“Art Nouveau Revival” Exhibition Review

We all love revivals. From leggings to New Romantics, classics just keep being reinvented (which begs the frightening question: can you hack the return of the perm?). Art and design may have their inherent qualities but they also succumb to the tides of fashion, as demonstrated by the Musée d’Orsay’s current design exhibition, “Art Nouveau Revival”. An atypical show, it avoids trying to define the nebulous character of the Art Nouveau movement, which was both geographically and conceptually disparate (no manifesto was ever drawn up between the likes of Antoni Gaudi, William Morris, Alfons Mucha, Rennie Mackintosh), and reevaluates reincarnations of the style throughout the 20th century, from the practical (chair design) to the ridiculous (paper dresses).

An example of Hector Guimard's designs for the Paris metro

Salvador Dali wrote an essay in 1933, “on the terrifying and comestible beauty of the modern’style architecture”, referring to Gaudi’s “Casa Batlló” and “Casa Mil

Tags: Art Nouveau, chair

Caroline Rossiter is a writer based in Paris, her work has appeared in European Comic Art and she blogs about art in Paris at thegreatexposition.com. ...read more