From Paris to Portland. (Current and Coming).(collections from Musee des Arts Decoratifs on tour)(Brief Article)

Founded in the nineteenth century, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, is one of the largest institutions of its kind in the world and ranks among the foremost private museums in France. The collections encompass more than 250,000 objects dating from the Middle Ages to the present and represent a wide variety of mediums including silver, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, jewelry, and wallpapers. There are comprehensive subcollections such as walking sticks, thimbles, minute ivory skulls, Chinese cloisonne enamel vessels, Oriental carpets, and Persian miniatures. Then there are period rooms designed by Emile Galle, Armand Albert Rateau, and other well-known figures in the history of architecture and design.

The museum has been dosed for extensive renovation for a number of years, and will not reopen until 2004. In the interim a traveling exhibition of more than one hundred objects drawn from the collections has been organized by the museum and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, where it maybe seen from February 2 to April 28. The exhibition is entitled Matieres de Reves Stuff of Dreams from the Paris Musee des Arts Decoratifs, and future showings will be listed in Calendar.

The curators of the exhibition are Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, curator of nineteenth-century art at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, the Portland Art Museum's consulting curator of European art. Together, they mined the Paris museum for what Hunter-Stiebel calls "extraordinary objects that surpass all standards of technical excellence, demands of utility and traditional precedents to make the leap from artifact to work ...