The Louvre’s redesign of its 18th-century decorative arts galleries

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The Louvre has just spent €26m on the redesign and reinstallation of its 18th-century decorative arts galleries. The sweeping sequence of the 33 new galleries, a decade in the making, shows a reinterpretation of this peerless collection that is as radical in terms of the Louvre’s museology as it is spectacular.

Like every collection here, the department of decorative arts is, in effect, a museum within a museum. In its previous dark and rather dreary presentation, however, it was not one in which visitors were inclined to linger. The need to upgrade its outdated technical services allowed for a total restructuring of this sequence of galleries that runs the length of the first floor of the north wing of the Cour Carrée, and have now extended into the rooms of the former Conseil d’Etat.

Initially there was talk of a very contemporary presentation, like that at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, but the curatorial team under Marc Bascou, working with designer Jacques Garcia, decided on an arguably bolder approach: 14 “period” rooms, assembled as completely as the collections allowed, and interspersed with themed, vitrine-lined galleries.

The late 20th century saw many museums, particularly in the US, dismantling period rooms but now they have made something of a comeback. As curator Frédéric Dassas explains in the illuminating catalogue: “Decorative objects – more than any other art form – require a physical as well as intellectual reconstruction of their original context in order to reveal their full beauty and convey their full meaning.” Such reconstructions may also be the most effective means of making this potentially perplexing material culture comprehensible to the Louvre’s global visitors.

The period rooms newly installed at the Louvre have either been recreated from surviving boiseries – sculpted panelling – and furniture from a particular interior or confected from different sources; each was conceived to explore a specific age and place. This has not been done before in the museum and it allows a wonderfully clear (if necessarily simplified) overview of the evolution of style, taste and technical innovation in the French decorative arts, from the grand siècle of the late 17th century to the revolution.

The display, which is essentially chronological, is divided into three: the reign of Louis XIV and the regency, the triumph of the rococo, and the return to classicism during the reign of Louis XVI. It begins with the Sun King himself. Presiding over all is Hyacinthe Rigaud’s monumental portrait of the monarch in his coronation robes, one of many paintings and objects borrowed from other Louvre departments and elsewhere. Before it, on the Fouquet porphyry table, stands the spectacular bronze and gilt-bronze “Jupiter Victorious over the Titans”, cast in France to a design by Alessandro Algardi. Everything – from the armorial Gobelins tapestries and Savonnerie carpet to the Boulle armoires – was once in the French royal collection. This was art as a political tool, under rigid state control. The new royal academies and manufactories, which attracted highly skilled foreign cabinet makers, glassmakers, stonecutters and weavers, were seen as a means of royal and national glorification and much-needed economic development, and their extravagant, theatrical productions were designed to impress rather than to beguile.

It was the decline of royal commissions and state intervention at the end of Louis XIV’s reign that allowed the rococo style to flourish, for the workshops of Paris were at last free to follow every flight of fantasy that imagination and technique allowed. Their lighter, brighter and more whimsical productions were confected for the pleasures of the private salon rather than for the court, and were embraced enthusiastically by the financiers and nobility who began building their grand hôtels particuliers on the Place Vendôme and elsewhere.

A gem of an example is the mirrored cabinet, or private sitting room, created for the tax collector François-Balthazar Dangé around 1750: here recreated and displayed in its entirely for the first time. The original brilliant blue of its panelling, along with its variously toned gilding, were only recently rediscovered during restoration. With its lustrous surfaces, palette of blue, white and gold, and painted decorative panels, it is like a piece of Vincennes porcelain writ large.

Research has gone hand-in-hand with conservation and restoration in this project. A recent discovery in the diplomatic archives, for instance, has revealed that a fabulous coffer, its wooden carcase covered with blue silk-satin and then a layer of intricate, lacy and filigreed gold-work, was, in fact, made for Louis XIV rather than his mother. Here delicate bouquets of flowers are entwined with acanthus scrolls, the gold variously matt or burnished to contrast rough leaves with smooth petals. It was commissioned by the king from the goldsmith Jean Pitan in 1676 to hold his “bejewelled finery” – the gem-studded necklaces, bracelets, rings and buttons that glittered on his court costume and were occasionally lent to female members of his family.

This is just one example of a dazzling technical virtuosity that propels the decorative arts of this period into the realm of great art. The achievement of these new galleries is that they return their contents to the light and let them sing. They can stop you dead in your tracks, to marvel at the magnificence of a whole ensemble or at the extraordinary invention and detail of individual pieces, such as the astonishing pair of silver sugar casters designed by Thomas Germain in 1735 in the form of slaves bearing heavy bundles of sugar cane.

The renovation of these 18th-century decorative arts galleries is the first major project at the Louvre entirely funded by private donors. Along with the recent exhibition of vernis Martin imitation lacquerwork at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the forthcoming major show at Versailles, which explores the innovative, pioneering character of 18th-century furniture in terms of form, techniques, decoration and materials, it is focusing attention once again on a glorious but hitherto unfashionable era.

louvre.fr/en

Photographs: Olivier Ouadah; RMN/Jean-Gilles Berizzi; Musee du Louvre/Thierry Ollivier; RMN/Martine Beck-Coppola