A short walk from the Luxembourg gardens, on rue d’Assas, there is a passage between two walls that looks as though it leads nowhere. At the end of it a courtyard opens up with a low house, a garden and two studios: Ossip Zadkine lived and worked here from 1928 to 1967, forty years, and it is now a City of Paris museum with about three hundred sculptures.
The permanent collection is free, the museum closes on Mondays and last admission is at 17:30. And there is something you should know about this page before you read it: you will not find photographs of the sculptures here, and I explain why further down.
How do you hide a museum in a street of the 6th arrondissement?
Let’s begin!
1. The passage, the door almost everyone walks past
From the street you see nothing. There is an iron gate between two buildings, a grey plate with the opening hours and a sign set at right angles to the wall reading MUSÉE ZADKINE: if you are not looking for it, you walk on.
Walk through the passage: a few metres are enough and the noise of the street disappears. Carry that effect with you as you go in, because half the value of this place is what the courtyard does to you after the pavement.
2. The house and the two studios, left as he left them
Look at the house from the garden: it is low, white, with iron railings at the windows and a glazed pavilion jutting out towards you. The studios are next to it, and what strikes you is the size of them: these are small rooms, domestic rooms, in which a sculptor worked for forty years without ever having the space a museum would have given him.
Run your eyes over the floors and the corners. There is no staging of a reconstructed artist’s house here: the house is the house, and the museum put the works inside it instead of turning it into galleries.
3. Wood, the material Zadkine thought in
Why does a 20th-century sculptor go back to wood?
Zadkine cut straight into the trunk, without the clay model you would expect. It is the technique the French call taille directe, and it means every cut is final: the work cannot be corrected, it can only be got wrong.
Look for the grain and the knots in his wooden pieces, because Zadkine does not hide them, he uses them. A figure follows the fibre of the trunk it came out of, and the concave parts, the hollows dug into the body, are his signature: where another sculptor would have put mass, he takes away and leaves the hole.
4. La Ville détruite, which is not here but explains everything
Zadkine’s most famous work is in the Netherlands. It is La Ville détruite, unveiled in the port of Rotterdam on 15 May 1953, six and a half metres high, and it remembers the German bombing of 14 May 1940, which flattened the medieval centre of the city.
What is missing from that figure?
The figure holds its arms above its head, which is thrown back as if in a cry, and there is a hole in its chest: the missing heart is the destroyed centre of Rotterdam. Zadkine called it «a cry of horror against the inhuman brutality of this act of tyranny». This museum holds the Torse de la Ville détruite, a bronze cast between 1951 and 1963 that takes up the figure of the monument on a smaller scale, and which came in with Valentine Prax’s bequest in 1981. It is the best way to understand where that shape comes from: it is not an abstraction, it is a body with a piece missing.
5. Why there are no sculptures on this page
Ossip Zadkine died in 1967, so his works stay under copyright until 2037. Freedom of panorama exists in France, but it excludes commercial use, and a site carrying affiliate links is commercial use to all intents and purposes: even the bronzes standing out in the garden do not solve the problem.
That is why the two photographs I have put here are the house and the entrance passage, and why I describe the works to you rather than showing them. It also explains why, when you search for this museum online, you mostly find pictures of the garden and very few sculptures: that is not a failing of the museum, it is the copyright calendar.
Practical information
Data checked on 24 September 2026 on the official website zadkine.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. Access to the permanent collections is free and needs no booking. Temporary exhibitions are paid for separately, and you will find the price on the page of the exhibition on at the time. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, and last admission is at 17:30. Closures. It closes on Mondays, and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Accessibility. The museum is accessible to visitors with reduced mobility, lends wheelchairs free of charge without booking and provides folding stools. Getting there. The entrance is at 100 bis rue d’Assas. The stops are Notre-Dame-des-Champs on line 12 and Vavin on line 4, and the RER B stops at Port-Royal. How long to allow. The five stops take forty-five minutes, and an hour with the garden.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
From here on
The other house-studio in Montparnasse is the Musée Bourdelle, ten minutes away on foot and also free, and the two work well in the same morning. Zadkine came to Paris in the circle of La Ruche, alongside Chaïm Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani, and that generation has a museum that tells its story, the mahJ. If you would rather see a painter’s house than a sculptor’s, the Musée Delacroix is on the other side of the boulevard.
Photo credits: house seen from the garden by Serein (CC BY-SA 3.0); entrance on rue d’Assas by Celette (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
