"Paris is the world, the rest of the earth nothing but its suburbs"
First in a 3-part series on the 1925 Paris exposition, the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne", that sparked a world-wide explosion of the glamorous and much-loved Art Deco style. In this episode I discuss the genesis of Paris' position as the fashion capital of the world, and also explore early responses of decorative art and design to the challenge of modernity.
To explore further:
Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com
Photo credit: Crystal Palace relocated to Sydenham, Historic England Archive FF91/00334
"Paris is the world, the rest of the earth nothing but its suburbs"
First in a 3-part series on the 1925 Paris exposition, the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Moderne", that sparked a world-wide explosion of the glamorous and much-loved Art Deco style. In this episode I discuss the genesis of Paris' position as the fashion capital of the world, and also explore early responses of decorative art and design to the challenge of modernity.
To explore further:
Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com
Photo credit: Crystal Palace relocated to Sydenham, Historic England Archive FF91/00334
Podcast episode 8 – Paris exhibition 1925 Part 1
Welcome! To the eighth episode in the series, “Talking Modernism”, the podcast about the 1920s and 30s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed the world. I am your host, Michael Hauptman.
In the next 2 episodes I’ll be talking about the Paris exhibition of 1925, and tell the story of how France fought to maintain its position as the world leader in fashion , first against the challenge of the birth of mass consumerism, and later against German advances in industrial design. And in the process sparked the explosion across the world of the gorgeous, evocative style we now call Art Deco.
Paris is truly a world city. 17M international tourists visit it each year, a total second only to Bangkok. And the “City of Lights” is as much an idea as a place. Say the word ‘Paris’, and even if you’ve never been, a host of associations immediately spring to mind: the Eifel tower, the Mona Lisa, great baguettes, rude waiters. And one of the strongest associations we have for Paris is style. The English borrowed the phrase “saviore faire” from the French for a reason. For centuries Paris has been synononomous with high fashion. It’s home to fabled brands like Chanel, Hermes and Cartier, to incomporable fashion districts like the Champs Elysees, the Rue Saint-Honoré, & the Place Vendôme. A 2012 study found that France controls a quarter of the world’s trade in luxury goods, worth 210 billion Euros. Out of the 270 leading prestige brands, 130 are French. Haute couture, pret-a-porte – even the language of fashion is French.
King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the origins of French fashion
Paris was not always the world’s leader in style and fashion. It first achieved this status due to one of the most successful examples ever of government sponsoring an industry. When King Louis XIV came to the throne of France in 1643, the fashion capital of the world was Madrid. French aristorcats imported their fashions from Spain, their tapestries from Brussels, their lace and mirrors from Venice, and their silk from Milan.
Louis XIV set out to change that and, over the course of his long reign, he succeeded brilliantly. The furniture, textile, clothing, and jewelry industries he established not only provided jobs for his subjects, but made France the world’s leader in taste. Luxury became the growth engine of the whole French economy. His shrewd finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously said that “fashions were to France what the mines of Peru were to Spain”—in other words, the source of an extremely lucrative trade and export commodity. Louis’s reign saw about one-third of Parisian wage earners gain employment in the clothing and textile trades; Colbert organized these workers into highly specialized and strictly regulated professional guilds, ensuring quality control and helping them compete against foreign imports while preventing them from competing with each other. Nothing that could be made in France was allowed to be imported; Louis once ordered his own son to burn his coat because it was made of foreign cloth.
One of Colbert’s most effective and far-reaching innovations was to mandate that new textiles appeared seasonally, twice a year, encouraging people to buy more of them, on a predictable schedule. Fashion prints were often labelled d’hiver or d’été for winter or summer, with corresponding props like parasols, and fans for summer; for winter, there were furs, capes, and muffs for men and women alike.
Colbert & Louis’ building of a French luxury manufacture industry was similar in many ways to how the South Korean government helped build the hugely succesful k-pop and k-drama industries in the late 1990s. And it was part of a larger project to build French self-sufficiency behind a barrier of import tarrifs, a strategy known as mercantilism, that unfortanely was similar in many ways to the North Korean government’s ruinous policy of economic self-sufficiency. The burdensome costs of mercantilism would ultimately help tip France into revolution.
But this reckoning lay 150 years in the future. In the meantine, king Louis XIV himself was the ultimate arbiter of style. A theater buff, Louis took his self-selected nickname “the Sun King” from his youthful performances as Apollo in lavish court ballets, and his love of dramatic artifice and splendor infused his offstage wardrobe. The fashions he introduced were colorful, voluminous, and ornamental. And this was the antithesis of austere Spanish style which came before, that favourded sombre black clothing, not the least because Spain had access to high quality back dyes from its colonies in South America. The king started wearing elaborate wigs to hide his premature baldness and soon all the well dressed men in Europe were wearing them too. As one writer put it, Louis combined “... the incontestable authority of an Anna Wintour with the charisma of a supermodel”.
The new French fashions were depicted on engravings that were distributed all over Europe, as well as fully coiffed dolls dressed in the latest Paris fashions. Even France’s political enemies like Britain fell under Paris’ spell. France was Britain's only real economic and diplomatic rival – the two countries went to war seven times between 1688 and 1815. France was everything the new Protestant parliamentary state abhorred – Catholic, authoritarian, pleasure loving and effervescent. Yet still those thrifty Anglo Saxon Protestants could not contain their desire for French silks, tapestry, porcelain, mirrors, clocks and cabinetwork. "We are the whipped cream of Europe," sighed Voltaire in 1735. Paris became the western world’s headquarters of taste. "Paris is the world," the French playwright Pierre de Marivaux crowed in 1734, "the rest of the earth is nothing but its suburbs."
Government sponsorship of luxury goods exended far beyond clothing. Workshops were establised for tapestries, porcelien, furniture, jewelry and watchmaking, rugs and silk. In 1671 Louis and Colbert established the Academie royal d’archiecture, the world’s first school to be dedicated to the training of student archiects. Later in 1816 the school was amalgamated with the schools of painting & sculpture and the school of music to form the fabled Académie des Beaux-Arts. The academy leant its name to a style of archietcure known as Beaux-Arts, a heavily decorated style that combined elements of greco-roman neoclassicism with renaissance and baroque, but using modern materials such as iron and glass.
The revolution in 1789 gave only brief pause to Frances fashion leadership. The end of the Jacobian terror in 1795 saw France start a new fashion known as the empire line or empire silhouette, inspired by depictions of women in greco-roman art. Womens dresses were light and loose, often of muslin imported from Bengal, with a high waist and minimum of petticoats.
In the mid-1800s Paris then introduced a fresh set of innovations to dress design that we now call haute couture, and intrestingly enough these were the work of an Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth. After a few years working in a print shop and draper, he arrived in Paris in 1846 at the age of 21, with 5 pounds to his name and speaking no French. But clearly full of drive and talent because by 1858 he set up the House of Worth, the foremost fashion house in Paris for the next sixty years. Revolutionizing how dressmaking was perceived, Worth made it so the dressmaker became”… the artist of garnishment”: a fashion designer. Worth would allow his clients to select colors, fabrics, and other details before ever beginning his design process, which was unheard of at the time. While he created one-of-a-kind designs to please some of his titled or wealthy customers, he is best known for preparing a portfolio of designs that were shown on live models -he invented the fashion show. An astuste brand manager, he even introdced the practice of putting brand labels on clothes.
But towards the end of the 1800s, the Paris style was beginning to lose its allure. In archictecture for instance, the restraint and balance of the Georgian era was replaced with a style known as eclecticism, combining archietctural elements from different histrocial periods – gothic, renaissance, baroque. Every possible external space was adorned with pediments, arches, statuary, volutes and swags. A later critic dubbed it horror vacui, the fear of empty space. Done well, it could be balanced and beautiful. Emporor Napoleon III, the bougouse emporer as he was known, nephew of Napoleopn 1, employed over 3k builders and 150 sculptors between 1853 and 1858 to renovate the Louvre and created the Second Emprire style in the process. But in less skilled hands and with more limited funds, as unfortuanetly was commonly the case, the buildings of the late Victorian age were often over-decorated monstrosities encrusted with a pastiche of hisitorical elements, often factory made of cheap plaster or even papier mache, ordered from a catalogue like so many bricks or so much timber. And a similar heavy excess was a feature of all decorative arts, clothing, jewellery, furniture and interior design.
And of course, the 1800s saw the transformative effects of globalisation and the Industrial Revolution, which refashioned fashion and other applied arts just as it refashioned pretty well every other aspect of society. First it created a vast new class of wealthy consumers – the middle class, the bougousie, the 1800s are often called the bougouise century – and they wanted the sort of clothes, furniture and houses that were previously only available to the aristocratic elite. But the taste of these nouveau riche – of course, the French had a phrase for it – was less refined than that of the old-money aristocracy. Design became overly elaborate, showy, aiming to clearly communicate the new-found wealth of their owner rather than display any strong aesthetic sensibility. In Australia, the heavily,discordantly decorated buildings of the late Victorian period are often referred to as “Boom” style, referencing the economic boom of the 1880s that gave birth to the style.
The Great Exhibition and the birth of mass consumption
The Paris exhibition of 1925 that spread Art Deco across the world had its genisis in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. It was held in the Crystal Palace, a breathtakingly modern glass and iron building three times the size of St Paul’s Cathedral. A fittingly revolutionary building for this modernist event, it was designed by Joseph Paxton, a gardner who had previously designed nothing larger than a greenhouse, though admittedly that greenhouse, the “Great Stove” greenhouse at Chatsworth built in 1836 ,was the world’s largest glass building at the time. Unfortunately the Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936, a singular loss. I’ve included a link to some old photos on the podcast website, it must really have been amazing.
The Great Exhibition was a huge success. Six million visited over its 5 months, borne there by the new railways that were spreading their lines across Britain. The exhibits included almost every marvel of the Victorian age, pottery, porcelain, ironwork, furniture, perfumes, pianos, firearms, fabrics, steam hammers and hydraulic presses. There was even a pleasure garden fiilled with reconstructions of dinosaurs – the term “dinosaur” had only been invented 10 years earlier.
The theme of the exhibition was “a celebration of art in industry for the benefit of All Nations”, which indicates how just much the mass production that was introduced by the Industrial Revolution, plus the spread of global trade with the colonial age, drove and in turn was driven by, a revolution in consumption. Its a fascinating topic, and if you want to read more I can recommend a book “Empire of Things”, written in 2016 by Frank Trentman. I’ve included a link on the podcast website.
Prior to the 1800s, there wasn’t much manufactured or imported goods. And these goods tended to be reserved for the wealthy, the 1%. The mass of the population tended to rely on local hand crafted goods, often made by themselves: the home was at least as much a workplace as an oasis of domestic comfort. And as hand-crafted goods are expensive to make, and as people were infinitely less wealthy in these pre-indistrial times, they had less “things”. When the comfortably middle-class William Shakespeare died in 1616, his will specified things like a silver bowl and his “second-best bed” alongside his houses and his interest in the Globe theatre.
But the growth of industry and trade meant that western society got wealthier and that there were more things to buy especially for home furnishings. Mass consumption was born,. An 1874 survey of skilled workers in Massachusetss found at all of them had a carpet in their parlour A significant proprotion had carpets in all rooms of theoi rhouses, and many had a sewing machine or piano besides. Britain in 1874 produced 32 million pieces of wallpaper, an 6-fold increase in the space of 30 years. And this pattern of mass consumption was repeated in all countries as they industrialised.
Indistrialisation had made goods infinitely cheaper, but they were often of dubious aesthic value. In wallpaper for instance, developments in industrial lithography meant it was possible to produce highly detailed, multiicoloured patterns. So wallpapers often showed 3-dimensional landscapes and hunting scenes. You could even deck your halls with wallpaper covered with reproductions of the Crystal Palace. Such pieces might have showed off the advances in printing technoogy, but lacked any sense of balance or restraint. A bit like the early days of PowerPoint, where people went wild on clip-art and transition animations.
Even France, the arbiter of Western taste, succumbed to the lure of cut-price luxury for all in the form of mass produced copies of art works. Ferdinand Barbedienne and Achille Collas developed a process for making minature bronze replicas of statues and soon houses all over Europe were filled with pint-sizedcopies of Michelango’s David and the headless Victory of Samothrace. And Parisian printer Le Maison Legras offered over 2,000 different coluor lithographic reproductions, from still lives to historic scenes to landscapes.
The artistic world reacted with horror to the aesthic excesses of mass produced industrial designthat was showcased in the Great Exhibition The textile worker William Morris who was to become the figurehead of the Arts & Crafts movement – I’ll talk more about this shortly - visted the Exhibition with his family as a 17-year-old. A sensitive, soul, he was so overwhelmed with what he saw he famously rushed outside and threw up. John Ruskin, an art critic who would be the key sponsor of the Arts & Crafts movement, was similarly unimpressed. The magnificent Crystal Palace he dismissed as”a cucumber-frame between two chimneys’”- a cucumber frame being a type of greeenhouse.
The issue of steering public taste in this new age of mass consumption became a pressing concern. Some of the profits from the Great Exhibition were used to establish “The Museum of Manufactures”,. The Museum opened in 1852, one year after the Great Exhibition, with the aim of educating the public on the principles of good design.
The museum’s first attempt at steering public taste was unfortuatenly a bit of a disaster. An exhibition of 87 popular but poorly designed goods was held at “The Gallery of False Principles” so that the public could be educated in what bad taste looked like. In particular the exhibition called out as kitsch items with the realistic decoration that modern industry was so adept at reproducing, such as landscapes on wallpaper and gas lamps shaped like a lily. The public however were not convinced. Charles Dickens had his character Mr Crumpet pay a visit to the” Chamber of Horrors” as the press called it:
“I could have cried sir. I was ashamed of the pattern of my own trowsers for I saw a piece of them hung up there as a horror. I dared not pull out my pocket hankerchied while anyone was by, lest I be seen dabbingthe perspiration from my forehead with a wreath of coral. I saw it all: when I went home I found that I had been living among the horrors up to that hour. The paper in my parlour contains four kinds of birds, besides bridges and pagodas. “
The exhibition at the “Gallery of False Principles was not a success, and it closed after two weeks. This was a rare misstep for the new Museum of Manufacturers: it then went from strength to strength and eventually moved to South Kengsington and became the fabulous Victoria and Albert Museum. But this argument between the public and the intelligensia on what consituted “good taste” would never go away.
Whilst the general public may have been happy with their wallpaper with four kinds of birds, bridges and pagodas, the Great Exhibition sparked an artistic response in opposition that become known as the Arts & Crafts movement.Sponsored by John Ruskin and led by William Morris, the movement’s solution to the modern challenge of machine-made applied art was to reject indistrialisation altogether. Strongly socialist and envornmental in its outlook, it saw the indistrial system as inherently evil: factory labour destroyed craftsmanship whilst despoiling the landscape. Their solution was to return to an imagined golden age of medieval craftsmanship, reviving national styles and the ancient craft guilds. The Arts and Crafts movement was one of the first explicit responses to the forces of industrialisation, and so can be considered one of the first modernist movements.
The Arts and Crafts style continued to be place a strong emphasis on decoration. But in wallpaper and textiles for instance it favoured repetative flat, styalised patterns rather than realistic 3-dimensional patterns. And there was a strong emphasis on the revival of historic, national styles, especially from Britain’s gothic period, the heyday of craftsman guilds. The movement also valued what they termed “honesty in materials”: wood and brick were left bare rather than rendered or painted. Stonework was often artificially roughed - “rusticated” was the technical term – rather than smoothed.
The influence of Art&Craft’s movement’ steadily increased for the next 60-odd years up until the eve of WW1. It spread across Western Europe and especially influential in Germany and Austria, influencing national revival styles by the Deutscher Werkbund. In the US, it influenced the “American Romanesque” of Henry Hobson Richardson and later the “Prarie” school of Frank Lloyd Wright.
With the Arts and Crafts movement, the applied arts mantel at the end of the 1800s had passed from France to England. France certainly participated in the Arts & Crafts movement, notably the gothic revival movement under Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who led the restoration of Saint-Chapelle, Notre Dame and the town of Carcassone, and was very much influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin. France though was now more a participant than a leader. But Paris was planning an event that would launch a style that would help it regain its status as the leader in style and fashion. The event was the 1900 Paris Exposition, and the style was Art Nouveau.
The 1900 Paris Exhibition and the Art Nouveau explosion.
The success of the Great Exhibition of 1851 sparked a golden age of international exhibitions that continued for the next 90 years up until 1939. World expos continue – there was one in in Dubai in 2022 , and Austalian listeners might recall there was one in Brisbane in 1988. But they are but a pale shadow of those held 1851 and 1939. Held roughly every 3 and a half years, interrupted only by world wars, they were huge in scale and visited by tens of millions. The Paris Expo of 1889 saw the construction of the Eifel tower. Chicago’s world fair in 1893 invented the ferris wheel, 80 meters high. The London Eye by way of comparison is 135m high. The St Louis Fair in 1904 allegedly introduced to a hungry worldthe hot dog, hamburger, ice cream cone and fairy floss to a hungry world. Melbourne held one in 1880 and you can still visit the exhibition building, one of the oldest still standing.
