Latest news with #Métro
Time Out
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Paris is getting a museum dedicated to the maker of its iconic art nouveau metro entrances
Every city has its own unique subterranean transport system. London 's is characterised by the red and blue Underground roundel and colourful maps, Mexico City 's is where you'll find the most impressive murals and Moscow undoubtedly has the most decadent stations. But Paris 's métro system is up there, too, and its art nouveau, cast-iron entrances have become a recognisable symbol of the city. And now, the long-forgotten artist behind the designs will finally get a brand-new museum dedicated to his work, right in the heart of the French capital. His name was Hector Guimard, and alongside the elaborate métro entrances, he designed many of the city's art nouveau buildings in the early 1900s. It's taken a century for his contribution to be recognised and put on display. 'It may be surprising to foreign visitors but the French have never really liked art nouveau,' said Fabien Choné, a collector and head of Hector Guimard Diffusion, which is involved in establishing a new museum, to the Guardian. 'There was great opposition to Guimard's Métro entrances. While visitors saw them as marvellous symbols of the Belle époque Métro, Parisians criticised it as what they called spaghetti style and couldn't understand why tourists liked them.' Apparently, a critic of Guimard's work described the green paint of the métro stations as 'un-French' and said the cursive lettering was 'stupefying to foreigners', and in the wave of modernism which completely dominated Europe in the post-war era, lots of his creations were declared without historic or artistic value and destroyed rather than preserved. Of the 167 entrances Guimard designed, only 88 remain – so it's about time for a museum to open in the artist's honour. The designs will be displayed in Hôtel Mezzara, a four-storey building in the city's 16th arrondissement designed by Guimard back in 1910. After a €6 million refurb, it will open in 2027 and display a host of Guimard's creations, from art nouveau decorations and furniture to archival documents and photographs. Getting the approval to open this museum hasn't been easy – in fact, Nicolas Horiot, architect and the president of Le Cercle Guimard (a body founded to save Guimard's work) said it had been a 10-year battle with Paris authorities to get this artwork its long-overdue recognition. 'We see this museum as repairing an injustice done to Guimard,' said Horiot to the Guardian. So, sounds like this could be a worthy addition to Paris's packed roster of museums, eh? Stay tuned for more updates on when the museum will officially open.
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Forgotten' designer of art nouveau Métro entrances to get Paris museum
The 'forgotten' designer of Paris's most iconic Métro station entrances and art nouveau buildings is to be given his rightful place in the city's history with a museum dedicated to his work. Hector Guimard left a distinctive mark across the French capital in the early 1900s, creating elaborate and monumental Métro entrances whose fans of iron and glass resembling unfurled insect wings were nicknamed dragonflies. The remaining station surrounds of sinuous cast iron, with lamps resembling lily-of-the-valley flowers and topped with the stylised Métropolitain sign that Guimard also designed, feature in postcards, tourist photos and style books. When installed in the early 1900s, however, many Parisiens were scandalised. One critic declared the green paint 'un-French' and another said the ornate signs were 'confusing to children trying to learn their letters … and stupefying to foreigners'. Art nouveau went out of fashion, and by 1913 the transport authorities had dropped Guimard's designs. By 1942, when Guimard died aged 75 in New York, where he and his American Jewish wife had sought refuge from the Nazis, he had already been forgotten and much of his work consigned to the scrap heap. 'It may be surprising to foreign visitors but the French have never really liked art nouveau,' said Fabien Choné, a Guimard collector and head of Hector Guimard Diffusion, a company involved in establishing the new museum. 'There was great opposition to Guimard's Métro entrances. While visitors saw them as marvellous symbols of the belle époque Métro, Parisians criticised it as what they called spaghetti style and couldn't understand why tourists liked them.' On returning to Paris in 1948, his widow, Adeline, an artist whose work had been displayed at the 1899 Beaux-Arts salon, worked tirelessly to preserve and promote her husband's legacy, which included about 50 residential buildings. She donated his drawings and smaller creations, including furniture, to museums, many of them in the US, and offered to bequeath the couple's art nouveau home, the Hôtel Guimard, and its contents to the state and then to the city. Both turned down the offer and the building was converted into flats with the furnishings scattered. In the wave of modernism that swept post-war Europe the style was sober and many Guimard creations were declared without historic or artistic value and destroyed. Of the 167 Métro entrances that he designed – described by Salvador Dalí, who painted Tribute to Guimard in 1970, as divine – only 88 remain. Choné said: 'After the war, each time the city did any work on the streets, they got rid of Guimard's designs. Even up until the 1960s to 70s the logic was one of destruction rather than preservation.' The museum will be established at the Hôtel Mezzara, a four-storey building in Paris's 16th arrondissement designed by Guimard in 1910 and which features much of his signature ironwork, including a spectacular glass skylight and chandeliers. The building, originally commissioned by Guimard's friend Paul Mezzara, a rich textile manufacturer from Venice and later acquired by the education ministry and used as student accommodation until a decade ago, will undergo a €6m (£5.2m), two-year renovation before opening around the end of 2027. Once open it will display known Guimard creations including art nouveau furniture and decorations as well as an archive of his designs and documents. 'It is absurd that there is recognition of Guimard at museums around the world, especially in the US, and nothing in Paris when he created some of the most important symbols of the city,' Choné said. Nicolas Horiot, an architect and the president of Le Cercle Guimard, an association created 23 years ago to save Guimard's designs and documents, said it had been a decade-long battle to get the state and Paris authorities to recognise the designer's work. He said the museum would right a historic wrong. 'After the second world war, Guimard was completely forgotten. Art nouveau no longer interested people in the urban design of the 1960s and many of his pieces were destroyed,' he said. 'The revival started in 1970 with an exhibition in New York, but it was a step-by-step process. We see this museum as repairing an injustice done to Guimard.'
