ART REVIEW : A Glittering Display That’s Up to Snuff

The holiday attraction to glittering baubles probably has less to do with material greed than with fuzzy childhood memories of seasonal ornaments twinkling the magic of the moment. However motivated, it is a time of year that magnetizes people to objets de luxe even when they don’t usually care much about them.

The appetite will be slaked, if indeed not surfeited, by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s premier exhibition of about 150 gold boxes from the collection of Rosalind and Arthur Gilbert, a promised gift to the museum. The Gilberts are indefatigable local collectors of finely fashioned gold and silver objects from the aristocratic past. They have already acquired extensive holdings of stately tableware, ceremonial odes to conspicuous consumption and crowd-pleasing gaggles of micro-mosaics that make computer chips look gross.

Even a casual glance will persuade those familiar with these collections that this one constitutes the diamond in the diadem. Indeed, their curator, Martin Chapman, says that it is the most comprehensive and distinguished gold box collection in the United States. While there is no reason to doubt it, there are some grounds for wondering if such caches are much more than sumptuous versions of such modern collectibles as Kewpie dolls and baseball cards.

The attractions of the decorative arts are not the soulful ones of painting and sculpture. They are, rather, the occasion to admire human ingenuity focused down on objects that speak volumes about human folly, now amusing, now repellent. Absorbing these marvels of craftsmanship more or less precludes the need to read Vanity Fair.

The exhibition might aptly be titled “Snuff and Status.” The making of gold boxes centered itself in the 18th Century, the epic of the Rococo that specialized in enlightened rational thought oddly linked to aristocratic silliness.

The taking of snuff through the nose was their version of smoking cigarettes, a nasty habit that turned the nostrils brown. Men consumed masses of snuff but so did women, snorting up through clown-thick cosmetics, sneezing with the best of them.

Psychologically, gold boxes probably evolved to lend an aura of class to the habit and acted as forerunners to the sleek cigarette cases of the 1930s. Boxes made for bonbons eventually mutated into women’s makeup compacts.

Gold snuffboxes became so fashionable a fad and so telling a status symbol that one tastemaking journal of the time recommended that a gentleman should have one for every day of the year. Frederick the Great of Prussia had 300. You had to be almost as rich as he was to afford them.

Chased in pure gold, inset with tortoise shell, mother-of-pearl, lapis lazuli and porcelain, they might have been encrusted in diamonds, rubies and pearls. They often bore exquisite miniature portraits or whole landscapes in micro-mosaic. They were miniaturized Rolls-Royces even down to careful engineering that kept them firm when shut, balanced in the hand when in use. (Evidently, spilling one’s stash was a major social gaffe.)

So much money for such utterly useless objects? Well, as the modern Cartier’s once argued, luxury objects do provide work for craftsmen and thus help the economy. It’s said that Frederick the Great’s life was once saved when his snuffbox took the brunt of a bullet.

And then, too, they functioned as gifts. Napoleon passed them out to his officers for good work. Monarchs presented them to departing foreign ambassadors who had been particularly helpful. Just a memento (and a polite payoff worth a small fortune). On a more humane note, one particularly handsome example with a diamond-outlined classical scene was presented to an English doctor by Russia’s Catherine the Great after he successfully inoculated the royal family against a raging smallpox epidemic.

Paris, with its traditional excellence in craft and elegance, was the center of gold box making. One of the most restrained and refined on view was made for Philip V of Spain and bears his portrait, cartouche and emblems of the favorite aristocratic occupations of the day, hunting and making love. Numerous French boxes, such as one by Thomas Pierre Breton, reflect a passion for the exotic art of the Far East. All of them tend to have an Oriental look. Chinese and Near Eastern potentates became collectors.

Germany--then a loose collection of principalities--contributed innovative boxes in mosaic, Meissen porcelain and hard stone such as a magisterial example in bloodstone by Johann Georg Klett. England got into the game with novelty boxes such as a purely impractical agate carving of a boy and his dog. Ingenuity ran amok in a box that has an automaton girl dancing on a wire and another by James Cox features a tableau of little people and animals and a timepiece.

Other countries made boxes. The Swiss versions were not so well thought of but they were cheaper.

Once recovered from an attack of self-righteousness over all this excess, one realizes the boxes contain a kind of magic that can’t be gotten at any other way. We realize we’re all still passengers dreaming nice dreams on the ship of fools.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. (213) 857-6000 . Closed Mondays. Through March 8.