Overview
Marking the inclusion of Canadian artist Robert Polidori (b. 1951) in Marie Antoinette Style at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, we are delighted to present a selection of related key photographs from Polidori's landmark project Versailles: Transitional States.
In the early 1980s, Polidori was awarded a contract to exclusively document the extensive ongoing refurbishment of the Château de Versailles, providing him with unrestricted access to the palace. From 1985 until 2010, Polidori recorded Versailles' transformation from symbol and heart of Ancien Régime France to a monument of modern day museumification. For Polidori, the palace's rooms play a role as 'memory theaters' and receptacles for meaning as its grand architectural details are highlighted alongside its aging process and the realities of conservation.
Salle de Bain, Marie-Antoinette, R.D.C. Cord Central, Versailles
Featured in the Victoria & Albert exhibition Marie Antoinette Style is Salle de Bain, Marie-Antoinette, R.D.C. Cord Central, Versailles, 2006. Revealing a stark intimacy of what was once Marie Antoinette's bathroom, Polidori's use of natural light and stillness heightens a sense of suspended time, suggesting both the presence of its former occupant and the impossibility of returning to that past.
"Robert Polidori's haunting photograph of the queen's bathroom at Versailles captures a once-intimate space now laden with history. Located in the queen's private chambers on the ground floor, the room overlooks the palace's marble courtyard. Ironically, the queen had little opportunity to luxuriate in this space as the works were only completed in 1789, the year the French Revolution began." - Marie Antoinette Style
What does it mean to restore something? It means to make something old, new again. It's a temporal paradox, especially in a place like Versailles that went through so many changes. So when you choose to restore a certain room as it was in a certain period, the period you choose is based on your contemporary worldview. What we are looking at in these museum restorations is historical revisionism and the society's superego.
Robert Polidori
About Robert Polidori (b. 1951)
Robert Polidori was born in Montreal and is now based in California. He has documented numerous sites across the world, creating highly detailed, large-format colour photographs of places marked by the imprint of lives past and present. Polidori's images reflect on notions of memory and history embedded within architecture.
Polidori began his career in avant-garde film, assisting Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, an experience that critically shaped his approach to photography, based on ideas of temporality and stillness. While living in Paris in the early 1980s, he began documenting the restoration of Château de Versailles, and has continued over a 30-year period to photograph the ongoing changes to its interior.
A prolific artist, his works are held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.