The more I bone up on the names of great French cabinetmakers, ponder the decorative needs of French nobility, and peruse catalogues and press kits, the more I appreciate the precious objects at the Museum of Decorative Arts, located in the northern wing of the Louvre.
If I keep reading up I might begin to hear the dialogue between the spirits of deco past: the triangulation of fashion, craftsmanship, and technique, the coquetry between economics and power, the courtship between industry and design, tales of art de vivre à la française, and further reflections on lifestyle and beauty.
But my attention is waning, quickly. And I’ve the nagging conviction that precious furniture is better seen in context rather an ad nauseam in museum.
This confusingly laid out museum sets out to seriously present furnishings from the Gothic styles of the late Middle Ages to the Art Deco lines of the 1930s, followed by a cursory examination of more recent decades*. Despite the beauty of individual objects, even the evocative decorative vocabularies of the reigns of Francis I, Henry IV, Louis XIV, the Regency, Louis XV, Louis XVI, the Directory, and the Empire elicit little more than an occasional “Oh, isn’t that pretty.” Beyond that, highly crafted objects do not add up to a highly crafted museum. I even suspect that there’s some kind of curatorial sadism at work in a museum where one is invited to admire hundreds of armchairs without ever having an occasion to sit.
This is a museum without context, without narrative, without life. Before long, I realized that I was witnessing nothing more than the chronology of fashion, accentuated by the eventual shift from artisanship to industry to mass production.
I suppose that the emphasis on decorative fashion is appropriate considering that this museum belongs to a family of museums that includes those dedicated to fashion and textiles and advertising. But the Museum of Decorative Arts fails to attain the union of “the beautiful and the useful” that it promises (that union is actually found at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, the National Museum of Technical Innovation). In fact, it appears that the moment a designer starts to admire an object’s utility he’s already falling behind the times.
Specialists, antique dealers, and deco fans will recognize the voice of a decoratively challenged journalist, insensitive to the objects of their passion. They may nevertheless benefit from a sincere bit of travel advice: Wait a few months before visiting this museum—because once the opening-season hype has died down you’re likely to have the place all to yourselves.
But why go at all when the interplay of power, economics, art, and décor can be found in more vital museums, mansions, and chateaux elsewhere in and around Paris? There’s the 17th century purity of Vaux-le-Vicomte, the Louis this and Louis that at Versailles, the tremendous collection of 18th century decorative works in de Camondo mansion (a museum under the same organizational umbrella as this), the collectors’ view of decorative arts at the Jacquemart-André mansion, the Renaissance and First Empire rooms at Fontainebleau, the Art Nouveau pieces in the Orsay Museum, and even the Second Empire velvet luxury in the neighboring section of the Louvre itself.
While those evocative examples of decorative arts don’t individually reveal the evolutions of decorative fashion over time, they speak far more about the life of the objects, of their owners, of nobility and power, and of the sculptors and architects and visual artists at work at the time.
The Carnavalet Museum in the Marais, may be comparatively poor in furniture, but it does a far better job of revealing the development of the noble salon from the 16th through 18th centuries. Various period rooms encountered in the Museum of Decorative Arts do indeed manage to present a pretty snapshots of various periods, but they aren’t enough to rattle the chains of the spirits of deco past.
Ghosts in the Attic
Yet those spirits are here. I’ve seen them. They’re under the eves of the pavilion at the far tip of this wing of the Louvre (levels 4 to 9) in the cursory part of the museum that displays furnishings from the 1940s to the present.
And those eves also turn out to be the most worthwhile part of the museum—not for what’s inside but for what’s out: the imperial view of Paris.
This is the view from the Tuileries Palace, which once stretched from what are now the tips of the wings of the Louvre. (The Tuileries Garden was that of the Tuileries Palace rather than that of the Louvre, as it now appears). The Tuileries Palace, begun in the 1560s, was occupied on and off by French kings and emperors until the last of them, Napoleon III, who was deposed in 1870. The body of the palace was then burned down in 1871.
The wide view from the 5th level offers an eyeful of the Tuileries Garden, the Eiffel Tower, the arcaded facades along rue de Rivoli, the Arc de Triomphe, the Grand Palais, the Défense. The view itself is astounding, and it takes on an additional, historical dimension with the knowledge that this is as close as one can get to the last royal and imperial views of Paris.
Louis XIV looked this way while dreaming of Versailles, as did young Louis XV when wanting to play outside, and Louis XVI must have looked out over the trees of the Tuileries Garden when dreaming of rescue before being sent to prison during his trial. Napoleon I lived here, Louis XVIII died here, and Napoleon III called it home as he completed the connection of the Louvre with the Tuileries.
This is above all the view of the last emperor and empress, Napoleon III and Eugenia. Looking through their back windows they wouldn’t have seen the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais, or the Défense business zone in the distance, all later additions, but what we see now is still more or less their mid-19th-century view toward the wealth of the imperial capital.
The imperial view continues on the 7th level which offers peeks through bull’s eye windows of the courtyard of the Louvre, the Invalides, the Orsay Museum, the grey rooftops Paris, the bronze statue of Napoleon I (set in place by Napoleon III) on the column rising above Place Vendôme, and finally the crown jewel of Napoleon III’s reign, the Garnier Opera, which the emperor never saw completed: the imperial city—unlike the museum furniture—in context.
Turning back, there on the 7th level, I came across the spirits of deco past. They were sitting in period posture in a room of 60s and 70s chairs watching a montage of film extracts showing the icons of contemporary furniture. Yes, right there, in the emperor’s attic, they idle away the day having grown bored with taste-makers and their decorative fashion statements.
At night, I imagine, they descend into the period rooms of the museum, where they wind bronze pendulums, drape themselves over Louis XV armchairs, write letters from the beyond on Louis XVI secretaries, lounge on Art Deco leather, and lie on a Louis-Philippe bed, longing as I did during my visit, to leave the museum to have a walk in the Tuileries Garden.
Musée des Arts Décoratifs
107 rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
Tel. 01 44 55 57 50
www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr
Open Tues.-Fri. 11am-6pm, Sat. and Sun. 10am-6pm. Closed Mon.
Audio-guides available.
*One of the most notable rooms in his museum is that which has nothing to do with furniture at all but instead presents an astonishing collection of unbeautiful paintings of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985). Though the collection is clearly out of place in this museum, it’s here because the works were a gift from the artist himself.
© 2006, Gary Lee Kraut