Showing off France's art de vivre museums

Even in a city that last year welcomed close to 60 million visitors to its myriad cultural institutions, a major museum that remains closed for a decade risks being forgotten.

So in a sense when the Musee des Arts Decoratifs finally reopens here on Friday after a $46 million makeover, it will be starting afresh in trying to woo the public. Those in the business designers, manufacturers, collectors and dealers are of course delighted that the decorative arts again have a Paris home. And, by no coincidence, many are already gathering here for the 23rd Biennale des Antiquaires, which also opens Friday and runs through Sept. 24 at the Grand Palais.

The museum tells the story of France's art de vivre its interior decoration, its changing style, its affection for luxury, its love of food and its obsession with taste through furniture, ceramics, porcelain, glassware, textiles, jewelry and even toys.

"It's the only French museum that covers the whole sweep of French history," its director, Beatrice Salmon, said, noting that the collection starts in the Middle Ages and ends with today's design. "Its aim is to promote French industry, French art de vivre and French savoir-faire."

It also has elegantly refurbished quarters to match that ambition.

Its location in the 19th-century Marsan Wing of the Louvre Palace along the Rue de Rivoli has not changed since the museum opened in 1905. But the removal of a mezzanine now brings natural light into its soaring main gallery from a glass roof five floors above, while newly opened windows offer panoramic views of the rest of the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens.

The museum's display some 6,000 items from its 150,000-piece collection has also been reorganized along chronological lines, albeit with pauses for special features, like galleries on the "arts" of resting and eating, as well as the toy section and a room of paintings donated in the 1960s by Jean Dubuffet.

Among the highlights are 10 beautifully recreated period rooms peppered throughout the museum. Organized by the designer Francois- Joseph Graf, they give visitors an almost voyeuristic look inside the homes O.K., the castles and mansions of French aristocrats and wealthy bourgeoisie from the late 15th to the early 20th century.

What the rooms also illustrate is how, while individual artists in Italy and northern Europe were already famous by the time of Renaissance, little is known about the weavers, carpenters, silversmiths and potters who created the tapestries, furnishings and tableware for privileged homes before the 19th century. Then, as industrialization facilitated production, the designer appeared between the artist and the craftsman. He was more concerned with creating a style than an individual object; and he was sought out by the wealthy as a kind of guarantor of good taste. Soon, as he does today, he came to enjoy as many kudos as many leading artists.

Thus around 1880 Eugene Grasset was invited by his friend the art collector Charles Gillot to design an elaborate dining room, which is one of the period rooms here. Entered through a stained-glass door, it is peopled with ornamental figures, animals and plants. The creators of these objects are not identified. The room, as such, is "signed" by Grasset.

But the designer could not trump the patron. One striking period suite comprises a boudoir, bedroom and bathroom designed in the early 1920s by Albert-Armand Rateau for the prominent couturier Jeanne Lanvin. The rooms are discreetly furnished in an Art Deco style, with the walls of the bedroom and boudoir covered in blue silk. And they are known as the Lanvin not the Rateau rooms.

More of a showpiece for Art Deco is an office-library in the round designed by Pierre Chareau for the French Embassy pavilion at the 1925 Paris International Exhibition. It contains Chareau's original chair and black desk, but its most distinguishing feature is a domed ceiling with a leaflike wooden mechanism that reveals or hides book shelves.

In the rest of the collection there is a similar passage from objects of historical importance to designs carrying famous names. The oldest pieces are religious paintings and ornate retables, works which could easily be in the Louvre but here underline the early blurring between public and domestic art. Soon, though, the focus turns to the home, from beds and tables to ceramics and glass.

The sophistication of the objects increases as cabinetmakers add mosaic inlays and porcelain absorbs Chinese influence. Wood paneling in turn became an art in itself, later replaced by silk and eventually by painted wallpaper. These features are also well illustrated in various period rooms.

But from the late 19th century on, names take over: Charles Christofle was followed by Rene Lalique as jewelers to the rich; Hector Guimard was an influential Art Nouveau architect; Art Deco made the names of Robert Mallet-Stevens as well as of Rateau; and early Le Corbusier represents the Bauhaus. Philippe Starck, France's most famous designer today, completes the litany of stars.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was the emergence of decorative arts as an industry that inspired the creation of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in 1905. And, unusually for France, it was founded as and remains a privately run museum, which answers to patrons, collectors and industrialists.

(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved