{art nouveau} – Page 33 – { feuilleton }

Decorative car mascots

The Hood Ornament Flickr pool features an impressive range of antique car mascots from the age when motor vehicles were emblazoned with mythological motifs and pedestrian safety was an afterthought. Most of them tend to be Art Deco-styled but a few display the florid elegance of Art Nouveau, a design trend that was being eclipsed as car ownership became more popular. I have one of these sphinx mascots, the trademark of Armstrong Siddeley motors for several decades. I always thought the similarity to London’s Embankment sphinxes was a coincidence but it appears not.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Feminine Sphinx
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• The Decorative Age
• Frémiet’s Lizard

Rene Beauclair

Bijoux modernes (c. 1900) from a series of Art Nouveau designs by Rene Beauclair. As usual the peacock caught my attention on this page. There’s more by Beauclair at the NYPL Digital Gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Divine Sarah
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard

Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga

Paris and Brussels are well-known centres of Art Nouveau architecture, less well-known but equally valuable is the Latvian capital of Riga whose historic centre is now a World Heritage Site. The highly distinctive building at Elizabetes Iela 10b is one of a number of buildings there designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of film director Sergei Eisenstein. The giant decorative heads are quite unique, and I also like the peacock and other mascarons. One can’t help but think that this façade—in a street full of equally detailed façades—would have sustained a lot more attention had it been built in a European capital.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atelier Elvira
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• The Maison Lavirotte
• The House with Chimaeras

Atelier Elvira

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).

Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be even more exaggerated than similar work by Antoni Gaudí. Munich was the centre of German arts and crafts and produced much home-grown Art Nouveau but this eruption of bizarre plasterwork in an otherwise mundane street was still surprising. The façade was painted green, as in the tinted photo above, and the dragon painted different colours each year, yellow, red and so on.

The ironwork street entrance.

Needless to say, not everyone looked upon this kind of challenging décor favourably. In 1937 the Nazi Oberbürgermeister complained about the “hideous façade disrupting the character of the rest of the street” and had the dragon design chipped off the wall. Allied bombs did for the rest a few years later so these pictures are all that we have left.

Continue reading “Atelier Elvira”

Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams

Globe terrestre.

More exposition mania. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 would have been more grand/fabulous/excessive (delete as appropriate) if architect Louis Bonnier had been given free reign. The building above was intended to stand before the Palais du Trocadéro and house a huge globe which visitors could peruse from surrounding galleries. Bonnier also designed a series of kiosks (below) for different exhibitors which look more like over-sized Art Nouveau ornaments than pieces of architecture.

Three of these pictures are scanned from a book; the only site I found with examples of Bonnier’s work was this one which unfortunately spoils the pictures with enormous watermarks.

Exposition kiosks.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Maison Lavirotte
• The Palais du Trocadéro