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T he Meier Family Collection, on offer during The New York Sales, represents two critical artistic groups from the 19th century: the Nabis and the Impressionists, who pushed art forward into the next century and opened the door to modernism. The collection features important paintings by Impressionist giants Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, as well as lesser-known artists like Meijer de Haan, Berthe Morisot and Maurice Denis.
To celebrate 150 Years of Impressionism and the Meier Family Collection, Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch of the multidisciplinary architecture and design studio Roman and Williams have created a transportive installation that delves into the minds of the Nabis – some of the 19th century’s most avant-garde artists, who played a major role in the transition from Impressionism to modernism and abstraction. Standefer and Alesch’s installation, now on view in Sotheby’s New York galleries, draws on exhibition strategies that the pair developed while designing the British Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It also nods to their narrative-driven approach to designing projects at the Boom Boom Room at The Standard, NY, and Estelle Manor in the Cotswolds, England, to homes for notable creatives, including Gwyneth Paltrow. The resulting installation spotlights works from the Meier Collection in tableaux of deconstructed domesticity that reframe how these paintings are both displayed and understood.
Works by Nabi artists Ker-Xavier Roussel, Édouard Vuillard, Émile Jourdan and the movement’s leader, Maurice Denis, are hung on French boiserie paneling and surrounded by domestic furnishings designed by Standefer and Alesch. This arrangement offers a journey through the home of an imagined collector and pays homage to the Nabis’ emphasis on decoration, bold planes of color and deconstructed perspective. Each of the installation’s three tableaux features a glass vitrine that is conceived as a representation of the mind of the artist – a container for memories and ideas, made visible through an assemblage of objects.
These groupings feature items drawn from nature and culture, including found seedpods and flowers, antique textiles, ceramics by the Nabis’ contemporary George Ohr and modern provocateur Han Chiao, a collection of vintage Japanese indigo and handmade tabletop objects and ceramics, such as pâte-de-verre boxes and a sinuous bud vase. There are also handmade vessels by contemporary artists from Roman and Williams Guild, the homewares concept store founded by Standefer and Alesch. Together, the tableaux and vitrines establish a sense of visual discovery, animating the paintings by imagining both the mind of the artist and how the works may live in the home of a collector.
Here, Robin Standefer shares the inspiration that the duo found in works from the collection.
“We drew inspiration from three of the paintings from the Meier Family Collection to create glass vitrines that we conceived as representations of the mind of the artist – containers for memories and ideas, made visible via a collection of objects drawn from nature and culture. The vitrine for Maurice Denis includes seed pods and flowers, antique textiles and works from Guild Gallery, our ceramics gallery, including a pot by Nabis contemporary George Ohr and a vessel by the provocative contemporary sculptor Han Chiao, whose first U.S. solo exhibition is currently on view at Guild Gallery. We assembled these objects alongside an antique cross – Denis was the most religious of the Symbolists – a vintage daguerreotype and a collection of Japanese indigo. Together, the objects represent the kind of bravery that Denis embodied as a leader of Les Nabis – a willingness to both embrace and reject the past, in search of a new future.
“Denis celebrates the beauty of nature, and I’m drawn to his inventive representation of both nature and humanity. In his double portrait, Marthe et Marie (Intérieur), the skin, the gaze, the sky, the hand and the texture all create an enveloping world that transmits expression and emotion. Denis wrote about ‘exalting with color,’ and I truly feel that here! Through his fundamental forms, you can see how this presaged cubism and other modern movements. To me, this feels as radical as pure abstraction.”
“Meijer de Haan is the forgotten Nabi – he’s Dutch, rather than French, and you can see it in the garden, in the diffuse Northern light of La Vallée de Kerzellec, Le Pouldu. I always love giving someone a second look, so it appeals to me that he’s lesser known. As a compulsive gardener and a lover of nature, I also love the garden, the strange colors and how modern it feels. We installed the painting on dark, charcoal-colored boiserie panels, and the dramatic pairing really sharpens the work. If you told me this was made by a contemporary landscape painter, I’d believe you.”
“Classic Impressionism is a little too polite for me, in a way that the Nabis aren’t – they were prophetic, creating a bridge to another generation. Édouard Vuillard remains so avant-garde, but a painting like La Chambre verte, rue Truffaut also connects to humanity in a fundamental way through its sense of decoration, its connection with nature and the genre scene of the everyday. I love pictures of interiors – look at the pattern, the color, the foreshortening, the flat, matte planes of color.
“As someone who aims to create memorable spaces, I find this green room so cinematic. When we redesigned the galleries at The Met, we employed windows as a point of view to another gallery, to understand a sense of space and the relationship between indoor and outdoor. Here, we’re seeing the beauty of natural pigments and colors in space – and I love the idea of a collector having this painting as a ‘window’ in their own room.”
“Pierre Bonnard’s Jeune fille au rouleau de musique (Andrée Bonnard, soeur de l’artiste) is such a jewel of a painting – petite and restrained but containing multitudes. Bonnard’s palette, the way that he uses color, is quite contemporary. His use of a limited, almost monochromatic palette creates such an elegant painting. There’s a privacy to this painting that appeals to me. When we redesigned The Met’s British Galleries we made these small pocket galleries to create intimate moments with a work. I can see this work in a space like that. I also respond to how narrative this painting is; you feel connected with the character of the portrait. It’s evocative. I love storytelling in paintings, in rooms, in spaces – anything that transmits emotion about a character.”
