Titled, rich, perfectly groomed and exquisitely attired, he turned himself into a work of art as precious as the poetry he composed and the bibelots he collected. Contemporary accounts describe him as an aristocrat, poet, wit, art critic, art patron, interior decorator, male beauty queen, and arbiter of elegance.
1. The Arch-Aesthete as Muse
Montesquiou was the ultimate dandy of the Decadent era and the Belle Époque. His elongated silhouette, gloves and studied poses made him the favorite subject of the greatest portraitists of Art Nouveau.
- Giovanni Boldini painted him in 1897 in a swirling, elegant oil now in the Musée d’Orsay, classified under the trend: Art Nouveau.
- James McNeill Whistler created his famous Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac in 1891-92.
- Félix Vallotton made his stark black-and-white profile in 1898 for Le Livre des Masques, a work belonging to the Art Nouveau movement.
He was so iconic that he became the model for two of literature’s most famous aesthetes: Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ À rebours and Baron de Charlus in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
2. The House as a Total Artwork
For Montesquiou, Art Nouveau was not a style to hang on the wall, it was a way to live. His famous residences – the Pavillon des Muses in Neuilly and later the Palais Rose – were true gesamtkunstwerk.
A series of photographs in the archives provides evidence of his queer collecting, all interior views of his private residence reveal a sensual relationship with objects.
His interiors were synaesthetic décors, where scent, texture, light and literature merged. He was fascinated by the illusory effects of treated leather when used in interior decoration, with gilded leather walls that made surfaces shimmer and deceived the eye about the proportions of the room.
One of his most famous pieces of furniture was his canape de lecture – the reading sofa – catalogued in sales as « Art nouveau–Arts decoratifs–Tableaux modernes–Canape de lecture de Robert de Montesquiou ».
3. The Collector
Every object that passed through his hands was marked. A box from circa 1900 in leather, silver and hardstone with a gilded monogram still bears a handwritten label Collection Cte Robert de Montesquiou.
He collected not to accumulate, but to compose. Japanese prints, incunabula, orchids, relics of Sarah Bernhardt, and Art Nouveau glass from the 1900 Exposition Universelle coexisted in carefully staged tableaux. His library was itself a work of Art Nouveau, where bindings, papers and furniture were designed to echo each other.
Montesquiou et l’Art Nouveau, in the end, is the same story. Art Nouveau wanted to erase the border between fine art and decorative art, between life and decoration. Montesquiou had already done it – he made his life, his body, his house and his books into a single, continuous, highly artificial and perfectly beautiful work of art.
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