T Magazine: Legacy | If These Walls Could Talk

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 20 Maret 2014 | 17.35

The restoration of a storied French neo-Classical salon reveals as much about polite society as it does about high design.

An extraordinary scene has been playing out at San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum over the last year. Through a window installed into a temporary wall, conservators in lab coats can be viewed as they minister over the disassembled pieces of one of the finest examples of French neo-Classical interior architecture anywhere: the Salon Doré, originally constructed in 1781. The $2 million restoration of the roughly 25-square-foot room — four walls of gilded and light-gray-painted paneling — is now nearly complete; and when it is done, one of the most remarkable chapters in its rather eventful, nearly 250-year history will conclude as well.

There are well-conceived examples of French period rooms in this country at the Getty in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, most notably, the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But the Salon Doré is different. The room will be presented by the curator Martin Chapman as a complete environment, furnished as it originally was when new, rather than simply as a backdrop for important objects. Used in the 18th century as a salon de compagnie — a receiving space for guests — it was specifically designed as what was essentially a stage for conversation conducted in a state of high alertness on small, leggy upright chairs arranged in a semicircle. There was no question of being offered a drink or told to make oneself comfortable, as in the basic rites of entertaining today. The idea of "comfort" did not enter the social life of the French aristocracy for almost another hundred years (when it did so in the form of the deeply tufted upholstery of Napoleon III). Like the plan of a church — with nave and side aisles laid out to support a liturgical program — a room of this sort was arranged to allow nobles higher in rank (and senior in age) to be received by the hostess and seated closest to the fire. New arrivals — who understood the protocols on sight — greeted the assemblage and took their position, or perhaps remained standing. In this room you were expected to know your place, sit up straight and converse like Molière.

Neo-Classicism as a style made its real debut in the 1760s after several stillbirths. At first a chunky and awkward experiment in the resurrection of Greek and Roman forms, inspired by archeological discoveries like the temples of Paestum in southern Italy, it was equally a response to the relentless curves of the Baroque and Rococo that had been in style for decades. By the late 1770s, neo-Classicism had evolved into the graceful iteration we see in the Salon, and with its references to the classical world acquired a new and somewhat unanticipated meaning in the bargain: It gave form and image to democratic political ideals.

This was the architecture Jefferson so loved when he lived in Paris as the United States ambassador in the late 1780s. He was fascinated by the Hôtel de Salm, which, in a curious twist of fate, was both the residence of the brother of the original owner of the Salon Doré and the prototype for the museum that now houses it. The fact that this architectural vocabulary was given its most perfect expression by a society that toyed with it as stage design for Bourbon court life — yet was about to be swept away by the very principles to which it paid homage — was an irony not yet manifest.

The Salon is easy to recognize as a beautiful interior of art-historical significance, but to fully appreciate its poetry, you also have to understand the journey it has made to end up in Northern California. The paneling was given to the Legion of Honor by Richard Rheem, a Bay Area manufacturer of HVAC equipment, in 1959. Rheem had bought it from the art dealership Duveen Brothers under the impression that it came from the Hôtel de Crillon — an important but entirely spurious provenance. Duveen had purchased it from the widow of Otto H. Kahn after the financier's death in 1934. Kahn's residential portfolio is legendary — he was, after all, the prototype for the Monopoly Man — and the room had been a jewel at the center of his house in New York, which still exists today as the Convent of the Sacred Heart girls' school. How and from whom Kahn acquired the Salon Doré is not known for certain, but he was its first owner in the New World.

While still in Paris, the Salon Doré was rescued from the demolition of the Hôtel d'Humières in 1905. This event attracted great attention at the time; after all the losses incurred by Haussmann's urban reconstruction of the 1870s, one of the most important surviving 18th-century townhouses was being destroyed to construct an apartment building. (Many assume Paris has always appeared as it does today, but this was one of their Pennsylvania Station moments.) In looking at archives in the Rothschild country house Waddesdon Manor, where much of the other paneling from the Hôtel d'Humières now resides, architectural historian Bruno Pons discovered the Salon's true origin in the long-vanished Hôtel de La Trémoille — which was demolished in 1877 to accommodate an extension of the Boulevard St.-Germain. So the Salon Doré escaped destruction in the Revolution of 1789, emerged unscathed from Haussmann's boulevard-cutting swath of 1877 and was not damaged by the profiteering apartment-house developers of 1905 — twice faring better than the buildings that housed it. All before leaving for America, where it continued to move at least four more times. The room is not only a masterpiece, but a remarkable survivor.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M286 of the NewYork edition with the headline: If These Walls Could Talk.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

T Magazine: Legacy | If These Walls Could Talk

Dengan url

http://travelwisatawan.blogspot.com/2014/03/t-magazine-legacy-if-these-walls-could.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

T Magazine: Legacy | If These Walls Could Talk

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

T Magazine: Legacy | If These Walls Could Talk

sebagai sumbernya

0 komentar:

Posting Komentar

techieblogger.com Techie Blogger Techie Blogger