January 2009

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

When Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, paid a state visit to the United Kingdom earlier this year, the British press seized the opportunity to lament once more Anglo-Saxon inferiority to the French in taste and style. A new star had burst on the international political stage in the form of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the president’s glamorous wife. How is it, we were asked, that French women dress with such effortless elegance compared with the English? How do they say so thin on a diet of croissants and confit de canard? It hardly matters that Mme Sarkozy is in fact Italian by birth: she sums up everything that makes the world admire France – and feel a bit jealous of it.

A telling image of the state visit was the sight of the Queen and Prince Philip showing the Sarkozys works of art from the Royal Collection. This took place in the state rooms of Windsor Castle, which in boiseries, furniture and ceramics embody George IV’s discriminating passion for the arts of ancien régime France. A French issue of apollo – like the Paris Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris this month – emphasises how that taste has been a strong and consistent theme in collecting and decorating since the 18th century, although it has not yet, so far as I am aware, ever been analysed by a historian in terms of its changing meaning over two centuries or more. It is natural to assume that a taste for collecting Boulle, Sèvres, Savonnerie and so on reflects a nostalgia for the ancien régime. But that was not true of most of the English aristocrats who hoovered up the works of art thrown onto the market by the French Revolution. Think, for example, of the 5th Duke of Rutland, who at Belvoir Castle created French rococo interiors within a romanesque architectural framework that proclaims ancient English liberties. It was not true of the Rothschilds, who were intensely proud of their Jewish ancestry: Waddesdon Manor is a monument to plutocracy, not aristocratic values. It is surely inconceivable that the Astor or Vanderbilt collectors who followed in the Rothschilds’ footsteps thought themselves the political or even social heirs of Marie-Antoinette.

For all these collectors, French art of the 17th and 18th centuries occupied a pinnacle, just like French cuisine and haute couture. But that belief has received a near-terminal assault in the past few decades. The photographer Derry Moore once asked Gilbert and George why Paris had been superseded by New York and, latterly, London as the world centre of avant-garde art. ‘It became too safe’, was the reply. Contemporary French art and design is certainly neglected internationally, as Rodica Seward discusses. With a far less mongrel and far more inward-looking culture than England, let alone America, France has found it a struggle to keep up with the globalisation of taste. The best chefs may still be French, but that means less to a world that eats French one day, Thai the next. French couture may still just about hold its own, but as several commentators noted, it was thoughtful of Mme Sarkozy to have worn Dior on the state visit, since the house’s chief designer is John Galliano, who is British. Yet I hope that the appetite for the luxury arts of France will never fully give way to the internationalisation of contemporary art and design. In her review of the Getty’s catalogue of its French furniture, Carolyn Sargentson quotes J. Paul Getty’s revelation that a piece of furniture could be as significant a work of art as a picture. That transmutation of the everyday, whether a chest-of-drawers or a flowerpot – or a dress or a meal – into something of magical beauty is a spell that the French still weave more powerfully than any other nation.

Print this article   |  Email to a friend |  Subscription offers | Comment