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The passion for Art Nouveau was different in France. Instead of decorating with schematically stylised flora and fauna, French artists concentrated on embellishing new forms with sculpted ornamentation that retained the flower’s natural grace and showed the figure to best advantage. This was already the focus of French exhibitors in 1889. But those artists were looking for novelty in absolute realism. Their successors remembered that the refined art of the eighteenth century had derived its charm from the free interpretation of nature, not its rigorous imitation. The best among the artist craftsmen endeavoured to instil their designs with the gentle harmony of line and form found in old French masterpieces and to decorate them with all the novelty that flora and fauna could provide when freely interpreted. Although the best furniture makers, such as Charles Plumet, Tony Selmersheim, Louis Sorel, and Eugene Gaillard, had little use for sculpture, it was sometimes a handy aid, as seen in certain ensembles by Jules Desbois and Alexandre Charpentier. By employing freely interpreted flora and the human figure, these two designers (who also designed stunning contemporary jewellery) were able to produce dynamic new poetic effects in which shadow and light played an important role. Such was also the case with René Lalique, whose works evoked exquisite fantasies, or the more robust jewels executed by Jean-Auguste Dampt, Henry Nocq, and François-Rupert Carabin, for example. French objects such as these were more sumptuous and more powerfully affecting than the graphic rebuses seen in Brussels and Berlin.

Art Nouveau exploded in Paris in 1895, a year that opened and closed with important milestones. In January, the poster designed by Alphonse Mucha for Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Gismonda was plastered all over the capital. This was the event that heralded the Art Nouveau poster style, which Eugène Grasset had previously tackled, in particular in his posters for Encres Marquets (1892) and the Salon des Cent (1894). Then December saw the opening of Bing’s Art Nouveau boutique, which was entirely devoted to propagating the new genre.

Jacques Gruber, Roses and Seagulls.

Leaded glass, 404 × 300 cm.

Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, Nancy.

It was also around this time that Hector Guimard built Castel Béranger (circa 1890). Two years later, Baron Edouard Empain, the engineer and financer of the Paris Metro construction project, selected Guimard to design the now famous Metro stations. Empain’s choice, however, was strongly opposed at the time. Some feared that Guimard’s architecture represented too new an art form and that the style, derided as style nouille (literally translated “noodle style”), would ruin the look of the French capital. An obstinate jury prevented Guimard from completing all the stations, in particular the station near Garnier’s Opera: Art Nouveau appeared totally at odds with Garnier’s style, which was a perfect example of the historicism and eclecticism the new movement was fighting against.

At the same time, French brasseries and restaurants offered themselves as privileged sites for the development of the new trend. The Buffet de la Gare de Lyon opened in 1901. Rechristened Le Train Bleu in 1963, it counted Coco Chanel, Sarah Bernhardt, and Colette among its many regulars. With the addition of Maxim’s restaurant on the rue Royale, dining establishments henceforth became perfect models of Art Nouveau.

In 1901 the Alliance des Industries d’Art, also known as the Ecole de Nancy (School of Nancy), was officially founded. In accordance with Art Nouveau principles, its artists wanted to abolish the hierarchies that existed between major arts like painting and sculpture and the decorative arts, which were then considered minor. The School of Nancy artists, whose most fervent representatives were Emile Gallé, the Daum brothers (Auguste and Antonin) and Louis Majorelle, produced floral and plant stylisations, expressions of a precious and fragile world that they nevertheless wanted to see industrially reproduced and distributed on a much larger scale, beyond coteries of galleries and collectors.

Art Nouveau ultimately proliferated endemically throughout the world, often through the intermediary of art magazines such as The Studio, Arts et Idées and Art et Décoration, whose illustrations were henceforth enhanced with photos and colour lithography. As the trend spread from one country to the next, it changed by integrating local colour, transforming itself into a different style according to the city it was in. Its breadth of influence included cities as distant as Glasgow, Barcelona and Vienna and even reached such faraway and unlikely spots as Moscow, Tunis and Chicago. All the different names used to describe the movement along its triumphal march – Art Nouveau, Liberty, Jugendstil, Secessionstil, and Arte Joven – emphasised its newness and its break with the past, in particular with the mid-nineteenth century’s outdated historicism. In reality, Art Nouveau drew from many past and exotic styles: Japanese, Celtic, Islamic, gothic, baroque and rococo, among others. In the decorative arts, Art Nouveau was welcomed with unprecedented enthusiasm, but it also met with scepticism and hostility, as it was often considered strange and of foreign origin. Germany, for example, disparaged the new decorative art as the “Belgian tapeworm style”. France and England, traditional enemies, tended to trade blame, with the English retaining the French term “Art Nouveau” and the French borrowing the term “Modern Style” from the English.

Art Nouveau reached its apogee in 1900, but quickly went out of fashion. By the next major Universal Exposition in Turin (1902), a reaction was clearly underway. In the end, Art Nouveau strayed far from its original aspirations, becoming an expensive and elitist style that, unlike its successor Art Deco, did not lend itself to cheap imitation or mass production.

Georges Clairin, Sarah Bernhardt, 1876.

Oil on canvas, 200 × 250 cm.

Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris.

Paul Berthon, Liane de Pougy aux Folies-Bergère.

Colour lithograph.

Victor and Gretha Arwas collection.

Eugène Grasset, Snow-drop. Plate 32 from Plantes et leurs applications ornementales (Plants and their Application to Ornament), 1897.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Victor Prouvé, Salammbô, 1893.

Mosaic leather and bronze.

Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, Nancy.

René Lalique, Winged Female Figure, c. 1899.

Private collection, New York.

Hector Guimard, Castel Béranger, detail of entry and door to courtyard, 1895.

Paris.