The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
I love the graffiti I see in Paris – but tagging is just visual manspreading
Among the layers of life in Paris that energise me, I might list: peeling back the city's music scene all the way to figuring out where, and when, the musicians go to jam together; the unassuming flair of even a basic brasserie; the way one can pivot, in the span of a week, from an art gallery opening to a friend's concert to another friend's restaurant to discover his Corsican-influenced menu, and end it by lingering on a terrace, 'remaking the world' with others who challenge you – calmly – to see something a different way. Among the things about this city that exhaust me are the people who cram their way into the Métro without letting you step out first (seriously, what neurons are misfiring in the heads of these people?), and the sheer prevalence of tags. It's when you leave Paris for a bit and come back that you realise how many tags there are. How swaths of a city that is otherwise arrestingly beautiful look as if a giant toddler high on methamphetamines stumbled through them, scribbling on everything in sight with a giant Sharpie. In my mind there is, of course, a fuzzy-but-significant divide between street art, graffiti and tags. There is an entire graffiti wall just across the street from my apartment, visible from my living room, and I adore watching its constant state of flux – the greens and blues that slowly replace bubbly, fat oranges and reds. Sometimes, the wall tilts towards pictures; sometimes it tilts towards words. Other places in the neighbourhood regularly get postered ('Stop aux violences faites aux femmes'), there are walls that host the retro-style tile aliens put up by Space Invader or the dark-haired women of Miss. Tic, and some cracks in the pavement have even been filled in by the anonymous street artist Ememem. I appreciate all of this. I deeply dislike the tags. Street art, like other forms of art, seeks to convey something about the world and the person who drew it. The political postering anchors us in the reality of a world that is far too grim, far too often. Tagging is nothing more than a way of saying me, me, me. Some, I'm sure, will say that the real difference is that I am just a bobo; that I want what aesthetically pleases me, and reject what does not. That maybe you can't have one without the other, that Paris is rebellious by nature, that frustration comes with freedom. Aren't the tags a bit of grit that reveal the city as something real and alive, rather than an open air museum in a tourist-friendly stasis? Aren't they a form of voice for people who don't write for major media? If you want to live somewhere spotless and perfect, move to Switzerland, not the 10th arrondissement, you might be thinking. It would be worse, far worse, for Paris to lose its alternative, countercultural identity. There is some truth in all of this – Georges-Eugène Haussmann's grand avenues were designed in part to put an end to Parisian revolts and street barricades. The seventh arrondissement is a postcard; the 20th is a real city. But what sets tagging apart is that it is the visual urban incarnation of a largely, if not exclusively, masculinist impulse towards domination. Street art and graffiti are a form of conversation with the people who live in a city; tags say nothing more than 'I was here' and 'I dominated this space'. To tag is as egotistical as a billionaire's dick-shaped joyride to the edge of space. It's a dog peeing on a fire hydrant. It's visual manspreading. Just as with the people who play music on speaker on public transport, or who scream into their phones, the point is not for other people to experience and engage with their art, music or street performance; it is for us to cede to the inevitable truth that, for a moment in time, they control our experience of public, collective life. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion It's this subtone of domination that makes heavily tagged areas feel grungy, dark and unsettling – unlike areas full of other types of visual expression displayed on walls. When you live in a city, you expect the metal grilles of storefronts to be fair game; when someone has scribbled their callsign on a random part of a second-floor wall of a residential building, that feels different. That feels like a violation, the same way it feels like a violation when tags proliferate on shared public spaces – on rubbish bins, the insides of public toilets, the exterior wall of a restaurant that will have to be pressure-washed by a minimum-wage worker in the morning. The city, apparently, has reached its limit and is vowing to do something about the scourge of tagging. When they find the culprits, let me suggest an appropriate sentence: thoroughly cleaning the areas they've made less livable. After that, maybe the city can find them some art classes. Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