Paris had already held very successful expos in 1855, 1867, 1878 and 1889, each one larger than the last. And the expo of 1900 would be its biggest yet. 112 hectares was set aside in the heart of Paris, plus a further 104 at Bois de Vincennes. And it was especially significant because it came at the birth of the new century. France had got wind that it’s hated rival Germany – the bitterness of the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 was still very fresh in peoples’ minds – were planning to an expo in 1900, and they decided to pre-empt Germany’s plans and snatch it for themselves, because as a the organisers said:
The exposition of 1900 will define the philosophy and express the synthesis of the 19th century."
The Paris Expo of 1900 saw the city at the peak of what would come to be known as “la belle epoch”, a golden age of wealth, glamour and confidence that wasultimately snuffed out by the transformative horror WW1 . The economy was enjoying a long boom, and the population of Paris swelled 11% in 10 years, one of the most densly populated cities in the world The Metro would finally be completed, as well as the huge railway station the Garde de North. France’s international reputation, which had been tarnished by the long scandal of the Dreyfuss affair, and led to several countries to consider boycotting the Exposition, would be resolved with Captain Dreyfuss receiving a presidential pardon in September 1889.
The fin-de-siecle 1900 Exposition carried so many expectations that it was not surprising that it fell short in many areas, and indeed it marks the end of the first phase of the great exhibitions showcasing a confident progression of industrial and scientific progress. Whilst it achieved the biggest attendance of any expo to date – 51m visitors over its 7 months run – it fell short of its projected 60m. There was less emphasis on displays of industrial and technological progress as in previous exhibitions, and more on funfairs and entertainments. It was less expo and more “world’s fair”. The metro was completed for the opending, but there was no grand signature edifice like the Eifel Tower of the 1889 expo, 11 years earlier. Indeed, one critic unfavourably compared the signature buildings of the 1900 expo, especially the Grand and Petit Palais, to the Eifel tower of the Expo of 1889:
In 1889, iron bravely offered itself to us naked and unencumbered, asking us to judge its architectural potential. Since that time, it seems as though iron has experienced the shame of the first man after its original sin, and feels the necessity of covering its nudity. Today, iron covers itself with plaster and staff. It hides itself in casings of mortar and cement.
2 large art exhibitions were held, one showcasing the past 100 years, the Centale, and one focused on the new art of last 10 years, the Décennale. But due to curators being nervous of the latest developments in art, the Décennale was judged less interesting and indeed innovative that the 100 year retrospective, which included paintings by Cezanne, Monet, Manet and Gauguin.
But there was one undoubted triumphof the 1900 expo, and that was to establish Paris at the forefront of a new design movement and that was Art Nouveau.
Art Nouveau was one of the first modernist attempts to develop an orginal, non-historical style appropriate to the new age. Indeed in it’s earliest incarnation was in Glasgow in the late 1880s wher it was known as the Modern Style. The pioneer here was the brilliant Charles Rennie Mackintosh. If you are lucky enough to have visited Glasgow you might have visited the Glasgow School of Arts by Mackintosh – I’ve provided a link on the podcast website. In a shattering loss to that City’s patrimony, the School burnt down in 2018 just after competing major renovations after another fire 4 years earlier.
Modern Style evolved from the Arts and Crafts movement that I discussed earlier. But whereas the Arts & Crafts movement sought inspiration from national historical styles, especially from the Gothic period, Modern Style sought to break with history and create a new style, drawing inspiration from the sinuous forms of nature. They also incorporated idealised and often highly eroitic depictions of women – indeed a number of designers like Alfonse Mucha and Edward Beardsley would face accusations of pornography.
The movement was also greatly influenced by the traditional Japanese woodblock print-making art known as Ukiyo-e. Such prints had become common in the West after the opening up of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1853. Their unusual perspeciives and compositions, their use of flat colours and outline forms, had a big influence on new movements like impressionism, and especially on the revolution in advertising posters. Indeed, Modern Style had some of its greatest influence in graphic design, with designers such as Toulouse Lautrec, Edward Beardsley and Alfonse Mucha.
