How famed French garden grew into subject of High exhibit

FIVE ‘TUILERIES’ HIGHLIGHTS

1. "Hercules Battling Achelous as Serpent" (1824), Francois Joseph Bosio's monumental bronze sculpture, depicts the battle between Hercules and the river god Achelous (who transforms himself into a series of animals) for the affection of the nymph Deianira. Note the bullet holes, remnants of the 1871 Paris Commune.

2. Francois Barois' "Vertumnus" and "Pomona," from the late 17th-early 18th centuries, are 9-foot-7-inch-tall, half-human, half-architectural figures depicting Ovid's fable in which the mask-wearing god of seasons and change seduces the goddess of orchards.

3. "A Day in the Tuileries Garden" video, orchestrated by High Museum Head of Museum Interpretation Julia Forbes, a four-minute wordless tour of the park projected onto three gallery walls. You feel as if you're there for the invigorating stroll.

4. Camille Pissarro's "The Tuileries Gardens in the Snow" (1900), one of 31 depictions the Danish-French impressionist painted from an apartment he rented on Rue de Rivoli. Other painters included in a gallery emphasizing the Tuileries as a source of inspiration include Edouard Manet, Childe Hassam and William Samuel Horton.

5. Robert Doisneau's "Statues From the Tuileries Placed in Trenches" (circa 1939-1940) is a remarkable World War II-era image documenting large-scale works being protected in a deep trench. The trenches ultimately were covered by sandbags or surrounded by scaffolding. The photography gallery also includes prints by Eugene Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz.

On a sun-dappled fall day in Paris in 2009, leaders of the High Museum of Art and the Louvre gathered to talk about the just-concluded three-year string of "Louvre Atlanta" exhibitions.

There was much to celebrate: Nearly 500 treasures included in seven exhibits from the French museum had drawn 1.3 million visitors to the High. The partnership also generated national media coverage, even as some Atlanta critics questioned how the Midtown museum might otherwise have directed the resources it demanded.

But before the Americans in Paris dug in too deep with their hosts, then-Louvre director Henri Loyrette suggested a stroll through the Tuileries, the museum’s adjoining, historic, 63-acre green space.

“We were all scratching our heads,’” High Director of Collections and Exhibitions David Brenneman recalled. “‘What’s he up to?’”

Loyrette was planting a seed, it turned out, for a new exhibit to be imported by the High. "The Art of the Louvre's Tuileries Garden," a first-time exploration of the cherished Paris gathering space, opens in Atlanta on Sunday.

The show features more than 100 works, including some sculptures so large that they could not stand up in their crates in the cargo plane over the pond. In addition to the sculptures created from the 17th to 20th centuries, many never seen outside of France, the show includes paintings, photographs and drawings that depict the Tuileries and reflect it as a fount of artistic inspiration.

Promoting the exhibit as a touch of “Paris on Peachtree,” the High has outfitted Sifly Piazza outside its main entrance with rows of Nellie Stevens holly trees surrounding two bronze sculptures by French artist Aristide Maillol.

The rows of holly planters even extend into the lobby of the Anne Cox Chambers Wing (accompanying six more sculptures), that glass-walled gallery designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano in his 2005 expansion for the High.

Piano, who topped the largest of the three new buildings with 1,000 light-capturing skylights, is keen on bringing the outdoors in and taking the indoors out. That’s something “The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden,” which also fills the two upper floors of the Chambers Wing, achieves with greater success than any show the High has mounted.

While it continues an exchange with a world-recognized partner in the Louvre, the exhibit marks the first time the Atlanta museum has presented a show about a garden. To Brenneman and High Director Michael Shapiro, that held potential in a city where gardening is as much a year-round passion as golf, itself the topic of a first-time exhibit there in 2011.

Though the sampling is small (900 survey respondents), the High projects that a third of its members also are members of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Further underlining Atlanta’s gardening cred, resident Marian Hill, whose husband Ben is a High board member, is president of the Garden Club of America. The city also is home to some of the country’s most venerable garden clubs.

The Tuileries, of course, is not your garden-variety garden. It has served as a museum without walls since sculptures were moved there from royal palaces in the 18th century, and today it also is the site of permanent and temporary contemporary sculpture installations.

“This is perhaps the most famous public garden in the world,” Brenneman noted one recent blue-skied morning, sitting under elm trees at a Sifly Piazza cafe table, leafing through an early proof of the exhibit catalog.

The Tuileries dates to 1561 when, under Queen Catherine de Medici, the garden was created to frame the Tuileries Palace (which was burned down during the Paris Commune siege in 1871). Andre Le Notre was commissioned by King Louis XIV in 1664 to expand and transform the Tuileries into a formal French garden.

The exhibit will next travel to Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.

Not just a design exhibit, the show charts the Tuileries’ rich history, starting as grounds reserved for royals and their privileged guests to its status today as perhaps the City of Light’s most prized public site, whose grand promenades, fountains and art-dotted groves are enjoyed equally by Parisians and tourists. It is situated at what an exhibit wall label calls “the geographical and cultural heart of Paris,” extending from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde.

Louvre sculpture curator Genevieve Bresc, who came to Atlanta to inspect the irreplaceable works after their transport and to assist in their installation, wrote an authoritative history on the garden in the mid-1990s. She allowed that she didn’t think of the Tuileries then as a potential museum subject.

"No, no, because the garden was there," she said in her thick French accent. "There was no need to have an exhibition in Paris. The garden is an exhibition."

But as the subject of an exhibit in three American cities?

“I think it’s a rich topic,” she said with a serene smile.