Contrary to legend, Marie-Antoinette never told the hungry peasants to eat
cake. She certainly never wore Manolos, as Kirsten Dunst did when she played
the last queen of France in Sofia Coppola's frothy film. But the latest
retrospective of Marie-Antionette, running at the Grand Palais in Paris
until June 30, certainly offers the viewer a woman who was out to enjoy
herself with a vengeance, until it all went horribly wrong.
With nearly 300 items on display, Marie-Antoinette is the biggest exhibition
on its subject since a blockbuster at Versailles in 1955. Fittingly for a
queen so hooked on theatricals, design of the exhibition space was entrusted
to David Carsen, an operatic stage-director, to stunning, not to say camp,
effect. The visitor begins in a Versailles-style enfilade of rooms that
follows its subject from Viennese archduchess to French queen; decors
evoking her garden at Trianon frame belongings from the sunny uplands of her
short life; then a spiral staircase, lined with images of the lofty
hairstyles that had her ladies squatting on the floors of their carriages,
descends to a black cavern devoted to the Revolutionary years.
Here the scrupulously scholarly catalogue is not afraid to dig beneath the
“relics” of the queenmartyr. The French of MarieAntoinette's tear-stained
last letter, we learn, is suspiciously perfect. As for the famous sketch of
the bowed former queen minutes from the guillotine: could David really have
drawn it from life, through a window, as the tumbril hurried by?
The exhibition is a tribute to the erudition and flair of its curators, Pierre
Arizzoli-Clémentel and Xavier Salmon. In a larger sense, too, it celebrates
one of the least predictable successes of French art history. In 1793, when
the First Republic sold off the effects of the late monarchy, even the most
ardent crypto-royalist could not have dreamt that whole careers in France
would one day be devoted to the minute reconstruction of the appearance and
contents of the palaces of the former aristocrats. The catalogue's imposing
list of international lenders makes clear how widespread the dispersal of
the royal collections has been.
To track down Marie-Antoinette's chairs and plates in overseas museums, French
scholars led by the late Pierre Verlet have buried themselves in the
archives of the Bâtiments and the Garde-meuble, the court departments
directly responsible for the royal residences right up to 1792. Thanks to
the bureaucratic habits of the ancien régime, which extended even to a
record of window-cleaning at Versailles, Marie-Antoinette's former rooms can
be reconstituted on paper and increasingly, since the mid-20th century, in
reality. In a manifest irony, this literal resurrection of the mise-en-scène
of Marie-Antoinette's life is now an affair of state, supported and funded
by successive French republics at the highest level.
Given the relative frequency of exhibitions on Marie-Antoinette, it seems
reasonable to ask what is new about the show at the Grand Palais. There are
novelties, such as the portrait of a richly dressed woman reading in her
library. Long taken for Marie-Antoinette, she turns out to be one of Louis
XVI's aunts: satisfying, in a way, since the queen of myth was a notoriously
slack student.
The exhibition offers a superb exploration of how Marie-
Antoinette wished to be portrayed by artists and sculptors, culminating with
the huge painting by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun of Marie-Antoinette the mother.
This was a calculated riposte to her critics after the “necklace affair”,
but the attempt to reposition the royal image bombed. Despite the presence
of her children, the subject was criticised for not looking sufficiently
maternal - a harbinger of the “denaturing” of Marie-Antoinette in
revolutionary propaganda a few years later.
Mostly, the exhibition offers a distinctly French view of MarieAntoinette, one
that can be traced back to the first reunion of royal memorabilia at Trianon
in 1867. The commonality with earlier shows is suggested by the reappearance
of the same exhibits: thus the queen's jewel-cabinet from her bedroom at
Versailles was also featured in the 1867 and 1955 shows.
Historically these exhibitions have offered, and reinforce, a certain
“construction” of MarieAntoinette. Alongside personal relics and portraits
of contemporaries is set an array of objets d'art presenting her as the
quintessence of an epoch and its taste. This is a forgiving way of viewing
the Austrian queen by the nation that guillotined her: as an adjunct to the
history of French art. Into this formula the historical personage intrudes,
to be sure, but less as an actor in a specifically French narrative of
seismic events and more as a “woman in history”, if not exactly the
“mediocre” woman of Stefan Zweig's 1933 biography.
Just how much the historical Marie-Antoinette queened it over the style that
she is made to symbolise here is a question that the exhibition raises but
does not answer. She took little interest in the French fine arts, although
she sought to influence French music and resurrected the grand opera of
Versailles by means of a new court theatre, which the 19th century
destroyed.
The decorative arts were her true métier. Like Madame de Pompadour before her,
she is perhaps best seen as an exacting chatelaine who presided over a
string of homes that she had the means constantly to redecorate. Rough
drawings and a wax maquette of an armchair give insights into how
Marie-Antoinette chose these decors. Beyond the fact that she had a
Rousseau-esque predilection for the floral patterns that cover her
furnishings and crockery, how far she imposed a personal taste is not really
made clear. The provision of comforts for the French royal family was the
job of a well-oiled court machine of artists, craftsmen and suppliers, who
performed the same service for the king, his aunts, sister, brothers and
sisters-in-law.
