Eggs-tra fab-ulous

Author: By Curtis Wilkie, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, December 8, 1996

Page: M9

Section: Travel

A collection of 400 objects from the work of Peter Carl Faberge, the Russian artisan who crafted jeweled Easter Eggs and other treasures for the last of the czars, begins a nine-week engagement at the New Orleans Museum of Art today, and the city has helped set the scene.

More than 30 restaurants -- from fabled Antoine's in the French Quarter to stately Commander's Palace in uptown New Orleans -- are creating special dishes to dovetail with the Faberge exhibition.

Another tourist attraction, the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line, is rolling out a new motif, with paintings of glittering Faberge eggs adorning the historic cars.

The city has even found a way to tie Mardi Gras to the event, noting that Rex, king of the annual carnival and greatest of the Fat Tuesday parades, got its start in 1872 as a tribute to Grand Duke Alexis Romanov Alexandrovitch of Russia, who had pursued a burlesque singer, Lydia Thompson, to the Mississippi River port. The exhibition closes on Feb. 9, the last weekend of the Mardi Gras celebration.

Throughout New Orleans, stores have Faberge themes for their holiday windows, and a mural inspired by the Faberge eggs brightens St. Charles Place, an indoor mall in the heart of the city. Orleans Parish Sheriff Charles Foti, a pioneer in the practice of putting prisoners to work on art projects, supervised the mural and the streetcar decorations.

Atop another building along a busy interstate stands a giant, 8-foot-high replica of a Faberge egg.

But the real center of attention lies in City Park, a sprawling expanse of land dotted by bayous, live oaks and gardens where ``Fabegre in America'' has taken over the Museum of Art.

Thoroughbred racing at the nearby Fairgrounds usually draws a few thousand a day during its winter meet. The Sugar Bowl, featuring two of the nation's top college teams, and the Super Bowl, a match for the championship of the National Football League, will each bring more than 70,000 spectators to the Superdome in New Orleans in January.

Yet before the Faberge exhibit is finished here, it is expected to attract upward of 250,000 visitors.

There has been nothing like it here since Monet's paintings of Giverny flooded the museum with visitors nearly two years ago.

``We anticipate the response to `Faberge in America' to equal, and perhaps exceed, the response we enjoyed for Monet,'' says John Bullard, the museum's director.

The show is not without its detractors. It has been faulted for its commercial ties to the Faberge Co., which is marketing facsimiles of the jeweled eggs once created for consorts of the royal Russian court. The exhibition pieces have been dismissed as craft, rather than art, and the critic Paul Goldberger calls it ``tchotchkes for the rich.''

But the exhibition has pulled huge crowds and strained box-office personnel during its earlier shows this year in New York, San Francisco and Richmond. The fifth and final stop of Faberge's American tour will take place next spring in Cleveland.

The centerpieces are 15 Imperial Easter Eggs that Faberge's house designed for the last two czars of Russia, Alexander III and his son, Nicholas II, to bestow on their empresses.

With their fine detail, glittering overlay and miniature surprises inside, the eggs are Faberge's equivalent to the gold statues from King Tutankhamen's tomb that lured long lines to an exhibit of Egyptian riches while touring the country two decades ago.

The Faberge exhibition also features dozens of delicate figures of animals and flowers, enameled picture frames and fancy cigarette cases.

Some of the objects come from the private collections of such turn-of-the-century American multimillionaire families as the Vanderbilts and the Morgans, who bought their Faberges before the Russian Revolution. Others were brought to his country by the modern magazine magnate Malcolm Forbes.

A Napoleonic egg and other Faberge objects, obtained by the late Matilda Geddings Gray of Lake Charles, La., is part of the permanent collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

The luxury of the Faberge items is so intense that the New York Times wrote:

``It is unlikely that anyone, either incurable romantic or die-hard Marxist, can look at these artifacts of a bygone age of innocence and opulence without also seeing the Russian Revolution bearing down on the doomed House of Romanov.''

While the museum displays the splendor, many of the city's chefs are adding Faberge touches to their menus. At Bayona, one of the French Quarter's highly-acclaimed newer restaurants, Susan Spicer offers ``Faberge's Toad in the Hole,'' a pair of quail eggs nestled in seven-grain bread and topped with prosciutto and a sherry sauce. Dooky Chase, a famous, funky eatery, will have special Creole eggs. Even the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen has a new dish called Faberge Pizza, with ham and eggs.

``The restaurants have been fantastic,'' says Sharon Litwin, assistant director of the museum. ``With eggs, it's such a natural for New Orleans,'' where restaurants prepare such specialties as Eggs Hussard and Eggs Benedict.

``We told them any eggs would do. Chicken eggs. Ostrich eggs. The only egg that wouldn't fly was eggplant,'' she said.

In early 1995, in homage to the Monet exhibition, Joanne Clevenger turned the walls of her Upperline Restaurant into a faux-Monet mural. This year, she has whipped up a Faberge feast, giving the traditional Creole holiday dinner, the ``reveillon,'' a Russian taste with a three-course special that starts with ``truffled eggs on emerald greens.''

Although the exhibition comes at peak season for New Orleans, when rooms are already booked for conventions, the football spectaculars and Mardi Gras, local hotels are trying to target ``marketing periods'' when there are openings. One period runs for several weeks this month, until the city fills for the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2.

In one arrangement coordinated with the museum, the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel (504-525-2500) is offering a package deal that includes two tickets, with a 9 a.m. entrance and no waiting promised, with the price of a room.