Le Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Paris From the Middle Ages to the 21st century Christopher Wagner
After a �35 million renovation that lasted 10 years, le Musee Des Arts Decoratifs has reopened in full glory in the 19th-century Pavillon Marsan Wing of Musee Du Louvrealong the rue de Rivoli. The museum displays approximately 6,000 items from its 150,000 piece collection of furniture, altar pieces, religious paintings, sculptures, tapestries, wallpaper, ceramics, and glassware, organized along chronological lines from the Middle Ages to present day.
Among the highlights are the recreated period rooms of French aristocrats and other patricians from the late 15th to the mid- 20th-century. Two period rooms, independent of their artistic content, are particularly noteworthy:
- the bedroom of courtesan Lucie Emilie Delabigne, who was the inspiration for the main character in Emile Zola’s 1880 novel Nana. You will feel like a voyeur standing in front of an opulent 1877 bed designed by Edouard Lelèvre and so well described by Zola . “…a bed such as had never before existed; it was to be a throne, an altar, whither Paris was to come in order to adore her sovereign nudity.”. Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, and Henri Gervex, whose portrait of her you can see at the Musee D' Orsay, and many others artists came to that altar to adore the sovereign nudity of Mademoiselle Delabigne. Her nickname was “l’ Union des peintres “ She was also the very intimate friend of that other Grande Courtisane Liane de Pougy. Ah, if that bed could talk …
- the Jeanne Lanvin bedroom, boudoir and bathroom from her house at 16 rue Barbet de Jouy in the 7th arrondissement. These rooms were decorated with delightfully elegant furniture designed by Albert-Armand Rateau. It is Rateau who created the spherical parfum atomiseur for Arpège several years later. It is there, in discrete elegance, that one of the most entrepreneurial woman of the 20th-century lived. The eldest of 11 children, Jeanne Lanvin started working in her early teens as an apprentice millner. At her death, right after World War II, she left a formidable Fashion Empire.
The 20th-century floor showcases the works of all the designers who have marked the world, creating furniture and objects that have been parts of our lives.
Do not miss the Musée de la Mode et du Textile and the Musée de la Publicité located next door.
The trendy restaurant of the Museum des Arts Decoratifs "Le Saut du Loup" is open from noon to 2 a.m. Its terrace offers glorious views of the gardens of the Tuileries, the Carrousel du Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. It is just divine during the Parisian summer nights when the Sun never seems to set.
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