From Paris to Portland - Current and Coming - collections from Musee des Arts Decoratifs on tour - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Founded in the nineteenth century, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, is one of the largest institutions of its kind in the world and ranks among the foremost private museums in France. The collections encompass more than 250,000 objects dating from the Middle Ages to the present and represent a wide variety of mediums including silver, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, jewelry, and wallpapers. There are comprehensive subcollections such as walking sticks, thimbles, minute ivory skulls, Chinese cloisonne enamel vessels, Oriental carpets, and Persian miniatures. Then there are period rooms designed by Emile Galle, Armand Albert Rateau, and other well-known figures in the history of architecture and design.

The museum has been dosed for extensive renovation for a number of years, and will not reopen until 2004. In the interim a traveling exhibition of more than one hundred objects drawn from the collections has been organized by the museum and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, where it maybe seen from February 2 to April 28. The exhibition is entitled Matieres de Reves Stuff of Dreams from the Paris Musee des Arts Decoratifs, and future showings will be listed in Calendar.

The curators of the exhibition are Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, curator of nineteenth-century art at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, the Portland Art Museum's consulting curator of European art. Together, they mined the Paris museum for what Hunter-Stiebel calls "extraordinary objects that surpass all standards of technical excellence, demands of utility and traditional precedents to make the leap from artifact to work of art." These are works that defy traditional boundaries of the decorative arts, and many are in truth, over the top, especially in relation to the mundane functions they were made to serve. They have an exotic and sensual aura that compels one to look and look again.

The exhibition commences with a bronze aquamanile (illustrated at right), a vessel made to hold water for washing hands before and after a mass, made in southern Germany in the thirteenth century The anthropomorphic form merges the torso of a bird with the head of a human. From this starting point the journey continues into the exotic and bizarre. A hallmark of the eighteenth century in France is a flamboyant silver candelabrum designed by Juste Aurele Meissonnier (illustrated at left), which seems to be made of molten metal. It is a distillation of the rococo style in its asymmetry and opulence. As the epicenter of the art nouveau style, France is particularly well represented. Incredible jewelry made by Rend Lalique and Paul and Henri Vever is joined by sinuous pieces of furniture with whiplash lines made by Alexandre Charpentier and Hector Guimard. The sharp edges and crisp shapes of the art deco period, another style generally associated with France, are also well represented in this show A section on co ntemporary decorative arts that features the work of living French designers such as Phillippe Starck, Cesar, and the partnership of Mattia Bonetti and Elisabeth Garouste completes this opulent tour through the collections of the museum.

The catalogue of the exhibition, exhibition, written by its cocurators, is available by telephoning 800-228-2129.