Tired of the Duty-Free Shop Go Check Out Those Rodins

Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times

Steve and Kimberly Kulpanowski visited an art gallery at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport.

ROISSY, France â€" When Steve and Kimberly Kulpanowski arrived at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to fly home to Detroit, they could not believe their luck.

They had tried to take in as much of Paris as they could, including a Christmas dinner at the Eiffel Tower, but they had missed the sculptures of Auguste Rodin. After checking in and going through security, though, they found Rodin’s work in a most unexpected spot: in a small gallery tucked away between a Bulgari store and a cafe, on the way to their gate.

“We had missed it, that’s why we were so excited to find it here,” said Mr. Kulpanowski, 51. “I couldn’t even believe it.”

Officials at the airport inaugurated the museum space last December, hoping to improve the airport’s image and gain a competitive edge over other European hubs. And financially struggling artistic institutions are eager to promote their collections to the millions of passengers that come through annually. As for travelers, they finally have more than duty-free cigarettes and 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi to look forward to.

The 2,600-square-foot, T-shaped gallery opened in Satellite 4, a new international departures hall at the airport, which is 16 miles north of Paris.

The new terminal is slick and gleaming white, identical to many airport terminals, except perhaps for the smell of cheese wafting from a remarkably well-laden dairy section in the Buy Paris duty-free store.

The museum space, however, has the sober oak floors and polished black walls of a regular museum. Glass panes protect the sculptures, bronze and plaster torsos, expressive faces, winged figures. Only the luggage carts, shopping bags and passports hint at the gallery’s location.

“It’s a bit of a hidden treasure,” said Stephanie Giddings, a 33-year-old Australian flying back from Berlin, as two Japanese women took pictures of each other with their phones in front of a plaster cast of “The Thinker.”

The cone-shaped entrance of wood and glass panels that ushers visitors inside is easy to miss. Many travelers go by without a glance, and those who stop are surprised. There is no entrance fee. “They should advertise it more,” Mr. Kulpanowski said.

Aéroports de Paris, the public company that runs the airport, and Artcurial, an auction house, created an endowment fund to manage the space and negotiate the loan of works of art from institutions. Artcurial belongs to the Dassault Group, a major French civil and military aviation manufacturer.

Art has also arrived on the doorstep of Le Bourget, a smaller airport south of Roissy that is used for private jets. There, the art dealer Larry Gagosian recently opened a 17,760-square-foot private gallery designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. It is currently featuring works by the German artist Anselm Kiefer. The gallery is in a former hangar, not in the airport itself.

Several airports in the United States regularly collaborate with artistic institutions, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has a permanent annex at Schiphol Airport. In France, airports in Nice and Toulouse have also displayed art, and a terminal at Orly Airport, south of Paris, features weekly jazz concerts.

But Roissy-Charles de Gaulle is the first to organize an exhibit of this caliber in the heart of a terminal, a six-month show called “The Wings of Glory” set up in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, which opened in 1919 after the sculptor’s death. Rotating shows displaying pieces from other French artistic institutions will follow.

For museums, the partnership with Europe’s second-busiest passenger airport offers maximal exposure at minimal costs, especially at a time when financing is hard to come by. “It’s six months of free advertising for us, and for an audience that is leaving but that often comes back,” said Catherine Chevillot, the director of the Musée Rodin.

Mrs. Chevillot estimated that while 730,000 people visit the museum every year, approximately 750,000 to 800,000 people would come through the airport gallery in the next six months.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 13, 2013, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Tired of the Duty-Free Shop Go Check Out Those Rodins.