As well as being modernist in rejecting historical styles and inspirations, the Modern Style movement was modernist in that it sought to continue the Arts & Crafts program to expand the scope of fine art beyond art and sculpture to all the aspects of applied art: jewlery, furniture, and graphic design. It developed the concept of architecture as a gesamkunswerk, the German word meaning “total work of art”, a concept which appears in modernism again and again. In an Art Nouveau house like Gaudi’s Casa Battlo in Barcelona or the Stoclet Palace in Brussels by Josef Hoffman, the architect designed every aspect of the house in a consistent style: funiture, doorhandles, lightfittings, cutlery. Hoffman even designed a dress for Madame Stoclet so she wouldn’t clash with her living room décor. Modern Style’s idea of Gesamkunstverk had a spiritual aim: by immersing people in an evironment filled with imagery drawn from primordial nature and the erotic, a new outlook and awareness would come about, vibrant, geniune, modern, a break with the tired and outmoded mindsets of the past.
Britain’s Modern Style struck a chord with designers throughout the western world, attracted particularly by its associations of modernism. It was known as Modernismo in Spain, Modernas in Lithuania, Modern in Russia and Ukraine. its spread facilitated by the introduction of art magazines with colour lithography. Indeed, in Germany and much of Scandanavia it was known as the Jugendstil, Jugend style, named for an art magazine that featured it. In Austria it was known as the Secessionsstil, named for artists of the Secession movement like Gustav Klimt.
Paris also latched onto the Modern Style. The Maison de l'Art Nouveau, a Parisian gallery owned by a Franco-German dealer Siegfired Bing, opended in 1896 to promote the new style and eventually and gave the movement is best-known name. The distinctive and flamboyant cast-iron entrances to the new Metro – edicules they are called - were designed in the style. Town planning rules in Paris that had limited the hight and decorations of facades were relaxed at the end of the 1800s which allowed some dramatic apartment blocks in the new style, such as the Castel Béranger, still standing, a welcome change to the monotony of previous facades.
The Paris expo of 1900 would promote the new style to the world, and that’s why we know it today as Art Nouveau and not Modern Style. To visit the Expo was to be immersed in a world of Art Nouveau. Several national pavillions showcased the style, either in the design of the pavillions themselves or in the craftwork on display. But it was the French who made the biggest display of the style. The interiors of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais were in the new style, plus endless displays of Art Nouveau-styled works by prestige manufactures like Lalique crystal, Sevres porcelain, jewellry by Cartier. After visiting the expo one could enjoy dinner amongst the art nouveau interiors at Maxims and Le Train Blu, then catch a show at the Moulin Rouge, adverstised in the Art Nouveau posters of Tolouse Lautrec. Whatever failings the 1900 expo had, it was a triumph for Art Nouveau, and indeed the 1900 expo is synonymous with Art Nouveau, just as the 1851 Great Exposition was synonymous with the Crystal Palace, and Eifel tower synonymous with the 1886 exposition. Paris had reclaimed its position as the Western World’s style leader,. At least for the moment.
A short lived triumph
Art Nouveau burst like a skyrocket in the world of fashion, and like skyrocket it faded fast. By 1910 the style had pretty well completed died out. And this was due to a number of factors. For a start, the style was extremely ornate, which made it very difficult to adapt the designs to mass production. Art Nouveau always remained a style for the extremely wealthy. And as the world became increasingly indistrialised, the number of skilled craftsmen and artisans declined. It would be pretty well impossible to attempt to build today a neighborhood of Art Nouveau mansions like those in Barcelona or Riga, even if you were a Bill Gates or Elon Musk – you just couldn’t find enough craftsmen.
Also, like Victorian eclecticism, the style demanded high skill of its designers. Done well, it could be sublime. But done poorly, as it often was, it could be, as one critic described it, “nightmarish”, with its grotesque shapes and garish colours.
Also, it narrow focus meant that designers soon exhausted its artistic potential. You would think that nature and semi-naked women would provide a pretty well inexhaustible source of design inspiration, but after a short time designs became derivative and repetitive, especially its use of the characteristic “whiplash curve”. Critics mocking called it the “eel style” or “noodle style”. And the characteristic “Mucha woman” beloved of Art Nouveau posters became, with lavish swirls of hair, also become a repetive trope. Art Nouveau ignored all the rich historical aethetic traditions of Western art. And it also ignrored the inspiration potential of industry, science and technology, all forces of the modernist age. In another Exposition a quarter of a century later Paris would again popularise to the world a modernist style that would be much more eclectic in its influences at that style would become known as Art Deco.
On that expectant note, lets leave our podcast for now. Join me next time when I’ll conclude the story of the 1925 Paris Exposition, and how Paris sought to reclaim its leadership in applied arts from a resugant Germany and in the process introduced the wonderful Art Deco to the world. I look forward to speaking to you then.