A Seat at the Table: Christian Bérard's Final Gesture

Curators: Arianna Quinn, Jenna Sharaf, Jada Tribue, Raky Wane, Marina Teubal

On the night of February 11th, 1949, Parisian artist and socialite Christian Bérard dined at the famed Le Berkeley, before collapsing the next morning at the Théâtre Marigny and being pronounced dead shortly after. All that remained from his final dinner: a menu. On the front, Bérard’s own design for the restaurant. On the back, four quickly-sketched, elegantly dressed figures. A final gesture, or a quiet clue. Bérard’s life was steeped in spectacle and mystery. His death was no different.

Our exhibition offers a fictionalized reenactment of that evening, intertwining fact and fable. A table invites you to take a seat in his world. Images and documents dress it, while a menu of imagined testimonies, written in the voices of friends, observers, journalists, narrate the night. These literary gestures bridge archival material and imagination, exploring Bérard’s biography, and the unity of fashion, performance, and storytelling. Visitors are invited to take a menu home, carry Bérard’s story into their own space. Literature becomes a curatorial strategy, animating the archive and questioning how history is constructed.

A projection of his illustrations and photographs cast an air of remembrance. A vase of poppies offers a delicate nod to his opium addiction. A faint sound of a song composed in his memory plays in the background. At the center of it all, the original menu, an artifact at the crossroads of art, fashion, and history, held today at the Palais Galliera. 

Designed years before, the cover holds its allure, but the spontaneous sketch on the back, made that night, and the posthumous inscription, captivates us. Its importance lies in its ephemerality and particularity of being both collectible yet unique. By highlighting it through literature, and scenography, we reflect on the museum’s legacy, exploring how documents can speak when words, and facts, fall short.