Curating “Paris: Life & Luxury”

People often say of complex operations, ‘It’s an art, not a science.’ Still, the complexity of art itself is sometimes underestimated. Even those well schooled in and appreciative of painting, sculpture and the decorative arts may not recognize the intricacies involved in curating a major exhibition. An innovative new show at the Getty Center is notable both for its art and for the enormity of the work behind the scenes.   ’Paris: Life & Luxury’ animates the activities within an 18th-century Parisian town house, structuring the rooms around the rhythms of the day, beginning with ‘Rising & Dressing’ and closing with ‘Seeking Divine Mercy at Bedtime.’ In doing so, it breaks some rules, or at least conventions, around how art is typically displayed.   ’What this show does is reshuffle the deck,’ says Charissa Bremer-David, curator of sculpture and decorative arts for the J. Paul Getty Museum and co-curator of the show, along with Peter Bj’rn Kerber, assistant curator of paintings. ‘We came up with new suits, new series.’   This modern remix is completely in sync with 18th-century sensibilities, before a divide developed between the fine arts (painting, architecture and sculpture) and the applied arts (furniture, textiles, dress, accessories and other decorative arts), Bremer-David says.   The middle of the 18th century, often overshadowed by the French Revolution, was ‘a wonderfully invigorating, virtuoso collaborative period,’ the curator says, when there was ‘a flourishing of the arts in the broadest understanding’ of the term. Those who commissioned and collected great painting were also connoisseurs of fashion. ‘There was a Society of the Arts, which consisted of men of science and craftsmen who got together to exchange ideas,’ Bremer-David continues. ‘Their motto was ‘sciences in service of the arts and arts in service of the sciences.”   The Getty’s permanent decorative-arts collection is housed in a gallery beautifully designed by Thierry Despont and lush with textiles. Bremer-David has worked extensively with that collection for nearly 30 years and was enchanted by the idea of exploring cross-disciplinary connections in the form of a special exhibition.   Early discussions around ‘Paris,’ the first special exhibit dedicated to the French 18th-century decorative arts since the Getty Center opened in 1997, began in 2004. Antonia Bostr’m, senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts, who joined the Getty that year, brought the notion of structuring art around the passage of a day from her experience at the Detroit Institute of Arts.   ’The Four Times of Day,’ a series of four oil paintings on copper by Nicolas Lancret on loan from the National Gallery of Art in London, introduces the exhibit and illustrates its allegorical framework. It also highlights the intense level of detail and discussion involved in pulling the show together.   One of the biggest challenges of any exhibition is procuring important works from other collections, and this series is a case in point. The National Gallery’s policy is to lend works no more than once every three years and yet one of the four paintings had been lent about two years earlier. Couldn’t the Getty work with print versions of the paintings?, the National Gallery wondered. Or hang only three of the four? Bremer-David ultimately persuaded the museum to lend all four, but then special precautions were required to protect the paintings on display. Once those critical issues had been resolved, the curator and her team still had to work out the specifics concerning another nearly 80 works lent from 21 other museums and five private collectors.   ’Getting the loans took a lot of work and, frankly, goodwill,’ Bremer-David says. ‘When you ask for historically beautiful and important objects from other people’s collections, they have to think hard: ‘Is the exhibition worth lending to? Is our loan going to contribute in a substantial way?”   Asked if a worldwide database exists to document and track ownership of decorative and other art, Bremer-David laughs. If only. That knowledge exists only in the minds of the curator and her colleagues, based on decades of research and visits to collections around the world. ”Even works from the Getty’s own collection, which constitute about half of the installation, required extraordinary handling and consideration. The very fragile silk satin hangings for a duchess-style bed installed in the first room, which arrived at the Getty Museum in 1979, had never been displayed for fear that even a layer of dust would be difficult to clean from the silver-wrapped silk thread and silver trim. It took a team of four to six art handlers, three conservators, including a textile conservator from outside the Getty, and Bremer-David ‘six days alone to just assemble this bed,’ she says. That was after a special Eiffel Tower-like construction was erected inside the wall to support the bed’s cantilevered ‘flying’ canopy.   