Through a show of their assembled belongings, arguably any of these could
serve as an avatar of the Louis XVI style. To some extent the French royals
shared similar tastes - the king and the aunts, for instance, loved
lacquerwork, as did Marie-Antoinette. The queen was set apart from these
other royal women mainly because her exalted rank entitled her to greater
display and expenditure. Intrafamily rivalries encouraged her to exploit
this advantage to the hilt.
Marie-Antoinette's love of appearances is illustrated by the clothes and
coiffures in contemporary images. Some, like the unflattering Wertmüller
portrait, explain Nancy Mitford's caricature of her dress sense: “a pearly
queen in a mass of mad feathers”. Past fashions are often baffling to later
ages, and this seems particularly true of modish Frenchwomen circa 1780.
Sadly, our image of the queen in bed, picking the dresses of the day from a
book of swatches, must now be consigned to myth. On display, the book in
question was in fact a register for the use of her wardrobe officials.
Mitford put the blame for the queen's clothes on Rose Bertin, the most
influential of her marchandes de modes. She is shown here in a newly
identified oil portrait as a chubby woman in her thirties, whose shrewd
expression suggests how she, not the queen, might well have pulled the
sartorial strings, as claimed by her recent biographer, Michelle Sapori.
Where the exhibition succeeds perfectly is in capturing the hopeless
contradictions of the royal lifestyle. Here is Marie-Antoinette in a
painting after the Le Brun original, fashionably dressed in a simple
“shirt-dress” that was easy to put on and comfortable to move in, unlike the
formal court costumes into which she was pinned when she was “in
representation”.
There are bucolic views of her mock farm, but the overwhelming impression of
her reconstituted interiors is of simply staggering luxury. The materials
and craftsmanship, the omnipresent gilding, the fear of empty space that
demands that every inch of a worked surface be treated as a decorative tour
de force: this is a royal aesthetic of compulsive extravagance.
An extraordinary pair of vases in filigree ivory and gilt bronze from Louis
XVI's rooms at Versailles suggests how much her spouse too was wedded to
this opulence, despite his reputation for simple tastes. The dates of
manufacture of many objects show that, despite the deteriorating financial
climate, the funds flowed regardless, right up to 1789.
A pretty pair of doors from Marie-Antoinette's boudoir at Fontainebleau, each
equipped on the inside with a lock and a bolt, hints contingently at the
queen's obsession with privacy. Beyond including a portrait of her rumoured
lover, the Swede Axel de Fersen, the exhibition does not dwell on her
alleged adultery, a topic perhaps best explored in history books.
But the exhibition might have been a tad more adventurous, for instance by
showing the archival documents part-published in 1970 by the late Marguerite
Jallut, a Versailles curator who specialised in Marie-Antoinette. These
suggest that Fersen at one point was living above the queen's bedroom at
Versailles. Here the Rilkean question of what actually happened still seems
to matter. It was through her sexuality, after all, that the queen's enemies
chose mainly to attack her.
This exhibition does not seek to unsettle the core tenets of
MarieAntoinettemanie. But it is a triumph of scholarship and beauty, and
will bring pleasure to many.
Marie-Antoinette runs at the Grand Palais, Paris, until June 30
(www.grandpalais.fr). Métro: Champs-Elysées Clemenceau or Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Open 10am to 8pm daily (closed Tuesdays). Admission 11 euros.
Tony Spawforth's Versailles: A Biography of a Palace will be published in
the autumn by St Martin's Press, New York
REGARDE: THE BEST ART SHOWS IN PARIS THIS SPRING
Palais de Tokyo
Cellar Door - “A colossal organism engendered by an original music score” by
Loris Gréaud. Until April 27. Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson
(0033 1 47 23 54 01; www.palaisdetokyo.com), 6 euros (£4.75). Métro: Iéna
Musée du Louvre
Babylon - revealing the founding of the ancient city. Until June 2. Musée du
Louvre, Napoleon Hall (0033 1 40 20 53 17, www.louvre.fr), 13 euros/9 euros.
Métro: Palais-Royal-Musée du Louvre
Musée des Arts Decoratifs
Christian Lacroix: Histoires de Mode - Survey of the museum's fashion
collections. Until April 20. Les Arts Décoratifs - Mode et Textile, 107 rue
de Rivoli (0033 1 44 55 57 50; www.lesartsdecratifs. fr), 8 euros. Métro:
Palais-Royal
Centre Pompidou
Louise Bourgeois - fascinating retrospective of the 95-year-old. Until June 2.
Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou (www.centrepompidou.fr), free with
museum admission (10 euros). Métro: Rambuteau
Musée d'Orsay
Lovis Corinth - Celebrating 150 years since the German artist's birth. Until
June 22. Musée d'Orsay, 62 rue de Lille (www.musee-orsay. fr), free with
museum admission (8 euros). Métro: Solférino
