Hector Guimard French Art Nouveau Pioneer

Metro sign by Hector Guimard, Palais-Royal - Musée du Louvre — *Metro sign by Hector Guimard, Palais-Royal – Musée du Louvre*

Hector Guimard French Art Nouveau Pioneer: Paris is a city of legendary landmarks but surely some of the most memorable and cherished icons are the colourful Metro signs. Sue Aran reveals the story of the designer behind the much-loved signposts…

Hector Guimard’s distinctive designs are well known – even if his name isn’t. His signature work, the Paris Métro entrances, are classic examples of Art Nouveau, characterized by their elegant flowing lines, floral ornamentation, geometric forms, and mythical symbolism, taking inspiration from nature.

The term “Art Nouveau,” the New Art, was actually coined in Belgium by the periodical L’Art Moderne to describe the work of the artist group Les Vingt (the 20), a group of reform-minded sculptors, designers and painters.

From the 1880s to the start of World War I, Art Nouveau flourished. But, who was the man behind these marvellous souvenirs of a bygone age?

Hector Guimard – the forgotten architect

*Hector Guimard’s dining room at the Petit Palais*

Hector-Germain Guimard was born in Lyon in March 1867. He left home aged just 13 to move Paris and at 15 years old was accepted at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the national school for decorative arts in the city. Right from the start, he was a star student, winning medals, competitions and a place at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, then the foremost architecture school in the world. A travel scholarship enabled him to go to England where he toured workshops of eclectic designer William Morris who led the Arts and Crafts movement, a style that opposed growing industrialization and the rise of factory mass production at the expense of traditional craftsmanship.

Guimard also fell in love with the work of British illustrator and engraver Aubrey Beardsley whose designs depended heavily on the expressive quality of the organic line. Both Morris and Beardsley influenced Guimard’s developing style and the Art Nouveau movement in its entirety.

Aged 21, Guimard began independent practice with a small commission for an outdoor café in Paris. The following year he was awarded the contract to design the Palace of Electricity, at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the star of the moment was one Gustave Eiffel and his tower. But it was in the mid 1890s that Guimard really started to embrace Art Nouveau after discovering the work of Belgian architects and early pioneers of Art Nouveau style, Paul Hankar, and Victor Horta who’s astonishingly beautiful Hotel Tassel in Brussels, built in 1893, is considered the first Art Nouveau building in the world.

Guimard’s best known works were constructed between the years 1895 and 1905. He designed and built schools, funerary monuments, town houses and apartment blocks including Castel Béranger (Guimard lived there for a while) the first Art Nouveau residence in Paris, and the colourful Maison Coilliot in Lille. He also designed country villas, a concert hall, ceramics factories, artists’ studios, and exposition pavilions as well as train station entrances for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the year the Metro opened. His mass-produced, metal Métro entrance designs, with their flowing lines and floral shapes, initially shocked Parisians. Some said his use of green paint was “un-French”, that the letters were confusing, and that the ironwork looked much too Teutonic. Today they are legendary icons of the city, though just 86 of 167 such entrances remain. Most were demolished.

In 1909, Guimard married American painter Adeline Oppenheim, and as wedding gift to her, he designed a luxury house for them to live in at 122 avenue Mozart in the 16th arrondissement, known today as Hotel Guimard. He designed most of the interior objects and fixtures himself, including numerous Art Nouveau fabrics and furniture. In fact, for most of his buildings, Guimard created a wide range of decorative designs in stained glass, ceramic panels, wrought iron fixtures, and floral wallpaper.

Guimard built several residential buildings in the same neighborhood, and a few remain, including Hôtel Houyvet, Castel Béranger, and Hotel Guimard. But Art Nouveau went out of fashion by the end of the World War I, soon to be replaced by Art Deco. By 1942, when Guimard died aged 75 in New York, where he and his wife emigrated to in 1938, he was all but forgotten.

After World War II ended, Adeline, who outlived her husband by 23 years, returned to France. She tried to convince French officials to create a museum dedicated to her husband’s legacy but was unsuccessful. She donated much of Guimard’s work to American museums, notably the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the New York Public Library, where they still remain. Adeline later donated the dining room suite and interior wall panelling from the Hotel Guimard to the city of Paris where you can see it at the Petit Palais Museum.

Though Guimard was largely forgottten for many years, his metro signs have become a tourist attraction in their own right, and a new museum dedicated to his art is due to be established in 2028 at the Hotel Mezzara (which he designed in 1910) in the 16^th arrondissement.

Did you know? The Metro was originally called the Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris (“The Paris Metropolitan Railway Company”). There are 304 stations in Paris, 16 lines and it’s growing, 4 more metro lines are currently being dug out. It’s said that the Metro covers 600,000 miles a day – the equivalent of ten times around the world, the average distance between stations 550 metres, and that it takes an average of 60 seconds to go from one station to the next.

By Sue Aran, a writer, photographer, and tour guide living in the Gers department of southwest France. She is the owner of French Country Adventures, which provides personally-guided, small-group, slow travel tours into Gascony, the Pays Basque, Provence and beyond.