One of the
highlights of my recent trip to the New
York Metropolitan Museum of Art was a splendid show, Extravagant Inventions; The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens. If you are planning a trip to the Met in the
next month and have only time for one thing, make it this. The show is on view through January 27, and is
located just beyond the Greco-Roman collection.
I stumbled into it by accident, and was loathe to leave it at all.
Big names
always spring to mind when one thinks of “must-see” shows, so forgive me a few
words while I enthuse about the Roentgens.
The workshop of Abraham Roentgen
(1711-1793) and his son, David
(1743-1807), was responsible for some of the most beautiful (and fantastic)
furniture of the era. Desks, automatons,
grand clocks – all of these are on hand.
Aside from being exquisitely crafted works of great beauty, they are also
intriguing puzzles: many of them unfold to reveal hidden compartments, secret
drawers or games and mechanical devices.
The key
word to the Roentgen style is grandeur – these are pieces to savor. The Roentgens were based in Herrnhaag, in the
Wetterau region near Frankfurt. He was
soon recognized by the local nobility and he moved his shop to
Neuwied-at-the-Rhine in 1750. It was his
son David, however, who was responsible for the greatest successes of the workshop. His sophisticated designs and playful
clockwork precisions resulted in his being appointed Ebéniste-Méchanicien du Roi et de la Reine at the court of Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI at Versailles in 1779. He also created furniture for Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, and
she became his most important client/patron.
Sadly, it
was the very seeds of his success that also led to Roentgen’s downfall: with
the French Revolution, his royals clients could not sustain a taste for royal
appointments, and his workshop folded.
Extravagant
Inventions draws on works from the Metropolitan Museum’s own holdings, as well
as pieces from Berlin’s Kunstgewerbe
Museum that have never before traveled, most notably a mechanical Secretary
Cabinet (1779) made for King Friedrich
Wilhelm II of Prussia that is one of the most complex and expensive pieces
of royal furniture ever produced. When the exhibition ends, four objects from
the Kunstgewerbe Museum—The Harlequin Table (ca. 1760-65), a pair of marquetry
portraits depicting an elderly woman and an elderly man (1775-80), and the
aforementioned Secretary Cabinet—will remain on loan to the Metropolitan Museum
for an additional nine months and will be on view in the European Sculpture and
Decorative Arts Galleries.
The show is
superbly lit, and the pieces are comfortably spaced. There are several monumental clocks on view,
all of which are works of remarkable craftsmanship. One of the real highlights of the show is a
clockwork harpsichord player, which is both beautiful and tuneful. The muted colors of the walls bring out the
luster of the wood, and the feeling of being in such luxury is delicious. Here is art and form unified; the
spectacularly beautiful becomes the sublimely functional. It is a show than designers and manufacturers
should see and take to heart.
The
Metropolitan also provides video supplements showing the many secret drawers
and hiding places to be found in the furniture, as well as a video of the
elaborate musical automaton. There is
also a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Wolfram Koeppe, the first appreciation of the Roentgens in English
for more than 30 years. It is a sumptuously
designed book and comes highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment