In the Nave

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Momentané
26 April–1 September 2013

© Studio Bouroullec

The Arts Décoratifs Nave will be showcasing all facets of the work of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Conceived like a retrospective, the exhibition will retrace every stage of their international career, including their very latest creations.
The scenography they have designed for this 1,000 square-metre exhibition will highlight their innovative research into the partitioning of space. Great admirers of Charlotte Perriand, like her they are intensely interested in modularity, a concern they have explored in creations such as the Lit Clos sleeping cabin, the Alcove Sofa (Vitra), and lightweight screens built by assembling basic elements: the Cloud shelf-partition modules (Cappelini), and the Algues (Vitra) and North Tiles (Kvadrat) modular partitions.
Beneath an enormous textile vault, their presentation of all these pieces created over the past fifteen years has been adapted to structure this extraordinary space in the Arts Décoratifs Nave.

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Advertising

Pub mania, ils collectionnent la publicité
23 May–6 October 2013

Eventail, Cordon rouge, champagne G-H. Mumm & Co, anonyme, vers 1925

Bois, métal, papier, lithographie couleur
Don Anne et Michel Lombardini, 2011
© Jean Tholance

Who has never kept a beautiful biscuit tin, or a publicity fan, jug or ashtray? Since the late 19^th century, advertising has generated a host of easily collectable objects and is still using them as a sales tool, including in the form of collector editions. These usually mundane objects (fans, cigarette lighters, chromos, etc.) are amassed into amusing, surprising, heterogeneous collections often restricted to a brand (Meunier, Perrier, Kub, etc.), an event (The World Cup, etc.) or theme, or linked to a specific use or sales target (children, etc.). In France, one is a copocléphile if one collects key rings, a boxoferophile if one collects tin boxes, or a Yabonophile if one is interested solely in Banania products… The collector has the joy of the rare find and the pleasures of accumulating, exchanging and specialising. The passionate collector often obsessively amasses, identifies, selects and classifies.
This exhibition draws on Les Arts Décoratifs’ extensive advertising collection to explore this phenomenon and the psychology of collectors – who in the end are not that different from traditional art collectors…

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Toy Gallery

Winshluss. Un monde merveilleux
17 April–10 November 2013

Winshluss, “Un monde merveilleux”, 2013

© Winshluss

Winshluss is one of the major independent comic book authors in the French-speaking world. He published his first pages in the fanzine Les aventures de Miguel in 1995 and has contributed numerous collective publications, including the magazine Ferraille. In 2007, he adapted and co-directed the animated feature film Persopolis with Marjane Satrapi, and in 2009 he received the Best Album award at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême for his version of Pinocchio. The Toy Gallery invited Winshluss to use toys and advertising objects in the Arts Décoratifs collections to recreate his childhood memories in dioramas. The Toy Gallery’s display cases will host nine of these “wonderful worlds”: a “creationist” Noah’s Ark, an attack in a city, a scary world of dolls, a universe of mechanical toys, heroes as toys, masks, publicity toys, in short all the toys that Winshluss always wanted but never had and, of course, the “Ferraille” funfair.

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Contemporary Gallery

Emprunter pour inventer, Philippe Barde revisite Paul Bonifas
21 March–18 August 2013

Paul Ami Bonifas, vase dit à la chinoise, vers 1930 / Philippe Barde, œuvre réalisée à partir d’un moule original de Paul Bonifas, 2009

Œuvre de Paul Ami Bonifas :
Faïence émaillée
Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris
© Jean Tholance

Œuvre de Philippe Barde :
Grés, émail lustré noir
Collection particulière
© Vincent Lieber

The museum’s contemporary gallery is featuring the work of Philippe Barde (born 1955), one of the major Swiss ceramicists of his generation. This project focuses on the last three years of his rich creative itinerary, devoted to his free interpretation of the modernist work of one of the great Swiss potters in the 1930s, Paul Bonifas (1893–1967).
For Philippe Barde, the possibility of working in and from Bonifas’s original moulds, in the Musée Ariana in Geneva, was the departure point for a reflection on filiation in art. It was also an opportunity to question tradition – its respect and transgression – and explore the question of the contemporaneity and personality of an artwork when it takes history as its pretext.

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In the Study Gallery

Trompe-l’œil. Imitations, pastiches et autres illusions
2 Feburary 2012–5 January 2014

Plaque murale en forme de cage à oiseau recouverte d’une tente verte, Delft, vers 1780

Faïence de grand feu
© Les Arts Décoratifs / Photo : Jean Tholance

In the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ Study Gallery the public can discover the wealth of its collections via selections of rarely or never previously shown works from its storerooms, shown for an 18-month period. Trompe-l’oeil, as its name indicates, is meant to trick the eye, and originated in painting, in which the illusion created by a painted object relies heavily on perspective and chiaroscuro.

In decorative art, this ‘trickery of the eye’ took very diverse forms. Wallpapers, for instance, proved ideal for this form of expression. From the most modest to the most sumptuous, they all imitate materials: wood, lacquer, tiles, straw, velvet, and even framed pictures. Many imitations were of course done for economic reasons, and in this game of substitutes, one sees that for centuries many materials have been imitated by others: marbled ceramics imitating jasper, glazed ceramics imitating porphyry or gold, paste imitating the diamond, linoleum floorboards, and so on. This game of illusions evolved in the 19^th century, when, historicism oblige, it was not only materials that were imitated but motifs too. Owen Jones’ famous The Grammar of Ornament, like its French equivalent, Albert Racinet’s l’Ornement polychrome, provided numerous medieval and Moorish motifs for 19^th-century creators.
Fashion was no exception and became the theatre of the most outrageous illusions. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, wigs, tournures and faux-cul were worn to give false impressions. In the 20^th century, illusion focussed less on form than on the fabric itself, with the appearance of false wears and tears, false pockets, false buttons, etc. Like a treasure hunt traversing centuries and materials, this exhibition invites us into the great game of illusion or the ‘vertigo of imitation’.

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