Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris


The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is a museum of the decorative arts and design located in the Palais du Louvre's western wing, known as the Pavillon de Marsan, at 107 rue de Rivoli, in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France. It is one of three museum locations of Les Arts Décoratifs, now collectively referred to as the MAD.
The museum also hosts exhibitions of fashion, advertising, and graphic arts from its collections from the formerly separate but now defunct Musée de la Publicité and Musée de la mode et du textile.

Displays

The museum collection was founded in 1905 by members of the Union des Arts Décoratifs. The architect was Gaston Redon. It houses and displays furniture, interior design, altarpieces, religious paintings, objets d'arts, tapestries, wallpaper, ceramics and glassware, plus toys from the Middle Ages to the present day.
The collection is primarily composed of French furniture, tableware, carpets such as those from Aubusson, porcelain such as that by the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, and many glass pieces by René Lalique, Émile Gallé and many others. It includes numerous works in the Art Nouveau and Art Déco styles and modern examples by designers like Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand. However, the museum's deep holdings range back to 13th-century Europe.
Of interest to the public are the period rooms. Examples include part of Jeanne Lanvin's house at 16 rue Barbet-de-Jouy in Paris. Others are graphic artist Eugène Grasset's dining room of 1880, and the 1752 Gold Cabinet of Avignon. And, peculiar to a French museum it seems, there is the 1875 bedroom of courtesan Lucie Émilie Delabigne, purportedly the inspiration for the main character in Émile Zola's novel Nana.
There is a distinctive ceiling there once owned by Jeanne Baptiste d'Albert de Luynes, mistress of then duke of Savoy.

Exhibitions

Some of the museum's vast number of exhibitions have been distinguished. 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 and was 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 Decoratifs", to be a misnomer. Thus, its name for popular use became MAD in January 2016, even though the acronym is the same as MAD in New York City.

Renovation

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. The museum reopened on September 15, 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 understand how to relate to paintings and sculpture in a museum, but they don't know how to interpret objects".
Pierre-Alexis Dumas, a principal of Hermès International and the president of the Fondation Hermès, was elected president in 2015. He succeeded Bruno Roger.