includes some 150 works, including Kusama's monumental multicolor plexiglass light installation "Fireflies on the Water."
Full StoryJet skis skim across the lake as families picnic on the shores: a resort just west of Baghdad is an oasis of relative calm that offers escape from bombs, shootings and political squabbling.
The Habbaniyah Tourism City, which lies between Fallujah and Ramadi, two of the main Sunni insurgent strongholds of past years, offers swimming, boating and a cinema.
Full StoryA peep show of seven women named Diana and a "seductive" robot are among the modern works unveiled at London's National Gallery in an exhibition inspired by Renaissance master Titian.
The gallery has invited artists, poets, choreographers and composers to create works based on three great nudes by the 16th century Italian painter for the new show, "Metamorphosis: Titian 2012".
Full StoryOn his 150th birthday, Vienna's museums offer an intimate look at Gustav Klimt, digging beneath the layers of paint and scratching away at the artist... but not without a good dose of kitsch.
Over the past century, Klimt has gained worldwide recognition even beyond the art world, something Vienna has been keen to exploit with ad campaigns borrowing heavily from his famous golden paintings like "The Kiss."
Full StoryNative Americans spread out today from Canada to the tip of Chile descended not from one but at least three migrant waves from Siberia between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, a study said Wednesday.
The finding is controversial among geneticists, archaeologists and linguists -- many of whom have maintained that a single Asian ancestral group populated the Americas.
Full StoryFifty years ago Thursday a beach ball-sized satellite carried the first television images across the Atlantic, kicking off a new era of global communications decades before the Internet.
The Telstar satellite -- built by Bell Telephone Laboratories for use by AT&T -- was also the first privately sponsored space mission, and was seen as part of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Full StorySeoul's last old-style, one-screen cinema, soon to be knocked down and replaced by a hotel, played its final movie Wednesday — the Italian classic "The Bicycle Thief" — a moment so emotional for the theater operator that she publicly shaved her head in frustration.
The theater, which opened in 1964, had become a place where mostly elderly moviegoers gathered regularly to watch classic Hollywood and South Korean films and indulge in nostalgia for cinematic days gone by.
Full StoryTwo women plan to tie the knot next month in Taiwan's first same-sex Buddhist wedding, as gay and lesbian groups push to make the island the first society in Asia to legalize gay marriage.
Fish Huang and her partner You Ya-ting, both 30, will receive their blessings from Master Shih Chao-hui at a Buddhist monastery in north Taiwan's Taoyuan county on August 11.
Full StoryBosnia remembers the Srebrenica massacre on Wednesday with the two alleged masterminds, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, finally on trial.
But for many of the survivors and relatives of the thousands of victims of the mass killings -- Europe's worst single atrocity since World War II -- the pursuit of justice is just too little, too late.
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