by Chadd Scott
Last updated: 8:00 PM ET, Thu December 20, 2018
There you are in Gertrude and Leo Stein's Paris apartment-27 rue de Fleurus, 6th arrondissement. The year is about 1907. It's a Saturday night, or maybe Sunday morning by now.
Perhaps Pablo Picasso and his good friend and fellow founder of Cubism, Georges Braque, are there. Ernest Hemmingway has been known to drop in. F. Scott Fitzgerald, too.
Henri Matisse is quietly discussing the latest of his paintings to be added to the Steins' collection-Picasso shoots jealous daggers into his back from across the room.
There's Sinclair Lewis.
More champagne anyone?
If this sounds like your kind of party, short of a time machine, the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas' Salon Series may be your next best bet.
The hotel has launched a monthly series in its storied French Room Salon, curated by Lucia Simek, an art advisor and founding member of The Art Foundation, a Dallas-based artist collective. The Salon Series presents a modern-day iteration of the legendary French salons of past centuries, with speakers including artists represented in the Salon's 42-piece art collection, as well as historians, curators, authors, and musicians.
"The hotel's rich history, its ties to important artistic moments in Dallas, as well as parts of the original Adolphus Busch collection of art that still hang in the hotel, all set the stage for this new series to be born alongside the new collection of works that I gathered for the French Room Salon," Simek said.
She added, "It made perfect sense to extend the curatorial mission of this project and use the Salon as a true gathering space-a literal Salon, in the French sense-and take the chance to engage with artists, thinkers, and influencers that might enrich the experience of both the hotel and the city's culture."
Anheuser Busch founder Adolphus Busch built the Adolphus Hotel on Commerce Street as Dallas' first luxury hotel. Opening in 1912 and built at a cost of $1,870,000, the hotel went through a two-year renovation which was finished in the spring of 2018.
The Adolphus Hotel has hosted numerous U.S. presidents and was chosen by Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip's state visit to Dallas in 1991.
The hotel hopes it's Salon Series, which recalls a long since bygone era, will serve as a perfect anecdote for contemporary audiences increasingly isolated in a digital age.
"In the face of rapid-fire news, social media and image glut, I think that people are very hungry for this intimate encounter with ideas and with people in a shared, public space," Simek said.
"And in doing it, we realize what a rare thing it is to host a wide public in a beautiful place and to treat everyone with conviviality and respect and offer a chance to learn and be edified. I think that once people get a taste of that community, they see how essential it is to the life of a city, especially at this fractured moment."
The first Salon Series speaker of 2019 will be Scottish curator and writer Gavin Morrison. He will be discussing Napoleon's influence on food on January 3. That talk should pair nicely with a treasure of the French Room's art collection, a painting of Emperor Napoleon created by his court painter in 1805.
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