Art à la française
This month Paris hosts the world’s most beautiful art and antiques fair, the Biennale des Antiquaires. Susan Moore selects some highlights of this great feast of French art and taste.
Susan Moore, Monday, 25th August 2008
No art and antiques fair can match the ambition of the Biennale des Antiquaires. While other events offer a marketplace, the Paris Biennale flourishes a manifesto. It is a celebration of not just the magnificent contribution to the fine and decorative arts made by La Belle France but also to French style, taste and culture in all their forms. It is no coincidence that this is the most beautiful fair in the world – the Syndicat National des Antiquaires spend a fortune on designing and staging the event – or that the greatest chefs in France line up to preside over its gourmet restaurant each day. As befits all this flag-waving, it is even opened by the President.
This year’s edition – the 24th – is once again back in its original venue at the Grand Palais in Paris (11-21 September). In fact, the building’s great glass domed roof lends a particularly appropriate conservatory feel to a fair that this year is, quite literally, cultivating the art of life à la française. Its theme is the garden, and four are being planted in the 7,000 tonnes of earth en route to the Grand Palais as I write. Hundreds of trees, bushes and flowers are in readiness with the green-house staff of the Château de Versailles. There will be four major themes – a Zen garden, Undergrowth, a rose garden and a Mediterranean garden – with a vegetable garden and an orchard next to the restaurant. Within each of the four lozenge-shape groupings of stands – yes, there will be works of art too – will be patios planted around the themes of cocoa, tea, coffee and fruits. A feast for all the senses.
As for the exhibits, there will be much that will be expected and plenty that is not. It would be impossible, for instance, to imagine a Biennale without the grandest 18th-century French furniture. This year, arguably the oldest and most distinguished of all Parisian furniture dealers, Maison Kraemer, will be exhibiting for the very first time. It flourishes the likes of a virtuoso piece of rococo cabinet-making, a Louis XV commode confected out of imported Chinese lacquer and embellished with finely chiselled gilt-bronze mounts and topped with marble (Fig. 3). It is stamped ‘BVRB’ – the mark of the maître ébéniste Bernard Van Riesenburg (1696-1766). One of the most elegant and refined of French furniture-makers, his work was supplied to Queen Marie Leszczynska, wife of Louis XV the Prince de Condé and Mme de Pompadour. This piece latterly came from the Vanderbilt-Balsan Collection.
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