HOW MISTAKEN THE painter Jean Dubuffet was when in 1967 he gave a notable group of his works to the Musée des Arts décoratifs because they would not be ‘embalmed’ in a museum of fine art to be seen seen only by a cultured ‘élite’ but would be installed in one that showed objects of daily life and use, seen by ordinary people. On a recent visit to the Museum in a Paris thronged with early-summer tourists, the present writer found the galleries virtually deserted. Guards outnumbered the public. A few students came in and out of the special Study Galleries; elsewhere, hardly a soul. This dearth of visitors must surely disappoint those responsible for the complete redisplay of the Museum which reopened, after a ten-year closure, in the autumn of 2006.

The Museum has a curious private history. It originated in the 1860s as a centre for design reform, emulating in part the ideals of the South Kensington Museum, and was privately run and stocked by a group of individuals wishing to further a closer accord between design and industry. Extraordinary donations and bequests came its way. But it was never formally a state museum (although its stature was acknowledged by government funding for its recent overhaul). The state provided its splendid premises in the Pavillon Marsan (occupied from 1905) and remunerated its staff, in the process becoming the owner of its collections; for these the Museum has relied on the personal caprice, patriotism and posthumous generosity of patrons, collectors and industrialists (for its early, outstanding collection of Islamic art, see the article on pp.393–96 of this issue). What we now have is, in effect, a narrative of French design and decoration, overwhelmingly concentrated on furniture, ceramics, glass and metalwork, punctuated by a representative series of period rooms, from the late Middle Ages to the present.

It will come as no surprise that French design takes centre stage throughout. In the earliest rooms there are nods to Spain, Italy and Holland, while in the last rooms internationalism colours the display of modern and contemporary furniture. In between is mostly an unalloyed celebration of the pre-eminence of French taste and chic (except, perhaps, in the internal design of the rooms themselves, spread over nine floors). All within is grand, expensive and richly appointed, although it is never quite magnificent (for this one goes elsewhere in Paris, to the Louvre or the Mobilier national). In room after room, we leaf through a Who’s Who of the most influential designers, from Cressent and Boule to Grasset, Guimard, Lalique, Doucet and beyond. We are on intimate terms with progressive patrons, for the period rooms are recreated from Paris hôtels particuliers and apartments, from William Hope’s bedroom to a luxurious modern flat for the couturière Jeanne Lanvin, where we may imagine her in her boudoir or on her bidet (yes, it is there), and a circular office-cum-library designed in 1925 by Pierre Chareau (Fig.I), the epitome of the more severe, ‘masculine’ aspect of modernist Art Deco. While this latter movement is abundantly and well represented, one comes no closer to a definition of it nor a disentangling of the sources that fed it. Social and historical relevance is nodded to throughout but rarely engaged in conversation.1 Too many galleries seem short of the intellectual springs that would give some bounce to their thematic mattress. Recent advances in the academic study of the decorative arts hardly impinge on the progression of rooms. Of more modest bourgeois homes there is scarcely a hint; surely some loans showing the percolation of grand taste might have relieved so rich a diet.

Everywhere there are marvels to be seen but they are not always felicitously displayed. Some rooms are reminiscent of an auction preview; vertiginous glazed cases filled with glass or candlesticks are showy but do not stimulate the appetite; furniture stacked frontally on shelves, floor to ceiling, cannot be closely inspected. Hasty despair seems to characterise the showing of objects from recent decades in the top floors of the building, although there are good in-focus displays devoted to individual contemporary designers. On the plus side there is plenty of informative text; and there are some closely related paintings – from the meeting of Gothic and classic in an eerie François de Nomé to a Gauguin of Brittany perfectly at home in the Art Nouveau section.

A museum such as this needs visitors to add movement and human scale to what might otherwise become forlorn assemblages of domestic objects. Only a vigorous publicity campaign might reverse the current low attendance and woo the public that the Museum deserves.