Simply moving one pastel and gouache portrait by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour from the permanent collection in the South Pavilion to the special exhibition space posed challenges because its massive gilt frame weighs about 297 pounds.   But the trouble was worth the reward. The portrait’s subject, Gabriel Bernard de Rieux, a prominent member of the Parliament of Paris, is shown in his study, surrounded by precious decorative pieces, now echoed by similar pieces in the Getty’s exhibition gallery. A set of monumental corner cupboards (which break down into 81 individual components) veneered in tulipwood, kingwood and amaranth and adorned in gilt-bronze with symbols of music, architecture, science and the arts; a beautiful writing desk with inkstand and quill; and a freestanding globe next to a period leather chair all give three-dimensionality to the portrait.   In the re-envisioned study and elsewhere, drawers and compartments are opened and accessories placed to reveal how the furniture would have been used in an 18th-century home. In the case of a small, graceful writing desk with a number of drawers half hidden in the marquetry and opening every which way, the curators went a step further, creating a video to show the inner workings of the furniture, gleaned from X-rays, to imagine how it might have been used. In addition to choosing elements to reflect the fictional town house’s activities’art collecting, reading, music, dining, card games, and scientific pursuits’the museum sought enlightening pairings. So in ‘The Art of a Good Table,’ visitors will find a wall of still lifes by Jean-Baptiste Oudry that include the ingredients for a meal (a fish, a hare, a bird, fruits and vegetables) across from a case housing a silver centerpiece by Fran’ois-Thomas Germain similarly decorated with a still life of dead game and vegetables. In fact, Oudry secured the commission of the silver work for Germain, who was also his neighbor.   A large leather-bound book of animal fables by Jean de La Fontaine in an adjacent case includes illustrations by Oudry for the well-known tale of ‘The City Rat and the Country Rat.’ Books from the Getty Research Institute serve as thought-provoking counterparts to paintings and decorative pieces throughout.   Though only scholars may recognize all of the nuanced references and intellectual surprises, the show is designed as a crowd-pleasing sensory experience full of delightful discoveries. The centerpiece of the music room is a harpsichord decorated with chinoiserie vignettes in red and gold lacquer, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Black lettering above the keyboard offers its whimsical provenance: ‘Joannes Goermans me fecit Paris 1754’ (Joannes Goermans made me in Paris). Music from the Suite in G major, by French composer Jean-Phillipe Rameau, plays as if from within the instrument.   Three clock movements were reactivated to allow the chiming of the hour and ticking of clocks to resonate through the rooms. The lighting seeks to replicate the changing time of day in exhibit rooms in an age before electricity. Mimi Hellman, associate professor of art history at Skidmore College, wrote a chapter for the catalogue (edited by Bremer-David and published by The J. Paul Getty Museum) devoted to the ‘inconstant, flickering light’ of candles. Lighting influenced the design and placement of 18th-century jewelry, furniture and accessories, sometimes chosen to reflect candlelight to animate their wearer or surface. In the exhibit space, the paint color of the walls, the level of lighting and the placement of mirrors and reflective surfaces have all been thoughtfully managed to elicit a sensation of day falling into evening.   All in all, intense effort and teamwork was required to create the complex show.   ’No one at the Getty works alone,’ Bremer-David says. She continuously referenced the talents of the 60-odd curators, conservators, art handlers, editors, registrars, mount-makers and members of the exhibition and myriad departments involved in the show, as well as the generosity of the curators, collectors and others outside the Getty group.   In an impressive cross-disciplinary collaboration, perhaps not unlike that common in 18th-century France, Bremer-David, Kerber and their army of colleagues have created an inspired and opulent rendering of that luxurious time to please both scholars and those who simply love beautiful things.