ART NOUVEAU

The Ecole de Nancy, the Alliance Provinciale des Industries d'Art, was formally founded in 1901. That year also marked the first Art Nouveau architectural work in Nancy. Louis Majorelle invited a young Paris architect Henri Sauvage to build his house, a project in which he was assisted by two Nancy craftsmen Jacques Gruber and Henri Royer, and the Paris artists Alexandre Bigot and Francis Jourdain. Villa Majorelle soon became a seminal work. The same year, the architects Charles and Émile André, in collaboration with Jacques Gruber and Eugène Vallin, started work on the Grands Magasins Vaxelaire, inaugurating the modernisation of the city centre; shops, banks, bars, brasseries and hotels became the avant-garde of the new architecture and the new society. It was also in 1901 that the architects Émile André and Henry Gutton designed the housing estate in Saurupt Park on the lines of Vésinet, the classic town-planning model, as a reaction, only partially successful, to the anarchic growth of Nancy and in response to people’s new expectations in terms of urban housing. These pioneering experiments created a range of programs, typologies, shapes and decorative elements: architectural ceramics, wrought-iron work, stained glass... that left a lasting impression on Nancy’s townscape.

The Ecole de Nancy Museum

The Museum stands in a park that was restored in 1999, with the aim of recreating its original atmosphere using plants that were popular at the end of the 19thC. The Gardens still have their original aquarium, a remarkable work doubtless designed by Lucien Weissenburger in 1904. One of the first Art Nouveau funerary monuments can be seen in the lower gardens. Finally, the oak door made to order by Eugène Vallin for Emile Gallé’s workshops, was installed in the new extension to the wing in 1925..

Réseau Art Nouveau Network

In 1999, on the initiative of the Historic Monuments and Sites Department of the Brussels-Capital Regional Council, a number of European cities with a rich Art Nouveau heritage, from  Helsinki to Barcelona and Glasgow to Budapest, decided to come together and form the first European Cooperation Network. Surveys, studies, the protection and valorisation of their Art Nouveau heritage are the key concepts in the ambitious program planned for the years to come by the Réseau Art Nouveau Network. Enterprising and committed, the Network has a rigorously scientific approach, keeping both the scientific world and the general public informed and making them more aware of their shared cultural values thanks to this relatively recent heritage and its Europe-wide dimension.
http://www.artnouveau-net.eu

Additional information

The Ecole de Nancy website : http://www.ecole-de-nancy.com
.Click here to download the Tourist Office’s Art Nouveau itinerary