By the time the Maison du Peuple in Brussels opened three years later in 1899 and Horta’s early career reached its apex of achievement, the Art Nouveau was already a favourite mode with young French designers and generally in rising favour in fin de siècle Paris. As a result even established architects were not averse to introducing its curves in interior decoration and for the detailing of exposed metal structural elements, although most of them had little understanding of its real possibilities. The giant stone colonnades of the Grand Palais in Paris, designed in 1897 and built in 1898-9 for the Exhibition of 1900, were presumably intended to rival those of the plaster palaces of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893; but behind them the architectural team of H.-A.-A. Deglane (1855-1931), L.-A. Louvet (1860-1936), both pupils of Richardson’s master, André, and A.-F.-T. Thomas (1847-1907) provided a vast iron-and-glass interior detailed in a coarse sort of Art Nouveau way that is quite unrelated to the academic treatment of the exterior.[[383]]
The entrance feature, designed by René Binet (1866-1911), and the Pavilion Bleu by E.-A.-R. Dulong (1860-?), the principal exhibition restaurant in the Champ de Mars, were even more whole-heartedly à la mode. One can hardly regret, however, that these gaudy structures, unlike the Grand Palais, were only temporary. A much superior example of Art Nouveau decoration, Maxim’s Restaurant in the Rue Royale, remains intact as it was redecorated in 1899 by Louis Marney. This is full of period flavour and still splendidly maintained, but it has no real existence as interior architecture. Soon the Art Nouveau would be vulgarized in dozens of cafés, large and small, all over Europe. Of these the Brasserie Universelle in the Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris by Niermans, carried out two or three years after Maxim’s and lately demolished, was perhaps the most sumptuous; there, however, the new mode was eclectically combined with a lush Neo-Rococo.[[384]]
The architect Charles Plumet (1861-1925), working with the decorator Tony Selmersheim (b. 1871), built in 1898 at 67 Avenue Malakoff the first of a series of houses in which Art Nouveau decoration was grafted on to a general scheme of design that was more or less Late Gothic. This has also been demolished. Such eclecticism, based more usually on eighteenth-century models, is characteristic of the rapid Parisian dilution of the Art Nouveau and doubtless played a great part in its early descent into the obsolescence of the démodé. Yet Auguste Perret (1874-1954), in a large block of flats built in 1902 at 119 Avenue de Wagram, exploited in masonry a heavier and richer sort of Art Nouveau than Plumet’s with considerable success (Plate [134A]). This edifice is in curious contrast to the flats of ferro-concrete at 25 bis Rue Franklin, designed by Perret in 1902 also, with which his career is generally considered to begin. Even the latter, moreover, have considerably more Art Nouveau feeling in their panels of faience mosaic than is usually recognized (see Chapter [18]). The block in the Avenue Wagram is quite typical of French production in these years but of much higher than average quality.
The most accomplished French Art Nouveau designer remained Guimard, the first to take up the mode. His most conspicuous works, however, the Paris Métro entrances of 1898-1901, lie outside the normal realm of architecture (Plate [137B]). These are executed entirely in metal of the most sinuous and vegetable-like character, and their extreme virtuosity is the more surprising in that they consist of metal castings produced in series. His no longer extant Humbert de Romans Building of 1902 in the Rue Saint-Didier in Paris, on the other hand, illustrated the usual difficulties of Art Nouveau architects when working with masonry. The exterior was neither Neo-Rococo nor Neo-Flamboyant but curiously crude and gawky in its originality, like his Castel Béranger, with none of the Art Nouveau grace that even Plumet sometimes evoked with success, or the rather lush ornamentation of Perret’s block of flats in the Avenue Wagram. The auditorium inside, however, employed curved structural members even more boldly than Horta had done in that of the Maison du Peuple. Here Guimard succeeded in giving a masculine vigour to the rather feminine forms of a mode already passing its brief prime.
As late as 1911, however, Guimard remained faithful to the Art Nouveau in an extensive range of contiguous blocks of flats that he built at 17-21 Rue La Fontaine near the Castel Béranger. For his own flat there he designed ironwork as boldly abstract as advanced mid twentieth-century sculpture in metal, but also as suavely elegant as comparable Rococo detail of the eighteenth century. The exteriors, moreover, which are entirely of stone, have a great deal of the refinement and restraint of Horta’s Hallet house of 1906 in Brussels. They are, however, more plastically treated with boldly moulded bay windows and attic storeys. Except for Perret’s, few Parisian blocks of flats of the period rival these in interest or in quality of design and execution.
