House style: Norman L. Kleeblatt on La Maison Rouge.

THE PUBLIC DISPLAY of private collections is a complex, eccentric enterprise that continues to engender debate. Rather than ranging in practice, presentations of personal collections exist principally at opposite ends of an ideological spectrum. On one side is the distillation of "masterpieces" from private collections. The Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Annenberg Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are examples of private holdings kept intact and isolated within larger institutional contexts, usually installed in some neutral gallery space. In such cases, the domestic sphere of the original owners is eclipsed by a canonical display of assembled booty. At the other end of the gamut, the institutionalization of the house museum--what art historian Anne Higonnet has dubbed the "gift of the museum"--yields a lively presence on the museological landscape. The Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston testify to the privileging of pedagogical values and personal eccentricity over larger, ever changing art-historical narratives. The Frick Collection in New York, the Wallace Collection in London, the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, and the Musee Nissim de Camondo in Paris form but a short list of private collections gone public.

Of course, a small number of in-between scenarios exist in which individual collections have been resituated within larger institutional domains, like the Robert Lehman Collection at the Met and the Reeves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. Alternatively, the recent trend of collectors building architecturally distinguished, museologically driven versions of white cube galleries to display their masterworks is evident in institutions like the Menil Collection in Houston, Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in Saint Louis. What impact might their holdings have on larger, encyclopedic museums? If these works were incorporated into more comprehensive collections, what would be lost? While there are serious aesthetic dangers in such embalmed or isolated collections, these domestic scenarios remain popular precisely for the glimpses of individual privilege and personal vision overlaid with lush ambience that they provide. In the end, the two primary alternatives--sequestered galleries in public institutions or the institutionalized private collection--serve as latter-day monuments to their purportedly prescient and/or staggeringly wealthy original proprietors.

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Enter La Maison Rouge in Paris. Located near Place de la Bastille and run by Fondation Antoine de Galbert, La Maison Rouge organizes exhibitions of private collections twice a year as well as monographic shows of contemporary art. It occupies a commodious former industrial space elegantly renovated by Jean-Yves Clement of Amplitude, the Grenoble-based architectural firm. La Maison Rouge's first offering was visually scintillating and intellectually exciting, even if, in fine Gallic form, the show bore the ponderous and pretentious title "L'intime, le collectionneur derriere la porte" (Behind Closed Doors: The Private World of Collectors). "L'intime" showcased--or should I say "showhoused"--fifteen painstakingly detailed rooms miraculously plucked "ex situ" from the homes of anonymous European collectors. Fabricated for display as individual modules, these recast chambers included living rooms, dining rooms, a bedroom, bathrooms, an office, an attic, and even a storage room. Independent placement of the units within the cavernous exhibition space allowed viewers to circumnavigate each cube and guaranteed that no chamber intruded on the aesthetic singularity of the others. The exposed carpentry and rough framing of the outside walls of the rooms contrasted sharply with the meticulous re-creations of their interiors, with openings left in place of original fenestration and portals; reconstructed, if generic, moldings; and reinstalled art and furnishings. True to the show's name, the exact arrangement of bric-a-brac, the self-consciously positioned art book, and the casually strewn magazine fostered a sense of intimacy as well as authenticity. These real, contemporary "period" rooms offered alternatives for the display of contemporary art, making the domestic realm public while simultaneously showing viewers how astute, focused collectors imaginatively assemble and often audaciously juxtapose works.

The installations also demonstrated a European perspective that contrasts with the more canonical, list-driven, objective, or medium-specific clarity that tends to prevail among US collectors whose acquisitions often appear destined to inhabit the proverbial, cool "white cube." The playfully constructed personal realms and artful narratives in La Maison Rouge certainly lay outside the range of usual museological speculation. Objectivity was obscured by roguish intervention. Standard meanings usually ascribed to the works of certain living artists became modified, intensified, and sometimes blatantly distorted. We experienced the tensions not just between public and private but also between desire and voyeurism, creator and owner, installation and habitation. What a difference this was from the self-consciously artificial, prematurely nostalgic 1990s period room of a hypothetical Boston collector craftily assembled by Trevor Fairbrother for "The Label Show" at that city's Museum of Fine Arts in 1994. The objects were real but the room felt--and this was the curator's purposeful conceit--as if it had been constructed in a laboratory. Indeed, in La Maison Rouge's displaced rooms the lack of objectivity became a fundamental sign of their authenticity. If "The Label Show" meant to register a critique of the display and ideology of museums, then the re-created rooms of "L'intime" were romanticized portraits of the independence and ingenuity of the collector of contemporary art. There is little doubt that this first show at La Maison Rouge was inspired by--in fact based on--Suzanne Page's "Passions Privees," the 1995 exhibition of reinstalled rooms from private collections held at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

