A tour of dreams.

Byline: BOB KEEFER The Register-Guard

IMAGINE THIS: You're turned loose for more than a week in the galleries and attics and storerooms of the largest private art museum in Paris.

Take your pick, the director says. Mull over all 150,000 items we've got locked away, from the 16th century Flemish tapestries to the 18th century clock of Marie Antoinette herself to the 20th century designers' stark designs. Find the best and most amazing and utterly outrageous stuff and pack it up and take it home to Oregon. We'll help. All you have to do is choose.

That's not a bad description of what Portland Art Museum curator Penelope Hunter-Stiebel has been up to lately.

In yet another international coup for the museum and its directors, John and Lucy Buchanan, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris - closed for a giant construction project until 2004 - decided to let Oregon rummage its attics and basements and bring home a selection of treasure.

The result is an exhibit of devastating strangeness and outsized brilliance that opened Saturday and will run through April 28 at the Portland Art Museum.

In a literal sense, "Stuff of Dreams," as Hunter-Stiebel aptly titled the show, focuses on the art of the ordinary. The Musee des Arts Decoratifs - the Museum of Decorative Arts - collects only utilitarian works. It has specialists in charge of such traditional collections as drawings, glass and jewelry, but it also has departments of wallpaper and toys.

This is the art of everyday life - the art of home and hearth.

But that doesn't make it everyday art.

"I was given carte blanche working with (Paris curator) Odile Nouvel- Kammerer, who had all the keys," Hunter-Stiebel says.

"And for 10 days we opened doors. And we went from the 19th century attics, where we were climbing on these old wood ladders in the dark, down to the areas that were excavated for the Louvre (where the museum will reopen in two years)."

Her guiding priciple, Hunter- Stiebel says, was simply to find the best of the best, work that is indeed utilitarian but goes so far beyond everyday life as to reach a point of artistic transcendence.

"What we found were objects with a leitmotif. Every one of them far surpasses all standards of utility. People will delight in just the craftsmanship."

This is indeed the stuff of dreams, and not just pleasant daydreams. Much here is weird and dark and unsettling, the kind of dream from which you awaken with a start and wonder just what it was you dreamed of.

The exhibit is arranged mostly chronologically, opening with a 13th century bronze "aquamanile," a sort of pitcher used in pre-plumbing days for hand-washing water, and working its way right up to a ceramic bowl made by a contemporary French artist in 1996.

You can, if you wish, chart art history through the galleries: baroque and rococo, art nouveau and art deco unfold in fairly neat progression as you work your way forward in time.

Hunter-Stiebel, though, nicely chose to keep art history somewhat at bay in her presentation.

Rather than the usual dry explanatory matter, she has accompanied each object with a line of poetry or philosophy, as though it just might be the magic that matters, not the provenance. (More literal-minded types can find all the names and dates they need in copies of the exhibit catolog, arranged in reading stations around the exhibit.)

The dreams of which this exhibit is made are lush and fulsome, sometimes attached to history, sometimes springing from imagination.

History plays its part. Walk into the first room of "Stuff of Dreams" and you find yourself face to face with an enormous ceremonial cradle, built of finely inlaid wood and gilt bronze in 1819 for the young Duc de Bordeaux.

Crafted like an enormous boat, the cradle is almost Jungian in its layered symbolism. The winged figure of Fame, for example, looks away from the child, perhaps establishing the monarchy's independence of public opinion. This cradle doesn't rock, but is supported firmly on four cornucopia, seeming to establish stability amid the changing tides of French politics.

Another, more scandalous furniture item inhabits both history and fiction.

Emilie Valtesse de la Bigne was a financially successful French courtesan in the late 19th century. Her bed - built by the architect Edouard Lievre - is a clever play on the ceremonial beds used by monarchs and aristocrats back to the Middle Ages, incorporating such nuances as "flaming lamps, symbols of ardent passions, at the corners as boundary markers of the territory of licentious lovemaking," as the catalog notes.

