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Paris Art Nouveau on 1902

A bit of history

Paris, along with London, was one of the main players in the great Industrial Revolution of the XIXth century, and after the half of that century, thanks to Napoleon III, was gifted a second youth that lasted well past the dawn of our century.
   The Belle Epoque took place among the wide boulevards designed by Haussman, Paris is the cradle of the european culture, of the European way to the arts, especially figurative ones.
   And suddenly, like in a dream, among the imposing buildings 3rd Empire Style, along the tree furnished boulevards of the (once) suburbs, wonderful Art Nouveau buildings pop up, most of the times just a little house, a small palace, sometimes a more important one, but always on the private ones, almost never official or public ones.

The Underground Experiment

Paris, along with pretty little palaces, holds, deep down in its belly, the only experiment in which Art Nouveau is part of a project that touches not the single building, but a broader project, that involves a whole urban zone, if not all the city.
   This is exactly the spirit that lived within the great players of the modernist movement: to bring art in the every-day life, in the life of everyone, and this can happen of course in the house, but this dream can be fulfilled only in towns, cities, in the streets.

   It’s the famous style Metro by Guimard, that marked, for too a few years, the appearance of the Ville lumiére. What we can admire now, wonderful Underground entrances with iron-worked light posts, is just but a small part of the magnificent project of this genial architect.   

My Trip

I’ve been to Paris many times, and, with respect to Art Nouveau, I’ve only seen some Underground Station and some department store, but I knew that the city held many more secrets, well kept secrets, hidden ones, aside from the city-centre and the touristic roads. August 1997. My trip begins.
   To find such hidden treasures I had to flip through every book on the subject in every book store I could find, and, even if Paris is known as an Art Nouveau city, nonetheless it was amazing the scarcity of books on this subject.
   I had to walk in quiet suburbs, residential zones, just to see those buildings for the first time. It was a mysterious man, the one that walked unknown sunny roads and took photos of forgotten houses that are mostly neglected by tourists.
   I dare say the effect on the walker-by was similar to the one made by my mysterious fellow and me when we walked the streets of Turin, my birthplace, taking photos of wonderful buildings, always ignored by my citizens and by the always too rare visitor.

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Aknowledgemts

Thanks to all the book-shop keepers of France that allow people, as a sign of civilization, to read books in book-shops.
   I'm ashamed I can't say the same thing of Italian ones...