The museum preserves the studio of sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and provides an example of Parisian ateliers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the early 1930s, Gabriel Cognacq provided funds to purchase the studio and thus avoid dispersing the artist's remaining works.

The museum was inaugurated in 1949, expanded in 1961 by architect Henri Gautruche, and again in 1992 by Christian de Portzamparc.

Today the museum contains more than 500 works including marble, plaster, and bronze statues, paintings, pastels, fresco sketches, and Bourdelle's personal collection of works by artists including Eugène Carrière, Eugène Delacroix, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Auguste Rodin.

[3] Since June 2012, the museum's visitors follow a different path through the permanent collections: educational, chronological and attuned to the work, highlighting Bourdelle's artistic evolution.