A Corner Cupboard Opens at the Getty : The rococo cabinet was among J. Paul Getty’s eight favorite pieces of furniture in the world, and was purchased in his memory

It is not your average corner cupboard.

Featured in a new exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the remarkable cabinet is 9 1/2 feet tall and as ornate as a Mardi Gras float. Moreover, its provenance reads like a capsule history of modern Europe. Made in the 18th Century by a great Parisian ebeniste or cabinetmaker for the commander-in-chief of the Polish army, it was later owned by the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family. In 1938, Hitler grabbed it for his personal museum at Linz.

It was Gillian Wilson, the Getty’s curator of decorative arts, who chose the towering cupboard to be the centerpiece of the new interactive exhibit, which continues through Jan. 10, 1993.

As she explains, the cupboard is not only a choice example of the rococo style, it is also one of the best documented pieces in the museum’s highly regarded decorative arts collection.

Sleuthing by Wilson and associate curator David Cohen has unearthed fascinating bits and pieces of the cupboard’s past. They found, for instance, that its first owner, Count Jan Klemens Branicki, got sick and tired of waiting for it, the universal condition of people who have custom-ordered furniture.

A date on the back of the dial on the cupboard’s clock suggests that the piece was begun as early as 1744. Eight years later, Branicki wrote a testy letter to his palace administrator, declaring, “I want the corner cabinet with lights for my room to be ready. I am making M. Lullier (the cabinetmaker’s Warsaw dealer) responsible for this.” Apparently, the Parisian cabinetmaker was not overly concerned about his client in darkest Warsaw. Branicki had to wait another year or two before he got his cupboard.

Researching furniture is a “great hunt,” says Wilson, brightened by the occasional discovery of a document such as Branicki’s letter. “Sometimes you find out something and you’re happy as a pea for a week,” she says.

For the exhibit, the piece was removed from its usual place in the gallery devoted to 18th-Century French furniture and placed in a small room of its own. Visitors are invited to take a closer look at the cupboard: How it was made, what happened to it, why it is important. One photograph, for instance, allows visitors to peer behind the cupboard’s gorgeous veneered surface to see its plain oak carcass. Another photo shows how the cupboard looked in the Red Salon of the Rothschild house in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a room of such majestic proportions that the cupboard seems to shrink before the viewer’s eyes.

As David Ebitz, head of the museum’s education department, explains, the exhibit also includes illustrative materials that the public can touch. The cabinet is an exquisite example of marquetry, the technique whereby veneers are applied in curved or floral designs (parquetry refers to the application of veneers in geometric designs). Visitors can see and touch examples of each of the phases of the marquetry process, from sketching the design on the surface to be decorated to varnishing the finished piece.

Ebeniste Jacques Dubois veneered the cabinet with tulipwood, bois satine and rosewood.

The Getty also arranged to have a Parisian workshop make gilt-bronze mounts using the techniques and materials employed for those on the cupboard. Among the cupboard’s ornaments are a pair of “babies on lions,” as Wilson calls two mounted cupids. In an age when furniture makers thought no armoire should be without its allegory, the figures represent “love taming strength,” she says. Although visitors are directed not to touch the cupboard, they are encouraged to pick up the sample mounts and feel the heft of them.

The exhibit was an especially challenging one for the education department. “All of us agreed the cupboard was a fascinating piece of furniture and that it was worth singling out and putting in a context,” Ebitz says. The trick was finding ways to interest visitors in an object that does not immediately appeal to contemporary taste. Ebitz admits that even he didn’t much like French furniture of that period when he started the project, but he came around in the course of studying the piece and looking for ways to make the public appreciate its special qualities.

A museum staffer or volunteer will always be present at the exhibit to answer questions and, frankly, to make sure people resist the urge to touch the extraordinary corner cupboard. Visitors will be given a handout that will help them apply what they have learned about the cupboard to other pieces of furniture in the museum’s collection.

The cupboard was inspired by a drawing made in the 1720s by Parisian designer Nicolas Pineau. An engraving of the sketch was included in a widely circulated book that illustrated Pineau’s notions of the latest in French taste. According to Wilson, the cupboard is a wonderful example of the kind of furniture French cabinetmakers of the mid-1700s were making for foreign courts and aristocrats, perhaps muttering to themselves about the taste of the barbarians as they did so.

“No Parisian would have had this piece of furniture in his house because of its size and outrageousness,” she says.

Wilson bought the cupboard in 1979 for $2 million. She purchased the piece because it was unique and because Getty, who died in 1976, had included it in a list he had published of his eight favorite pieces of furniture in the world. “It was a posthumous gesture to Mr. Getty,” says Wilson. “He must have been so happy floating about in heaven or wherever he was.”

The cupboard is currently valued at $6 million or $7 million, she says.

Wilson is the only member of the museum’s current staff who actually knew Getty. Getty never visited the museum he so generously endowed, but he liked to screen movies of its construction.

Getty was also careful with his pots of money. Wilson notes that he didn’t own a movie projector but borrowed a neighbor’s. And in the early years he wouldn’t let Wilson buy flowers for the museum. “I had to grow them myself.”

The Dubois cupboard was probably used, not for storage, but to display exquisite clocks and other small, precious objects, Wilson says. Passionate about her acquisitions and how they are displayed, Wilson notes that the candles in the cupboard’s gilded candleholders are “Safeway, non-drip.” The supermarket candles are the authentic shade of ecru, not pure white, that candles of the period, made of unclarified wax, would have been. And the candles on display have been burned, as are all the candles in all of Wilson’s galleries. “It was considered very de trop to put unburned candles in your candlesticks.”