New museum offers up a whiff of history

 

NEW YORK | The nose rarely figures in the sensory experience of a museum visitor. That is about to change at one New York City museum.

The Center of Olfactory Art, dedicated to scent as an art form, was launched at the Museum of Arts and Design on Thursday.

“What we’re going to be able to do with the center is place scent directly in the mainstream of art history and demonstrate that it is the equal of paintings, sculpture, architecture and all other artistic media,” said Chandler Burr, the former fragrance critic of the New York Times whom the museum said it hired as its — and the nation’s — first curator of olfactory art.

More a curatorial department within the museum than a separate entity, the museum created the center because “scent is a really interesting part of the world of design,” museum director Holly Hotchner said in an interview.

It fits the institution’s DNA as a “sensuous, sensory-orientated museum” where patrons can touch and feel many of the objects. And, of course, smell is as much a part of the senses,” she added.

The center will present its first exhibition, “The Art of Scent, 1889-2011” next November, examining the reformulations and innovations of olfactory works by some of history’s best-known perfumers through 10 seminal scents.

An audio guide narrated by Mr. Burr will explain the context in which they were created. Each perfume will be identified only by artist and year to allow visitors to appreciate each as an independent work.

Don’t expect fancy fragrance bottles, brand perfumes, design graphics and packaging to be part of the exhibit.

Visitors to “The Art of Scent” will experience each fragrance along a 6-foot-wide path that will follow the curvature of the gallery wall where buttons on a specially designed atomizing machine will release “the work of art.”

With the center’s launch, the Museum of Arts and Design is the only museum to study fragrance as art. A museum in Grasse, France, focuses on the history of perfume and another perfume museum in Madrid “is entirely about bottles,” said Mr. Burr, who is also the scent editor at GQ magazine and the author of two books on scent.

Among the featured perfumes is “Jicky,” one of the first to use non-organic ingredients, which helped pave the way to the modern era of fragrances. Designed in 1889 by Aime Guerlain, it was, Mr. Burr said, “the first work of modern perfume art … and the first major perfume to use synthetic molecules that freed the scent artist from nature.”

“Jicky is one of the great neoclassicist, romanticist works of olfactory art of the late 19th century,” he said. “It’s an expression in this artistic medium of exactly the same aesthetic concern and intellectual concern and the artistic style used by Ingres in painting and used in music by Chopin.”

Scent artists or perfumers, colloquially known as “The Nose,” are fragrance composers or painters. Among the masters featured in the exhibition will be Jean-Claude Ellena, whom Mr. Burr called “one of the most important artists alive in this medium.”

“He is intentionally wiping away any reference to nature, effacing and erasing natural landmarks. He is doing work that is cutting edge in [that it is] forcing us to experience and rethink works of olfactory art,” he added.

Other leading perfumers whose work will be shown include Olivier Cresp, the creator of “Angel,” and Alberto Morillas and Annie Buzantian, whose “Pleasures” made use of a carbon dioxide extraction that is considered a major technological advance in the art of perfume-making.

A pivotal role of the center also will be to present public programs, including informal discussions with scent artists and perfume industry executives talking “about the tension between olfactory works of art and perfume as product,” said Mr. Burr.

Other shows will include a retrospective on Mr. Ellena’s work; a technology exhibit demonstrating the use of synthetic molecules in perfume-making; and one on the raw materials that constitute fragrances such as Ugandan vanilla and Peruvian pink peppercorn. Many of the exhibitions will travel to other museums, Mr. Burr said.

The center also will have an artist-in-residence program in which perfumers will work and be observed in the museum’s artist studios creating fragrances over a period of several months.

Because most people don’t associate perfume with art, Ms. Hotchner said, the center will introduce them to the creative work of “very serious, very talented and very sought-after designers who are artists who create scent — and have for hundreds of years.”