Three Paris department stores of the early years of the century continued to use the metal-and-glass interior structure of Boileau and Eiffel’s Bon Marché, with notable success. In presumable emulation of Horta’s Innovation in Brussels, moreover, the architects of two of these extended considerably the external use of exposed metal introduced by Sédille at the Printemps in the eighties. These two stores remain, with Guimard’s Métro entrances, the most prominent Parisian examples of the Art Nouveau. The main branch of the Samaritaine[[385]] in the Rue de la Monnaie near the Pont Neuf was built in 1905 by C.-R.-F.-M. Jourdain (1847-1935). This has several fine galleried courts inside in the tradition of the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie of the 1830s, but it is even more distinguished for the sturdy scale and the straightforward design of the external metal frame (Plate [133]). The actual structural members are hardly bent at all by the exigencies of the mode; but they were characteristically ornamented not only with decorative metalwork but also with inset panels of polychrome faience, now painted over. On the north front, however, other panels, here of faience mosaic, remain visible; these are of even greater delicacy and elegance than Perret’s foliate panels in his block of flats of 1902-3 in the Rue Franklin.
The contemporary Grand Bazar de la Rue de Rennes, now the Magasins Réunis, at 134-136 Rue de Rennes by H.-B. Gutton (b. 1874) is generally fussier in design than the Samaritaine. Gutton achieved, however, a more completely volumetric expression, emphasizing the lightness and the thinness of metal-and-glass construction somewhat as the early monuments of the 1840s and 1850s in England had done. New shop-windows below and the removal of the open grillework that once rose against the sky have now much diminished its effectiveness. Binet’s earlier galleried court of 1900 at the Printemps was burned out in 1923, unfortunately. With the lifts rising in the corners and the staircases swooping down in great splashing curves, this court was altogether superior to his Entrance to the Exhibition of 1900 and even to Frantz Jourdain’s small later courts in the Samaritaine. It seemed somehow to epitomize what a great metropolitan department store ought to look like somewhat as Garnier’s Opéra epitomizes what later generations came to expect of an opera-house. If Prince Danilo supped with the ‘damen’ of Maxim’s, we can be sure the ‘Merry Widow’ and the ‘Pink Lady’ did their shopping here.
It was the Art Nouveau structures at the Exhibition of 1900 which first focused public attention on the new mode, occasioning also that rapid Parisian vulgarization which brought its early end. At the exhibition, besides the crude but conspicuous things designed by Binet and Dulong that have been mentioned, there was the Pavillon Art Nouveau Bing by Georges de Feure (1868-1928), a designer rather than an architect, which had rooms by Edward Colonna, back from working for Tiffany in America, and others of the best artists and craftsmen employed by Bing; but their exhibits represented decoration, not interior architecture properly speaking. However, by 1900 the Art Nouveau was not at all the strictly Parisian manifestation that it must have seemed to most of those who visited the exhibition. The Germans, notably, had already taken it up with great enthusiasm, beginning about 1897.
The Studio Elvira of 1897-8 in Munich by August Endell (1871-1925) had a plain stucco façade cut by a few strategically placed windows of varied shape; but this façade was splashed across the centre with a very large abstract relief of orientalizing character resembling something half-way between a dragon and a cloud. Endell’s studio, if not the first manifestation of the Art Nouveau in Germany, was certainly the most striking; moreover, it followed immediately upon the showing of Van de Velde’s Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of 1897. Already, however, in that portion of the Wertheim Department Store in Berlin in the Leipzigerstrasse which was begun in 1896, Alfred Messel (1853-1909) had used a great deal of exposed metal and glass and even perhaps modified the detail a bit towards the Art Nouveau. This was five years before Horta designed the Innovation Department Store in Brussels and ten years earlier than Jourdain’s Samaritaine in Paris. Messel made the spacing of his heavily moulded masonry piers quite wide and opened up completely the bays between. The result was at least as close to Sullivan’s Gage Building of 1898-9 as to the Paris department stores of a decade later. In those portions of this department store that Messel added in 1900-4, however, the façades, although highly stylized, were of rather Late Gothic character and certainly quite remote from the Art Nouveau.
In 1899 Van de Velde moved from Paris to Berlin. There he designed the Hohenzollern Kunstgewerbehaus, a shop parallel to Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris in its interests and its activities. In the next year he carried out the Haby Barber Shop and the Havana Cigar Store, two of the most extravagant of all Art Nouveau shop interiors. With the opening of the new century, however, in his full-scale architecture Van de Velde moved almost as rapidly away from the Art Nouveau as did Messel, although in a different direction (see Chapter [20]). By this time strong counter-influences were reaching Germany from Glasgow and Vienna.