Improvements at the Met.(Current and coming)(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The intriguing exhibition Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century, organized collaboratively by the Costume Institute and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2004, focused on the aesthetic interplay between dress, art, furniture, and the broader decorative arts between 1750 and 1789. Rather than mounting the exhibition in the Costume Institute's somewhat dreary basement-level galleries, or in any of the museum's other special exhibition spaces, the curators presented the more than thirty costumes on mannequins that were posed dramatically in the Wrightsman Galleries, the museum's French period rooms, which became a sort of stage set where a series of tableaux explored the themes of seduction and erotic play.

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In the course of designing and installing the exhibition, members of the museum staff identified several aspects of the Wrightsman Galleries that were in need of refurbishing, for they had opened to the public between 1969 and 1977 and had not been updated since. The lighting, climate control, and security systems were poor, and some of the furniture was in need of conservation and new upholstery. The museum consulted with Jayne Wrightsman, a trustee emerita who, with her late husband Charles, had donated the collection of French furniture and decorative arts that is housed in the galleries that bear their name, and who remains a generous benefactor of the museum. She financed the renovations, unveiled this fall, which include such mundane but critical things as new climate control and fire suppression systems, as well as numerous decorative changes and alterations in the display. For example, all the candle bulbs in the seventeen chandeliers and many wall sconces were replaced with bulbs intended to give a true sense of candlelight, and the gilt bronze and rock crystal of the chandeliers have been cleaned for the first time in decades.

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A key conservation project was the overhaul of the state bed in the Lauzun Room (from the Hotel Lauzun in Paris), shown on page 26, a new period room in what was formerly the Sevres Gallery. New silk damask hangings were woven to replace the original Beauvais tapestry hangings, which would have been used during the ...