Costume, Period Rooms, and Donors: Dangerous Liaisons in the Art Museum

Abstract

C ostume and period rooms are notoriously difficult to present in art museums. They are no less worthy of attention than anything else in an art museum's holdings, but their frequent association with commercial sponsors and donors can lead to the exposure of the seamy rather than the noble side of the institutions concerned. Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century was an exhibition organized by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the museum's Wrightsman Galleries between April 29 and August 8, 2004. It was sponsored by Asprey, London, with additional support from Conde Nast. Its conceit was simple. Each of the eighteenth-century period rooms became the setting of a dramatic tableau comprising costumed mannequins. Each of the ten scenes was given a coy title-The Levee: 'The Assiduous Admirer,' Card Game: 'Cheating at Hearts,' and so on-and was loosely inspired by the mannered eroticism of Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos's novel, les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). The book itself was incorporated into the scenario, for the Chaperone in Music Lesson: 'A Window of Opportunity,' set in the Viennese Paar Room, is said in the accompanying pamphlet to be reading it while her charge, the Student-a young woman at a harp in a French ivory silk