Introduzione / introduction - The Period Rooms

After being regarded with disfavor for a long time, period rooms are now enjoying a resurgence in numerous European and American institutions. The objective of this volume is neither to rehabilitate nor to vilify this particular form of display, but rather to open an investigation into analogical presentation, the place of context in cultural history, and even certain issues at stake in contemporary art. The notion of “period room” largely tracks the history of the differentiation between public and private spaces. In the late nineteenth century, the golden age of exhibition, private residences offered themselves up like museums for public viewing, while museums – especially in the decorative arts – took on the characteristics of residences, and period rooms mimicked lived-in spaces. In the early twentieth century, numerous figures who championed the educational function of museums called for the introduction of contextualizing spaces as a means of bringing to life a particular period or atmosphere. Period rooms also contributed to the emergence of national narratives, particularly in the United States, where they stimulated a patriotic interest in colonial art and the country’s national figures. But the heyday of the period room could not last; following World War II, the period room became the perfect negative foil for the ideal of the “white cube”. The first part of this book, dedicated to the theoretical and methodological debates surrounding the period room and its definitions, examines the functions and audiences of these installations, with particular regard to their complex relationship with contemporary creations. A series of opposing notions have largely structured and enriched conversations about period rooms: private spaces and their public viewing; community identities versus those of the nation-state; the implied hierarchy between the fine arts and the applied arts. Within this web of tensions expressed by period rooms, visitors project their own experiences and emotions, thereby becoming the protagonists of a unique, even theatrical, dynamic. In this context, debates on the preservation of works in situ or their removal to museums have come to dominate the critical fortune of period rooms. These discussions have in turn raised questions on authenticity and historicity, on the choice between faithful reconstruction and suggestive reinvention. Reflecting a tendency toward post-structuralist materialism that views history as collective and anonymous, period rooms are endowed with a capacity to evoke and narrate history and memory, both personal and collective. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in Europe and elsewhere, historical reconstitutions and historicist decors multiplied within aristocratic interiors, private collections, artists’ studios, and eventually bourgeois apartments. The second set of texts in the volume illustrates the diversity of “private passions” that gave life to countless projects to resurrect the past through a “vibrant spectacle of interconnected objects”. These context-dependent installations were in many instances a means of constructing a self-image and identity, ensuring social legitimation, or restoring past cultural models. Alexandre Du Sommerard’s Hotel de Cluny, from 1832, served in many cases as an explicit model, giving rise to a diversity of historical interiors, from Renaissance to Orientalist – as illustrated by the Swiss, French, and Egyptian examples presented here. Within these spaces, the historicist genre adhered to a rational system, with the room’s style often reflecting its function. Innovative techniques available in the industrial age facilitated the construction of such interiors, while new experts and vocations emerged, including that of counterfeiter. The last part of the book addresses the contemporaneity of period rooms, often in the form of studies of individual houses. Indeed, contemporary period rooms are commonly analyzed from the viewpoint of interior decoration and their relation to the history of design. Professional decorators have always played a significant role in creating these rooms, and their expertise can be directly linked to set design for film and television. The most spectacular installations are those that lend themselves to dramatized scenes of the past and speak to visitors on both a personal and a collective level. When displays are created for reasons of activism or in the name of a particular community, they can also become tools for propaganda, memorials, and even works of total art representing a collective spirit. By far the most frequent use of rooms from the past in contemporary art, however, is by installation or post-installation artists: dioramas, period rooms, and other analogical systems of display have become the leitmotif of countless works inspired by the museum medium. Moreover, the period room is in some cases indissociable from the artist’s studio, as when a studio is transformed into a museum. The back-and-forth between artistic intimacy and publicity, whether it be in the name of institutional critique or histories large and small, is similar in both cases.

Il volume di 303 pagine riunisce saggi di specialisti di storia del collezionismo, di critica d’arte e di museologia e costituisce la più internazionale ed aggiornata ricerca sul tema delle "period rooms", cioè degli allestimenti storici dei musei, che vengono analizzati sia dal punto di vista della storia della critica e del gusto che da quello museologico in una prospettiva culturale ed antropologica. L’ampia prefazione storico-artistica in italiano e in francese, a firma dei tre curatori, vero e proprio saggio iniziale, offre chiavi di metodo per l’analisi di un fenomeno importante che, dopo un lungo periodo di incontrastato trionfo del "white cube", ha proposto un po’ ovunque nel mondo recenti riaperture e reinstallazioni di "period rooms". In tal modo la fortuna critica della costruzione delle "period rooms" viene interpretata in parallelo con una storia più vasta degli interni e del museo, e dei loro rispettivi ideali, attraverso le vicende del gusto antiquario e del commercio delle arti decorative.