De la Bigne was the inspiration for Emile Zola's novel "Nana," in which this very bed is decribed as part of Nana's bedchamber.

Wallpaper is not an art form you may have ever paid much attention to, but scenic wallpaper was a big deal in 19th century France, where the earliest examples depicted narrative scenes from mythology or the Bible.

The Musee des Arts Decoratifs takes wallpaper quite seriously. It devotes an entire department to its wallpaper collection, which is divided into repetitive pattens and mural designs.

The single wallpaper entry in the Portland exhibit comes from the mural side. It's huge - six panels, each 9 feet tall and almost 7 feet wide - and shows a highly imaginative view of Eden, populated by bright, tropical flowers and aggressive-looking vines with a few idyllic deer lounging quietly in the background. You can almost hear the insects.

The scene was designed by artist Joseph Fuchs, who had created the first non-narrative wallpaper two decades earlier.

I'd love to have his Eden in a room in my house - a big room.

A few objects here break the utilitarian rule. A 4-foot-tall - Is it a monument? A table decoration? There's no clear way to describe this thing in a word - "eclectic object," as the catalog ventures, by English painter James Tissot, consists of a blue globe, surrounded by snakes, with winged Fortune sitting on a crystal ball on top. She looks down on the lumbering tortoise that supports the whole thing by swimming in a green ocean on the base. Whew.

But there's more. Inscriptions in various languages, lotus blossoms, pomegranates, a laurel-wreathed skull - all this could add up to little more than the tortured imagination of an overwrought 21st century adolescent were it not for the incredible execution, in silver, bronze, enamel, walnut and glass.

What happened to utility?

Hunter-Stiebel smiles. The materials, she says, and the quality of the craftsmanship make Tissot's fancy a good fit among the other more traditional objects in the exhibit.

If you like nouveau and deco, the early 20th century flowering of design, you'll love the midsection of this show, from its smart cigarette cases (which remind one of Hercule Poirot, somehow) to the impossibly angular reading chair designed by Pierre Legrain with cubist and African themes in mind.

A bizarrely rounded chest of drawers, shown at the 1925 Paris World's Fair, looks vaguely like a pregnant woman but is covered in shark skin, making it perhaps the creepiest object in the show.

The final room brings us to contemporary design, always the most difficult period to view coherently.

But one object here is so wonderfully and literally strange that it makes you laugh out loud.

In the 1980s, designer Phillipe Starck created a series of glass vases that were glued, rather than fused, to plate glass upright panels. The one on display here could be a flower vase in a very contemporary setting, though I'd sure hate to try to clean it.

But it's Starck's title that brings the piece to life:

"Une <203>trangete Contre un Mur," he called it. "Something Strange Against a Wall."

Register-Guard features reporter Bob Keefer can be reached by phone at 338-2325 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

STUFF OF DREAMS

WHAT: Objects from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

WHERE: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland.

WHEN: Now through April 28.

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday; open until 8 p.m. Wednesday and the first Thursday of the month.

ADMISSION: $10 adult, $9 senior, $6 student under 18, children under 5 free.

CAPTION(S):

"Marguerite," a brooch by Paul Vever and Henri Vever. A head of a faun by Jean-Joseph-Marie Carries. Emilie Valtesse de la Bigne's bed by Edouard Lievre. Marie Antionette's clock in bronze, porcelain and marble by Pierre Philippe Thomire. STUFF OF DREAMS WHAT: Objects from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. WHERE: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland. WHEN: Now through April 28. HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday; open until 8 p.m. Wednesday and the first Thursday of the month. ADMISSION: $10 adult, $9 senior, $6 student under 18, children under 5 free. A vase by Emile Galle. A candelabra by Juste-Aurele Meissonnier, designer; and Claude Duvivier, silversmith. Photos courtesy of Portland Art Museum Carved ivory skeleton dates from 1547.