| Hector Guimard |
Article Index for Hector |
Website Links For Hector |
Information AboutHector Guimard |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT HECTOR GUIMARD | |
| 1867 births | |
| guimard, hector | |
| 1942 deaths | |
| french architects | |
| french decorative artists | |
| people from lyon | |
| art nouveau | |
|
Hector Guimard (Lyon, March 10 1867 - New York, May 20 1942 ) was an architect, who is widely considered today to be the most prominent representative of artists and architects who worked in the Art Nouveau style in France at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Within the international context of Art Nouveau, Guimard appears as an isolated sniper: he leaves no disciple behind him, nor any school, and this explains why history was for a long time tempted to regard him as a secondary player in this movement – an absence of posterity which contrasts with the extraordinary formal and typological profusion of his architectural and decorative work, where the architect gave the best of himself in a relatively short fifteen years of amazing creative activity. YEARS OF STUDY (1898)]] As of his studies of architecture, Guimard, like many other French nineteenth-century architects, matriculated to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in . The characteristic realization of this time, the Castel Béranger (1898), illustrates this moment of transition which sees the shock between these two heritages : on the medieval inspirated geometrical volumes of the carcass work spreads with profusion the organic line « in blow of whip » [http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/schoenauer/arch528/lect10/b12.jpg imported of Belgium. A FLASHING GLORY The Castel Béranger makes Guimard famous of the day at the following day and many orders then enable him to continue his aesthetic research always more – the stylistic harmony and continuity in particular (a major ideal of Art Nouveau ), which push him towards a quasi totalitarian design of the interior decoration, culminating in 1909 with the hotel Guimard (gift of wedding to his rich American wife) where ovoid rooms [http://lartnouveau.com/artistes/guimard/mozart_122/interieur/salle_mang_122.htm impose unique pieces of furniture, integral part of the building. If the well of light suitable for . The structural innovations do not miss either, as in the extraordinary concert hall Humbert-de-Romans (1901), where a complex frame splits the sound waves to lead to perfect acoustics ; or as in the Hôtel Guimard (1909), where the narrowness of the ground makes it possible to the architect to reject any carrying function on the external walls and thus to release the interior spaces arrangement, different from one floor to another [http://lartnouveau.com/documents/wiki/guimard/hotel_guimard_1er_et.jpg ; etc. Curious and inventive spirit, Guimard is also a precursor of the industrial standardization, insofar as he wishes to diffuse the new art on a large scale. In this field he knows a real success – in spite of the scandals – with his famous entries of the Parisian Subway flexible constructions where triumph the structural ornament principle of Viollet-le-Duc . The idea is taken up – but with less success – in 1907 with a catalogue of cast iron elements applicable to buildings : ''Artistic Cast Iron, Guimard Style'' [http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000053981.html . As for the global architectural space, the intrinsic design of his art objects proceed of the same ideal of formal continuity (which makes it possible to amalgamate all the practical functions in a single body, as with the ''Vase des Binelles'' of 1903) and linear design, as in the drawing of its pieces of furniture [http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000053975.html , harmonious and lightly silhouetted. His inimitable stylistic vocabulary proceeds of a particularly suggestive vegetable organicism, while remaining resolutely on the slope of abstraction. Flexible mouldings and nervous movements invest stone as well as wood ; in the two dimensions, Guimard creates true abstract compositions which adapt with same ease to stained glass (Mezzara hotel, 1910), to ceramics panel [http://lartnouveau.com/artistes/guimard/lille/coilliot/hall/coil4.htm (Coilliot house, 1898), to wrought iron (Castel Henriette, 1899), to wallpaper [http://aplressources.free.fr/GUIMARDOC/5mi.html (Castel Béranger, 1898) or to fabric [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/euwf/hob_49.85.11.htm] (Guimard hotel, 1909). OBLIVION But in spite of the fireworks of innovations and various demonstrations, the press and the public quickly grew tired of Guimard--not so much with his work, but his personality. While his relationship with the clergyman who commissioned him to build the Humbert de Romans Concert Hall (arguably his most complete expression of his Art Nouveau style) blossomed from their first meeting in 1898, by the time of its completion in 1901 it had soured completely and Guimard's patron had left France. Within five years the magnificent concert venue was demolished; it is now only know through photographs and articles from art journals. As a worthy representant of Art Nouveau , Guimard's work is itself victim of inherent contradictions of the ideals of the movement: his most completed creations remained financially inaccessible to the greatest number, and on the contrary his attempts at standardization of materials, parts, and measures never could keep pace with his very personal architectural vocabulary. Guimard was completely forgotten when he died in New York in 1942, where the fear of war and anti-Semitism (his wife was Jewish) had forced him into exile. THE REDISCOVERY Afterwards too many destructions, any isolated explorers (the first "hectorologists") go to the rediscovery of the artist and his universe about the years 1960-1970 and reconstitute its history patiently. If the major part is done in this field, the fact is that, hundred years after the « magnificent gesture » of Art Nouveau ( Le Corbusier ), the majority of the buildings of Hector Guimard remain inaccessible to the public, and that a Guimard Museum is still not inaugurated in France. TIMELINE
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|