Art: Art for Window-shoppers

Four years ago Manhattan’s swank Saks Fifth Avenue department store decided to make the minor art of window dressing more arty. Taking a cue from the Museum of Modern Art’s highly successful Van Gogh exhibition, Saks hung its windows with splashy Van Gogh reproductions, surrounded them with splashy garments. The idea spread until Fifth Avenue began to look like a huge, outdoor art museum.

Window dressers twisted the work of dozens of living and dead painters into ads to catch the feminine shopper’s eye. Their displays were painted and draped to resemble Gauguins, Bonnards, Utrillos, Chiricos, Redons, Vlamincks. Helena Rubinstein’s famed beauty salon decked itself with Picasso, Manet and Rembrandt windows, including living female models who held poses as painted portraits for 15 minutes at a stretch. Finally Bonwit Teller went everybody else one better.

It hired a real live artist, jittery Catalonian Surrealist Salvador Dali, to do his stuff in dummies and drapes. Dali’s surrealist windows were a big success. But shocked customers finally demanded that his hair-raising semi-nude manikins be further draped. Infuriated by unscheduled changes in his windows, spindly-framed Dali broke into one of them, hurled himself and a fur-lined bathtub through the plate glass, almost decapitated himself. Bonwit Teller did not try the experiment again.

Last week freak-fenestration’s pioneer, Saks Fifth Avenue, was at it again. This time the artist who furnished the in spiration was Henri Rousseau, the little French baggage inspector whose quaint, ingeniously primitive jungle pictures (painted on his Sundays off at the Zoo in the Jardin des Plantes) awed pre-war Paris.

For his Rousseau windows, which he had already tried out in Hollywood, Saks’s perky window designer James David Buckley chose six typical lush, salad-like Rousseau paintings, reproduced them in life-sized scenes with the help of rag-doll manikins, props of paper, cloth and wood. Window Dresser Buckley made each window represent a phase in the life of a woman. Rousseau’s Portrait of a Young Girl, bloatedly enlarged, became “Her Awkward Age”; his Sleeping Gypsy, complete with mandolin and prowling lion, “Her Bohemian Period.” Unlike previous art-conscious window displays, Buckley’s contained no merchandise. Sole exception: a limp corset which dangled from the raggy hand of a baggily nude Eve (see cut). Its caption: “Her Subconscious Self.”