For me the office of contemporary collector "Monsieur C." was among the most engaging, imaginative, and tautly constructed spaces. We are told in the catalogue that his wife, also a collector, dislikes contemporary art and does not permit it to enter their shared domain. So his rather modestly proportioned office has become the sole site for display of his serious holdings. In it a 1940s grand-scale, fascist-tinged desk by Andre Arbus and matching, equally imposing pair of chairs herald the "control" theme at play here. Andreas Gursky's commanding photograph Hong Kong Stock Exchange, 1998, on the wall behind the desk accentuates this construct while simultaneously acknowledging Monsieur C.'s profession. Contradictions abound in the tight discourse the collector has fabricated. The high-tech, plastic presence of the Bloomberg screen sitting on the desk contrasts glaringly with Arbus's handcraftsmanship and use of natural materials, yet both exude senses of power and domination. Large windows, we are told, look out at a beautifully kept garden. To the right of this vista stands a 1992 life-size sculpture by Paul McCarthy of a goofy yet threatening brown bear posed on a distressed country-style table. Controlled nature trumps nature gone haywire? In the end, the room's assemblage becomes a melee of monetary manipulation versus psychological release.

A surreal sensibility pervades the foyer of "Monsieur et Madame E.," a historically conscious affect entirely appropriate for collectors of contemporary Italian and Belgian art. Two mirror-surface paintings of nude females by Michelangelo Pistoletto play on the trope of standard decorative mirrors we expect in traditional entryways. A pair of white, neoclassical plaster busts by Giulio Paolini stare each other down on the modernist table below one of the Pistolettos. The juxtaposition sets up a dizzying conceptual mise en abyme where the material becomes ethereal as physical reflection meets psychological narcissism. Maurizio Cattelan's taxidermied flock of pigeons--Tourists, 1997--perches on a curtain rod above the entry door and is partly tucked into the architectural reveal that provides cove lighting in the ceiling. A Josef Hoffmann table and banquette and works by Jan Vercruysse, Franz West, Fabrice Hybert, Donatella Spaziani, and Luciano Fabro complete the ensemble's perfect orchestration, with its tense, edgy refinement. Our expectations of bourgeois decoration rest assured, yet we question the ways the owners have manipulated or exaggerated the artists' intent. The space exists as a witty dialogue or a self-conscious standoff between art and decor. For all this European sophistication, a sense of filmic fear a la Hitchcock saturates the environment.

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Despite its eeriness this was not the most menacing room displayed among La Maison Rouge's fifteen. That prize went to the bedroom of "Monsieur O.," whose space is built around an arena at once theatrical and functional: Julia Scher's Surveillance Sex Bed, 2000. Psychological and corporeal memory inscribed into humble religious artifacts or pieces by urbane performance artists underwrite the operative--and operatic--claustrophobia on view here. Works by Viennese Actionists, Vito Acconci, Franz West, Daniel Spoerri, Adriana Varejao, and Hanne Darboven coexist with nineteenth-century rural religious folk art, grain-painted country furniture, and African sculpture. Here is a horror vacui as ominous as it is mystical.

The tour ended in the basement of La Maison Rouge with "396 regards," projected details of historical masterpieces from the slide collection of the late art historian Daniel Arasse. The immateriality of this "collection" is immanent. Only through intimate details taken from reproductions can Arasse return these publicly held pictures to the domain of personal memory. He subverts material desire into ghostly enchantment. The art historian's slide project has been posthumously transformed into a conceptual installation reversing the role that artist Robert Morris played in his 21.3, 1964. Arasse is turned into an artist with this installation just as Morris impersonated an art historian (Erwin Panofsky) in his piece. These poetic and transient means offer the exhibition, so based in materiality, an intangible, philosophical climax that is nevertheless thematically in sync with our voyeuristic entree into the highly personalized visions on view.

This exercise in making public the private realm of collecting recalls its inverse: attempts to install public collections in more personal modes--a conceptual means of display that has been in vogue for at least thirty years, even though it is infrequently deployed. Museums have turned to auteur curators like Harald Szeemann, Susan Vogel, and Roland Recht to redefine the materiality and resonance of art in their possession. More important, institutions have at times given artists from Marcel Broodthaers to Fred Wilson, from Andy Warhol to Peter Greenaway, free rein over their collections. Like the collectors in "L'intime," such curatorial and artistic licenses were dispensed as a way to unpack the meanings of art and undo artificially imposed limitations on exhibition formats. In light of these poetic installations, the fifteen rooms from European collections at La Maison Rouge underscored a larger process of liberation from standard stylistic, historical, and/or canonical boundaries--a process that asks us to consider the intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic stakes in turn.

Norman L. Kleeblatt is Susan and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts at the Jewish Museum in New York. He curated the 2002 exhibition "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" and works on the history, theory, and politics of the art exhibition.