I RATHER LOVE my office. It sounds trite, but it’s like a second home. Or first home, maybe? It’s like a cocoon of books. Those on the shelves are mine, and the piles on the large table behind my desk are mostly from the Met’s library, organized by exhibitions and publications I’m working on.
While it might look a little chaotic to some, I can assure you there is a system. The floor is currently covered with forty or so files arranged in chronological order, each of which contains information about one of Louis XIV’s highly Baroque Savonnerie carpets made to cover the entire span of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre (that’s more than 4,000 square feet of hand-woven carpeting). Together with two colleagues from the Mobilier National in Paris, Emmanuelle Federspiel and Antonin Macé de Lépinay, I am currently writing a new book on this unique chapter in the history of art.
At the Met’s European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department, the atmosphere of the offices is wonderfully old-fashioned. Even though they were last spruced up in the 1990s, under the guiding hand of my pre-predecessor, the late William Rieder, they look like a TV set from the 1970s. Even after seven years, I still feel like I’m stepping into a time capsule every morning when I arrive. I suppose that’s one way to shut out the world to focus on your work. —WOLF BURCHARD
Wolf Burchard is a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He oversees the British Collection in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department. He is the author of The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV and curated the exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, which was shown at the Met, the Wallace Collection in London, and the Huntington museum in Los Angeles.
