‘Forgotten’ designer of art nouveau Métro entrances to get Paris museum | France

The “forgotten” designer of Paris’s most iconic Métro Station entrances and Art Nouveau buildings will be justified in the history of the city with a museum dedicated to his work.

Hector Guimard left a significant mark in the French capital in the early 1900s, and iron and glass fans created detailed and monumental Métro entrances similar to unopened insect wings.

The remaining station surrounds the curved cast iron on the top of the stylized métropolitan sign, which is similar to Valley Flowers Lilies and designed by Guimard, in postcards, touristic photos and style books. However, when it was founded in the early 1900s, many parcels were scandalous.

One critic declared the green paint “French -free, and the other said that the fancy signs were karşılık Confusing for children who try to learn their letters and children who are stupid for strangers”.

Art Nouveau was outdated and until 1913, transport officials lowered Guimard’s designs. By 1942, when Guimard died in New York at the age of 75, he and his American Jewish wife took refuge from the Nazis, already forgotten, and most of his work made love to the scrap pile.

“It may be surprising for foreign visitors, but the French never liked Art Nouveau, Fab said Fabien Choné, Guimard collector and president of Guimard. Hector Guimard diffusionA company that participated in the establishment of the new museum. “There was a great opposition to Guimard’s Métro entrances. While the visitors saw them as the magnificent symbols of Belle époque Métro, the Parisis criticized it for the spaghetti style and they could not understand why tourists loved them.”

When he returned to Paris in 1948, his wife Adeline, an artist shown in the 1899 Beaux-Arts Hall, worked without fatigue to protect and promote her husband’s heritage containing about 50 residential buildings.

Many donated his drawings and smaller creations, including furniture, to museums in the United States, and offered the couple’s art Nouveau house, Hôtel Guimard and his content to the state and then to the city. Both rejected the offer and the building furniture was transformed into circles with the mountain.

In the wave of modernism, which sweeps Europe after the war, it was sober and many Guimard Creations were declared and destroyed without history or artistic value. In 1970, the 167 Métro entrance described by Salvador Dalí, who drew tribute to Guimard, remained only 88.

Choné said: “After the war, every time the city did a job on the streets, they got rid of Guimard’s designs. Until the 1960s, it was demolished instead of logic protection.”

The museum will be founded in Paris’s 1910 in 1910 in Hôtel Mezzara, a four -storey building in Arrrondissement, which was designed by Guimard in 1910, including most of the signature iron works, including a magnificent glass light and chandeliers.

The building, which was initially a rich textile manufacturer from Venice and was later purchased by the Ministry of Education and used as a student accommodation until ten years ago, will undergo a two -year renewal before the end of 2027.

After opening, it will exhibit an archive of its designs and documents, as well as Guimard creations, known as Art Nouveau furniture and decorations.

“Especially in the United States, the recognition of Guimard in museums around the world, and when it creates some of the most important symbols of the city, it is nonsense to recognize anything in Paris,” he said.

Nicolas Horiot, an architect and president Le Cercle Guimard23 years ago, an association created to save Guimard’s designs and documents, the state and the Paris officials to recognize the work of the designer was a ten -year war, he said. He said the museum would confirm a historical wrong.

“After World War II, Guimard was completely forgotten. Art Nouveau no longer concerns people in the urban design of the 1960s and most of his parts were destroyed,” he said. “The revival began in 1970 with an exhibition in New York, but this was a step step. We see this museum as repairing an injustice to Guimard.”