VirtuosoLife - January/February 2008 - (Page 74) ART AND CULTURE additions and refurbished classics part of your itinerary when you are next there. A SPLENDID SuRvEy OF FRENCH ARchitecture through the centuries is on display at La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. Newly installed in the Palais de Chaillot, it has scaled-down replicas of Romanesque and Gothic cathedral portals from around France, plus changing exhibitions on the first floor and an overview of modernism, from 1850 to the present, on the second. From here, museumgoers can look across the Seine to the Eiffel Tower and then examine a cutaway model of the Palais Garnier opera house; behind its ornate stone cladding, it has as innovative a structure as Gustave Eiffel’s masterpiece. Later exhibits trace the evolution of a new architecture, from the early villas of Le Corbusier to the shimmering confections of glass that have begun to infiltrate the old city. Explore the contradiction between nineteenth-century engineering and architecture in the newly restored, expanded Musée des Arts décoratifs, in the north wing of the Louvre. The exterior, looking onto the place du Carrousel, is a riot of statuary, columns, and cartouches. Inside, the upper floors – previously used for storage and as a refuge Sacha Guitry exhibition, on through February 18 at La Cinémathèque Français. New PAris CLAssiCs La Cinémathèque Française 51 rue de Bercy 33-1/71-19-33-33 www.cinematheque.fr La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine 1 place du Trocadéro et du 11 novembre 33-1/58-51-52-00 www.citechaillot.fr Musée des Arts décoratifs 107 rue de Rivoli 33-1/44-55-59-26 www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr Musée du quai Branly 37 quai Branly 33-1/56-61-70-00 www.quaibranly.fr for pigeons – are enclosed by a simple steeland-glass shed roof. This makes a wonderful foil for twentieth-century furniture, which is arranged by decade, with the 1940s at the top and contemporary work five levels down. The first two floors of the museum cover the history of French design from the Middle Ages to the 1930s. There you can peer into vintage rooms that have been reassembled, including the bathroom and boudoir of couturier Jeanne Lanvin, who seems to have been inspired by a fevered dream of a harem. Her apartment was created in 1925, along with a library/study of palm wood designed by Pierre Chareau for that year’s landmark International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Art. Across the Seine, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, is the most ambitious new museum in Paris, named Musée du quai Branly for its location. Architect Jean Nouvel designed it to house a collection of African, Oceanic, Asian, and pre-Columbian art; it’s the antithesis of his crystalline Cartier Foundation on the boulevard Raspail. A massive exhibition hall is screened from the noise of traffic by a glass barrier and raised on piers above a luxuriant garden that flows underneath. Multicolored blocks containing small display areas jut from the north side like half-open drawers, and bright orange brackets support open windows in the projecting office wing. Enter from a louvered white rotunda to the rear, climbing a ramp around a glass cylinder that contains some of the museum’s 8,831 musical instruments. A raised walkway carries you over the temporary exhibition area and into a long, dark hall. Nouvel loves somber colors, and here the masks and carved figures emerge as glowing objects in the shadows as though you were viewing them by firelight in a jungle clearing. 74 V I RT U O S O L I F E STEPHANE DABROWSKI / CINEMATHEQUE FRANCAISE http://www.cinematheque.fr http://www.citechaillot.fr http://www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr http://www.quaibranly.fr
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