Art Nouveau. Jean Lahor

Edouard Empain, the engineer and financer of the Paris Metro construction project, selected Guimard to design the now famous Metro stations. Empain’s choice, however, was strongly opposed at the time. Some feared that Guimard’s architecture represented too new an art form and that the style, derided as style nouille (literally translated “noodle style”), would ruin the look of the French capital. An obstinate jury prevented Guimard from completing all the stations, in particular the station near Garnier’s Opera: Art Nouveau appeared totally at odds with Garnier’s style, which was a perfect example of the historicism and eclecticism the new movement was fighting against.

      At the same time, French brasseries and restaurants offered themselves as privileged sites for the development of the new trend. The Buffet de la Gare de Lyon opened in 1901. Rechristened Le Train Bleu in 1963, it counted Coco Chanel, Sarah Bernhardt, and Colette among its many regulars. With the addition of Maxim’s restaurant on the rue Royale, dining establishments henceforth became perfect models of Art Nouveau.

      In 1901 the Alliance des Industries d’Art, also known as the Ecole de Nancy (School of Nancy), was officially founded. In accordance with Art Nouveau principles, its artists wanted to abolish the hierarchies that existed between major arts like painting and sculpture and the decorative arts, which were then considered minor. The School of Nancy artists, whose most fervent representatives were Emile Gallé, the Daum brothers (Auguste and Antonin) and Louis Majorelle, produced floral and plant stylisations, expressions of a precious and fragile world that they nevertheless wanted to see industrially reproduced and distributed on a much larger scale, beyond coteries of galleries and collectors.

      Art Nouveau ultimately proliferated endemically throughout the world, often through the intermediary of art magazines such as The Studio, Arts et Idées and Art et Décoration, whose illustrations were henceforth enhanced with photos and colour lithography. As the trend spread from one country to the next, it changed by integrating local colour, transforming itself into a different style according to the city it was in. Its breadth of influence included cities as distant as Glasgow, Barcelona and Vienna and even reached such faraway and unlikely spots as Moscow, Tunis and Chicago. All the different names used to describe the movement along its triumphal march – Art Nouveau, Liberty, Jugendstil, Secessionstil, and Arte Joven – emphasised its newness and its break with the past, in particular with the mid-nineteenth century’s outdated historicism. In reality, Art Nouveau drew from many past and exotic styles: Japanese, Celtic, Islamic, gothic, baroque and rococo, among others. In the decorative arts, Art Nouveau was welcomed with unprecedented enthusiasm, but it also met with scepticism and hostility, as it was often considered strange and of foreign origin. Germany, for example, disparaged the new decorative art as the “Belgian tapeworm style”. France and England, traditional enemies, tended to trade blame, with the English retaining the French term “Art Nouveau” and the French borrowing the term “Modern Style” from the English.

      Art Nouveau reached its apogee in 1900, but quickly went out of fashion. By the next major Universal Exposition in Turin (1902), a reaction was clearly underway. In the end, Art Nouveau strayed far from its original aspirations, becoming an expensive and elitist style that, unlike its successor Art Deco, did not lend itself to cheap imitation or mass production.

      Georges Clairin, Sarah Bernhardt, 1876.

      Oil on canvas, 200 × 250 cm.

      Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris.

      Paul Berthon, Liane de Pougy aux Folies-Bergère.

      Colour lithograph.

      Victor and Gretha Arwas collection.

      Eugène Grasset, Snow-drop. Plate 32 from Plantes et leurs applications ornementales (Plants and their Application to Ornament), 1897.

      Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

      Victor Prouvé, Salammbô, 1893.

      Mosaic leather and bronze.

      Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, Nancy.

      René Lalique, Winged Female Figure, c. 1899.

      Private collection, New York.

      Hector Guimard, Castel Béranger, detail of entry and door to courtyard, 1895.

      Paris.

      II. Art Nouveau at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris

      Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Pavillon bleu Restaurant at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris.

      Photograph. Private collection.

      History has selected England, Belgium and France as the undisputed primary sources of Art Nouveau’s development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but contemporaries were unaware of this supremacy. In its section devoted to the decorative arts, the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, which called for the construction of both the Grand and Petit Palais, among other buildings, offered a sampling that gave a taste of the real flavour of the period. For example, Gaudí, now inseparable from Spanish Art Nouveau and a major architect who gave us the image of Barcelona we know today, was the Exposition’s major no-show: he failed to participate in the construction of the pavilions and none of his plans were shown. At the same time, countries such as Russia, Hungary and Romania, long since forgotten in the history of Art Nouveau, were well represented alongside other countries that history wrongly seems to barely remember.

      The French Pavilion

      France showed great artistic merit in bijouterie, joaillerie, ceramics and glassware – all magical arts of fire – as well as in sculpture and medallions. The triumph of France in all these arts was unmistakable.

      In the enchanting art of glass, one of the world’s oldest arts, and one that seemed to have exhausted every conceivable combination of line and colour, every quest for a perfect union between stones, precious metals and enamel, between chasing and the gluing of precious stones and pearls, Lalique was a genius who could surprise, dazzle and delight the eye with new and truly exquisite colourations in all his creations, with the fantasy and the charm of his imagination with which he animated them, and with his bold and inexhaustible creativity. Like a philosopher grading stones on their artistic value alone, sometimes elevating the most humble to highest honours and drawing unfamiliar effects from the most familiar, and like a magician who can pull something out of thin air, Lalique was a tireless and perpetual inventor of new forms and beauties, who truly created an art form in his own style, which now and forever bears his name.

      As is the prerogative of genius, Lalique steered his art into unchartered territory and others followed whatever direction he took. There was joy and pride at the triumphant manifestation of French taste in its plateresque palace, thanks to the masters of French bijouterie, joaillerie, and silver, such as Lalique, Alexis Falize, Henri Vever, Fernand Thesmar, and many others,[6] all relatively prestigious, and thanks to the masters of glass and ceramics, such as the still unrivalled Gallé, the Daum brothers, and the artists of the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, and Albert Dammouse, Auguste Delaherche, Pierre Adrien Dalpeyrat and Lesbros among others.

      Manuel Orazi, Palais de la danse.

      Colour lithograph.

      Poster for the official dance theater at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris.

      Victor and Gretha Arwas collection.

      Mathilde Augé and Ely Vial, Hand Mirror.

      Bronze

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In joaillerie, the following should also be mentioned: Lucien Gaillard, Georges Fouquet, René Foy and Eugène Feuillâtre.