Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs (English: Museum of Decorative Arts) is a museum in Paris, France, dedicated to the exhibition and preservation of the decorative arts. Located in the city’s 1st arrondissement, the museum occupies the Pavillon de Marsan, the north-western wing of the Palais du Louvre. With approximately one million objects in its collection, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is the largest museum of decorative arts in continental Europe. It is one of three museums operated by the non-profit arts association MAD, founded in 1882.
Exhibitions[edit]
Some of the museum's vast number of exhibitions have been influential. Yvonne Brunhammer, a curator and then director of the museum for over four decades from the early 1950s, and the person who rediscovered Eileen Gray, organized the 1966 exhibition, "Les Années '25': Art Déco/Bauhaus/Stijl Esprit Nouveau". The exhibition served to coin "Art Déco", the term that came to describe design between the World Wars, particularly French modern design.
The museum is somewhat on a par with similar and venerable decorative-arts and design-focused institutions such as the more international Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It was also the inspiration for the Hewitt sisters' collection in the Cooper Union in New York City. However, due to many fine-art, publicity, fashion and design exhibitions mounted at the Paris museum, its focus has been diluted and caused its name, Musée des "Art décoratifs", to become a misnomer. Thus, its name for popular use became MAD ("mode, arts, design" or, in English, "fashion, arts, design") in January 2016,[3] even though the acronym is the same as MAD (Museum of Arts and Design) in New York City.
Renovation[edit]
The Musée des Arts décoratifs was closed from 1996 to 2006 due to a renovation of the building and of about 6,000 works from the collection; the renovation cost €35 million (about $45 million in 2006). The museum reopened on 15 September 2006. Béatrice Salmon, the current director and overseer of the restoration, has called the collection "the history of French taste and of the decorative arts and design in France" and has suggested: "People [in France] understand how to relate to paintings and sculpture in a museum, but they don't know how to interpret objects".[4]
Pierre-Alexis Dumas, a principal of Hermès International and the president of the Fondation Hermès, was elected president in 2015. He succeeded Bruno Roger.