Where Marie Antoinette Went for Furniture
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Version 0 of 1. Blockbusters come in all shapes and sizes. Some, festooned with marquee names and masterpieces, can be seen from miles off. Others sneak up on cat’s feet, unsuspected and unannounced. “Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is of this quiet, feline type. Its subject — furniture — is on the face of things only slightly less ubiquitous than death and taxes. Nonetheless, this show has many a blockbuster trait, including rare loans, great objects, visual thrills, historic resonance and even a semblance of magic. It is the first in-depth survey of the brilliant artistry and engineering of Abraham and David Roentgen, a father-and-son team of German cabinetmakers whose design innovations, superb craftsmanship, formal imagination and entrepreneurial instincts made them renowned throughout the ruling houses of 18th-century Europe. Unless you count a descendant of theirs who invented the X-ray, the name Roentgen (pronounced RUNT-ghen) may be largely unfamiliar where artistic achievement is concerned. But from 1742 to the early 1790s, the Roentgens created some of the world’s greatest, most fastidiously thought-out, finely executed and certainly entertaining furniture. Their designs included stately clocks that play the music of Christoph Willibald Gluck, then some of the most admired in Northern Europe, and can be heard in the show; lavishly decorated commodes and multitopped, multipurpose tables. One here, in the Met’s collection, has surfaces for card games, chess, letter writing and backgammon that open, one over the other, like the pages of a giant wood book. The Roentgens are perhaps best known for shape-shifting roll-top desks and secretary cabinets, which could cost almost as much as small estates. These are resplendent with intricate marquetry, gilded mounts and precious inlay in mother-of-pearl, tortoise shell, bronze and ivory. But many of them are also ingeniously mechanized with weights and springs, so that the press of a button or turn of a key can activate veritable choreographies of opening doors and pop-out drawers, hidden niches and secret mirrors, candlestick mounts, easels and bookstands. These objects seem almost to turn themselves inside out, and their expanding, cascading, always symmetrical forms can exert a nearly libidinous, definitely magical thrall. Furniture as art is nothing new, but the idea of a single piece of furniture functioning as a total work of art, embracing painting, sculpture and architecture, and even aspects of theater or dance, is less usual. A writing desk from 1758-62 that is considered the pinnacle of Abraham’s career epitomizes this complexity. Its exterior is rife with depictions of either intricate architectural interiors (with sparkling checkered floors) or pastoral landscapes. The resulting mash-up of intersecting spatial illusions and angles is quite wild. Its foldout front shows an elaborate ballroom punctuated with arches and mother-of-pearl windows, which is more or less reiterated in three dimensions when the desk is opened. Its hidden attributes include a foldout prayer stool and a secret niche in the tabernacle on top to hold a devotional object. The Met has gone all out with small video animations that demonstrate the hidden chambers of seven pieces in the show. In addition, the Berlin museum that has lent an immense neo-Classical secretary cabinet that resembles a small building, chiming clock tower and all, has specified that it be regularly opened for museum visitors. Those who are present on such occasions will see a center shelf whose marquetry interior reveals a beautifully appointed room. The Roentgens came from nowhere, and through their work ended up just about everywhere: in the courts of Louis XVI of France, of Catherine the Great of Russia and of King Frederick William II of Prussia, not to mention sundry German princes and nobles. Ambition and an urge for newness seem to have run in their blood. Abraham Roentgen was born in 1711, in Mülheim, near Cologne, in what is now Germany, the son of a cabinetmaker. He trained further in Holland and then London, where he became so fluent in, and enamored of, the latest styles and techniques that he would later advertise himself as an English cabinetmaker. The show opens with a circular tilt-top table with brass inlay in the English style, a composite of smaller circles whose raised edges were designed to keep teacups and plates in place. Having converted to the Moravian Brethren, a pietist strain of Protestantism, in London, Abraham returned to Germany and married. He almost traveled to the American colonies as a missionary before settling in a Moravian community in Herrenhaag in 1742. Around 1750, the sect was expelled and resettled in nearby Neuwied, where a local count granted its members religious freedom and exempted Roentgen from guild rules, which enabled him to hire more employees, including masters in marquetry and clockworks. By the 1780s, the Roentgen workshop had an annual income nearly equal to that of the Meissen porcelain manufactory. Their work was widely sought after, even by Roman Catholic leaders who usually strove to patronize their coreligionists, as evidenced by a spectacular rotating tabernacle, some four feet high, that the elder Roentgen made for a convent in Mainz. Its three curved niches include a depiction of the Last Supper in marquetry and inlay whose forms and perspectives are adjusted to appear nearly flat. David, the eldest of eight children, was born in 1743, began working for his father as a teenager, and would go on to perfect many of Abraham’s innovations, especially the mechanical aspects. He was also something of a natural diplomat, adept at both conversing with royalty and bribing customs officials. Fittingly, a wonderful portrait of Abraham in the show, painted in 1772 by Johannes Juncker, has an endearing awkwardness, showing a plainly dressed man proudly displaying carving tools and a design for a gilded mount. A later, more routinely realistic portrait (by an unknown artist) of David features a suave gentleman with a luxurious fur collar, not a tool in sight. After the French Revolution, when the market for luxury goods collapsed, David actually became a diplomat. This extraordinary show of more than 60 objects has been organized by Wolfram Koeppe, a curator in the Met’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts, who may well have cashed in many chips to bring it together. For connoisseurs of style, the assembled objects trace the transition from the coy and coiling curves of Rococo to the relative austerities of Neo-Classicism — which the Roentgens’ combined careers spanned — with unusual clarity. It is quite striking to see the ornately decorated forms of the earlier pieces give way to designs in which the silken rivulets of carefully chosen wood grains provide much of the surface life, accented by increased use of the gilded mounts. Similarly, the graceful curves and intimate scale of Rococo are replaced by a stalwart monumentality in which classical columns often figure prominently. For students of history, many of these objects can seem to demonstrate how the spending habits of, say, Marie Antoinette, a Roentgen client, contributed to the fall of the French throne and to the rise of revolutionary tendencies. (David won her attention by presenting the queen with an astounding music box in the form of an automaton of herself, blond and delicate, playing one of her favorite Gluck melodies on a dulcimer. It is in this show.) But the Roentgen desks and tables also point to something equally basic: the human desire to be mesmerized, surprised and entertained. They are, in effect, gloriously beautiful toys for adults, antecedents of the Rubik’s cube, not to mention prevalent devices like television, movies and video games, whose narratives often hold our attention through magical surprise and dramatic transformations. It seems equally valid to see the Roentgens’ most elaborate pieces as an early, if not yet egalitarian, ancestor of popular entertainment, as to take them as symbols of ancien-régime decadence. Either way, they are unforgettable. <NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>“Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens” is on view through Jan. 27 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. |