June 9th was a pretty big Art Nouveau day for us, taking in both the Musee de Ecole de Nancy and the Majorelle House, and then a stroll down Avenue Foch toward the city center. We've seen our share of Art Nouveau/Modernista/Secessionist/Stil Mucha/Liberty/etc. collections and museums...Paris, Barcelona, Salamanca, Prague, Vienna.... The Museum of the School of Nancy is the largest, most dense such collection we've seen, and by far, too. Granted, the works represented are pretty strictly by the locals, but what a group of locals it was! Names like Galle, Daum, Majorelle, Gruber, and such. The "School" really was an organization of designers, artists, and industrialists, committed not only to the "principles" of Art Nouveau but also to the mass manufacturing of such items and to making them available to the wider public. Art Nouveau never was much more than a flash in the pan of art and architecture, beautiful, but very demanding and costly, the province of the ultra-wealthy. But in Nancy, for a brief shining moment, they at least gave the (upper middle) masses a fighting chance. Then it was all enveloped in real fighting...1914 and all that...and beauty disappeared....
Between us, we took 300+ pix in the museum. Selecting, editing, and captioning even a small selection for the blog would take days, so I am going to present just a few teasers and (strongly) recommend the interested reader take the wonderful museum tour, online, and in English too, one of the best such we've experienced. It's at https://musee-ecole-de-nancy.nancy.fr/visiter/telechargez-lapplication. Do it!
