Love is ALL

Indiscretion

by Alessandra Cenna

MAD Musée des Arts Décoratifs

Paris

until March 30, 2025

THE INTIMATE

From bedroom to social networks

Edgar Degas «Femme assise sur le bord d’une baignoire et s’épongeant le cou» 1880-1895 © RMN Grand Palais ( Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

MAD Museum of Decorative Arts - Entrance to the exhibition “L’intime” © Alessandra Cenna

The Musée des Arts décoratifs explores the history of intimacy from the 18th century to the present day in this magnificent exhibition inaugurated in October.

This journey to the heart of desires, senses, fantasies and feelings allows us to unders tand the change in the notion of intimacy over the centuries.

The nave and side galleries of the Museum host 470 works, paintings and photographs, but also many objects that bear witness to this evolution, passing through the bedroom seen by Henri Cartier Bresson or Nan Golden, from wrought iron beds, the commode or the maternal belly chair to sex toys and surveillance and protection tools.

To emphasize the notion of voyeurism in the face of privacy, the exhibition opens with a huge keyhole.

The word «bedroom» actually only appeared in the 18th century with the emer gence of a bourgeois class. A new concept of hygiene is born, an important place is given to amenities, the bathtub, dressing tables and boudoirs. In these places, perfume reigns as the perfect essence of intimacy. Close to the body or in a trail, fresh or voluptuous, it signifies the desires for cleanliness or seduction.

Thus are exhibited certain olfactory icons. Symbol of the woman freed from her corset in the 20s, Tabac Blond accompanies the very oriental and carnal Opium by Yves Saint Laurent while the young girl in bloom dreams of her future in Anaïs Anaïs.

The great nave is part of a spectacular scenography with twenty-five master pieces of 20th century design around the theme of the nest and shared intimacy, such as the Womb Chair by Eero Saarinen or La Mamma by Gaetano Pesce.

MAD Museum of Decorative Arts- Grand Nef - exhibition

“L’Intime” Joe Colombo Cabriolet Bad 1969 © Alessandra Cenna

AD Museum of Decorative Arts- Room of Convenience - Anonymous Cast Iron Bathtub - Alfred Choubrac Bathroom sinks, modern hygiene around 1895 © Alessandra Cenna

MAD Museum of Decorative Arts Teddy bear spy camera 2023 © Alessandra Cenna

Poster of the exhibition The Intimacy of the Bedroom to Social Networks © Les Arts Décoratifs / The female figure is a detail of the painting Le Bains (1903) by Tony Robert Fleury - City of Grenoble Museum of Grenoble J.L.Lacroix Graphics: Lacaste Design

Six themes follow to explore sexuality on social networks to the personal diary.

The web has profoundly changed our relationship with privacy and new surveillance and protection technologies are intruding into private life. Facial recognition, geolocation, object tracking, application tracking are undermining this fragile balance between the self and others in the broadest sense of the term.

From the Latin «intimus», that which is most internal, the intimate is confronted with a global exterior that feeds on images at breakneck speed, digesting and forgetting them with the interstellar speed of fiber and increasingly omnipresent artificial intel ligence.

Algorithms track the slightest desires, the slightest actions to offer personalized dreams that can thus be exploited for marketing purposes in the best case, but also for much more dangerous manipulation purposes.

In an era of powerful technology in both time and space, it is vital to cultivate one’s very secret garden...

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Jean Collas (1900-1986) Detail of the waiting room: slate and metal heating vents, rattan furni ture, Pierre Chareau Photographic Collection Around 1931 © Les Arts Décoratifs /DR