Guimard.(Books About Antiques)(Hector Guimard, Architect Designer 1867-1942)(Book Review)

Hector Guimard, the French master of art nouveau, is remembered today for his fantastical entrances to Paris Metro stations and for not much else. That is until Georges Vigne, author; and Felipe Ferre, photographer, collaborated on Hector Guimard, Architect Designer 1867-1942. They begin: "Any book on Hector Guimard must either begin or end with an elegy for the large number of his buildings that no longer exist." Their goal was to resurrect in word and picture and in chronological order all of Guimard's architectural and decorative projects, realized and unrealized, preserved and destroyed.

Guimard's patrons were nouveau riche members of the middle class, ready to show the old guard a thing or two and simultaneously publicize their businesses by building in the latest style. Predictably the old guard looked down its collective nose at the strange fluid lines of art nouveau, which they disparaged as l'art nouille (noodle art). It had no place in the classical canon nor could it comfortably coexist with its successor, the squared-off art deco style. In no time the French judged the innovations of art nouveau ostentatious, then vulgar, and finally and mortally, old-fashioned. Only in Barcelona did the daring constructions of the art nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi survive, and that was more for political than aesthetic reasons. As Vigne writes, Catalonia was "a region flaunting its economic power in the shadow of a Madrid, which ignored the Art Nouveau movement completely."

Details of Guimard's life are extremely sketchy, and surviving papers are almost nonexistent. He received his artistic education at the Ecole nationale des arts decoratifs in Paris, where, beginning in 1891 he taught perspective drawing to the girls' section. In 1909, at the age of forty-two, he married Adeline Oppenheim, an American painter of considerable means who lived in Paris. The couple moved to New York City in 1938, perhaps because his wife was Jewish, and there Guimard died in the Adams Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Eightieth Street in 1942. By then he was a mere footnote in the history of architecture, but his faithful widow kept the flame alive, leaving her estate to the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts in Paris with the stipulation that the revenue generated by the capital should be awarded every four years to the French student, who, in his or her final year of study, produces the most innovative proposal for a building or monument.

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Guimard was a great self-promoter who created twenty-four color postcards showing his buildings. These all bore his name and address, the address of the building illustrated, and the headline "Le Style Guimard." However, "perhaps because the style did not actually exist outside of the architect's own work, the effort to promote it might have struck the public as megalomaniacal." Certainly his professional colleagues found his advertising "a breech of decorum that ...