Creative idleness in the eighteenth century.(Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century)(Book review)

When I was a child, the dusty dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City used to hypnotize and terrify me simultaneously. It was a small leap to animate these large animals and send them crashing through the glass. Perhaps the curators at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had this static but menacing wilderness in mind when they created the exhibition entitled Dangerous Liaisons in 2004.

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Frost white mannequins in eighteenth-century French court dress were suggestively posed in the museum's eighteenth-century French period rooms in the Wrightsman Galleries, where they were as much at home as the buffalo on their painted prairie in the natural history museum across Central Park. The difference is that buffalo just eat and sleep. Eighteenth-century courtiers, having nothing whatever to do, cultivated a langorous and lustful leisure that came alive in the exhibition's installations.

The catalogue of the exhibition, necessarily delayed until the tableaux could be photographed, perpetuates the spirit of the original show because of the provocative and quirky photography. There are nine scenes that more or less summarize the ingenious idleness of the eighteenth-century French toff. They include a card game at which two out of four players are cheating; a vignette involving a broken vase, an indifferent husband, and a consoling merchant; and a late supper for two, or rather its aftermath in which the lady is laid out on a sofa with one arm in the air holding a souvenir garter for the obliging gentleman in shirtsleeves who is sprawled on the floor between her shoes.

In a larger sense, the premise of the exhibition was that "social seduction in eighteenth-century France was impossible without furniture. Objects were like extensions of the body, part of a wardrobe that, correctly worn, could turn the correctly worn, could turn the activities of elite existence into dances of artful persuasion." Social seduction was not easy. "It meant avoiding the equally displeasing extremes of aggression and impassivity. It meant being well groomed but not self-absorbed. It meant pleasing others, and being pleased by them, without seeming to be pleased with oneself. Moreover, this cycle of mutual ...