Rooms With A View

With their impeccable re-creations of pre-Revolutionary French interiors, the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art constitute an outpost of the ancien régime, an oasis of imperious pomp amid the all-too-demotic realities of 21st-century Manhattan. But like those exiled aristocrats, who scattered in all directions before the marauding Jacobins, the citizens of New York have been exiled from this artificial paradise for the past two years (a duration far longer, though perhaps not quite as disagreeable, as the Reign of Terror itself). Today, finally, it reopens to the world.And unlike France, the galleries have emerged from their ordeal in far better shape than before. But you might not know that at first glance. For the changes are so subtle, the effects so subliminal, that the average visitor will experience a greater aesthetic satisfaction, though for reasons he might never realize.The main cause, according to curator Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide, who, with Ian Wardropper, oversaw the renovations, is a revolution in lighting. Fiber optics have permitted far greater specificity than was ever imagined back in the 1970s, when Jayne Wrightsman, the widow of Charles Wrightsman, donated to the Met some of the finest items in her extensive collection of 18th-century French decorative art. The advances consist largely in implementing the lessons learned in such recent costume exhibitions as “Dangerous Liaisons” (which took place in the Wrightsman Galleries). So subtle is the lighting that the viewer might not realize that there is any lighting at all; he merely notices things he would not otherwise: a shimmer of gold leaf on the leg of a chair, a tremor of ormolu, the sheen of silver or silk amid the strands of a tapestry or the skirt of a tassel. Such details are brought out by a handful of buds of light strategically placed beyond the visitors’ purview.In general, the rooms have less light than before, since subsequent research has shown that interiors before the Industrial Revolution tended to be more somber than in modern times. Some of the rooms, especially the earlier ones that feature furniture from the time of Louis Quatorze, the Sun King, are so somber that it takes time for the eye to adjust to the Riesener cabinet by the windows or the embroideries along the wall, interwoven with strands of silver wire. Here, as in most of the rooms, the ceilings have been painted a darker tone and their mechanical apparatus is smaller and less conspicuous than before. But the 17 chandeliers in the galleries, fashioned from such materials as gilt bronze and rock crystal, are equipped with tiny bulbs that, through the use of magnets, flicker with all the willful arbitrariness of flames. It is a simple trick, perhaps, but it will captivate visitors almost as much as the irreplaceable furnishings.Another imposing achievement of the lighting is the fact that, as you move through the galleries, you seem to pass through the changing times of day. The morning sun that shines through a Louis Quinze dining room becomes an afternoon light in the next room and twilight in the room after that.Most of the rooms, however, are not re-creations or reproductions of rooms that actually existed. Rather, they are ad hoc combinations of furnishings, most from the same country and the same time, but with some liberties taken to create a desired effect. In this they are like stage sets whose fiction is almost impossible to detect. Even the boiseries, those decorative wooden panels that covered 18thcentury walls and that look authentic in the Met, are fitted in a way that is quite different from their appearance in the aristocratic “hôtels particuliers” for which they were intended. Not all the objects come from the same era or even the same country, but have been assembled in accordance with the curators’ sense of drama and taste. Furthermore, not all of the objects on view were originally from the collections of Mrs. Wrightsman; they include treasures from the collections of J. Pierpont Morgan, Jules S. Bache, and William K. Vanderbilt.And while the new configuration may not look so different from the old, it includes objects not previously seen, such as an imposing mid-17th-century carved ebony cabinet. Also on view is the entirety of the Met’s collection of Sèvres porcelain objects, mainly from the bequest of Samuel H. Kress, that is rumored to be the finest of its kind in the entire world.For some visitors, the Wrightsman rooms will stand at the farthest possible remove from the sort of engaged, politically-aware art history most appreciated today. In this they may find a provocation. One strongly suspects that the curators do not greatly care. Their intention appears to be a refreshingly positivistic one: to present the rooms and objects of the pre-industrial age, almost exactly as they were. But in the midst of that painstaking inquiry, the curators exhibit a willingness to accommodate, if not actively to encourage, the propensity of the visitors to linger and dream. In this ambition, they could hardly have achieved a greater success than in the sumptuous rooms of the Wrightsman Collection.

Rooms With A View

Rooms With A View

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