Modern Baroque

From Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros right down to Keith Haring and Banksy, muralists have often broken with convention, spilling over the boundaries of polite society and out into the streets. It is an art form that is seldom at peace within drawing rooms and salons. But the twentieth century produced one eminently clubbable exception: the Catalan Josep Maria Sert. A quick perusal of his list of patrons – Rockefellers, Waldorfs, and Cosdens, Spanish bishops, and French princesses – might suggest he was a purveyor of high art to high society. Sure, but no more so than his illustrious forebears, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Tiepolo, who had been muralists to popes and nobles alike. What Sert needed was great walls, and wall space was afforded him aplenty. Among his creations, scattered throughout lordly buildings, both public and residential, FMR has chosen to focus on his 1924 decoration of the Hôtel de Wendel in Paris, depicting the Queen of Sheba’s journey to Jerusalem – a suitable subject for an artist who loved the romantic extravagance of antiquity, the splendor of the East, and the lavish abundance of the luxurious and the corporeal – dramatized and exalted in stunning grisaille.