Paris Sex and Sensibility: The Allure of Art Nouveau

As the 19th century was drawing to a close,

a luxurious, new style was taking Europe by storm.

This was the fin de siecle,

the glamorous, decadent but also anxious end to the 19th century,

and the style was Art Nouveau.

Merci.

Art Nouveau grew out of the dark, restless energies

of the industrial city.

In the age of Darwin and Freud,

it was fixated with nature, sensuality and sex.

In the space of a decade or so,

Art Nouveau went from being nowhere to everywhere.

Lapped up by the burgeoning middle classes of Europe,

it was mimicked and mass produced.

What began as a revolution in the name of truth, beauty and nature,

ended in derision, decadence and decay.

In this series, I'll be visiting the great cities of Europe,

where the work of visionaries like Emile Galle,

artists like Gustav Klimt and entrepreneurs like Arthur Liberty

blossomed all too briefly.

Paris at the end of the 19th century

loved its bullet-straight boulevards,

its imposing monuments and classically inspired architecture.

But beyond the grandeur, the population had exploded

from half a million to 2.5 million people by 1900.

Those elegant boulevards were gridlocked with horses,

carriages and crowds.

Things needed to change.

The city planners came up with a radical solution.

Le Metro, ladies and gentlemen!

Typically Paris, typically Art Nouveau.

The good citizens of Paris were shocked.

Entrances like bat wings,

sinuous metals, sensuous curves.

It was a bold declaration of the new art for the new century.

The first Metro entrances appeared just in time

for a massive celebration in Paris,

the World Fair of 1900.

It was when the city would show off its cutting-edge new style.

At the heart of the fair were two huge buildings,

standing opposite each other, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais.

This is Le Grand Palais. It's exquisite, isn't it?

It's beautiful, substantial,

one of the biggest and best exhibition spaces

you'll find anywhere in the world, never mind Paris.

You'd love it.

Unfortunately, I'm not going there.

I'm going to Le Petit Palais, the small palace over here.

Perhaps they were boasting to their foreign visitors.

"In France, this, all 16,000 square metres of it,

"is what we call small."

Bonjour. Monsieur Chazal, je m'appelle Stephen.

Merci, monsieur.

'Gilles Chazal is director of the Petit Palais.'

Can you give me some idea of the sheer size of the exhibition

in terms of Paris? It was a great, big event, wasn't it?

It was an international exhibition.

It was of course a very, very famous event.

-It was from this place to La Tour Eiffel...

-To the Eiffel Tower.

Yes, yes and along the River Seine.

It was absolutely incredible and it was a discovery for the public,

to look after artworks, but also engines and so on.

Also, it was a change of century, so it was a very great moment.

Designed to showcase the very best of modern art and industry,

the World Fair was France's manifesto for the 20th century.

There were moving walkways and a grand electricity hall.

Over 60 countries exhibited and 50 million people visited.

It was the party to end all parties,

and Art Nouveau was the guest of honour.

Around the city, the dramatic jewellery of Rene Lalique,

the organic forms of Emile Galle's glass

and the alluring femme fatales of Alfonse Mucha

dazzled the Paris crowds.

With all its marble and mosaics and gilt and glass,

this was an opulent luxury showroom for Art Nouveau,

but it was much more than that.

It also held up a dazzling mirror to French hopes and fears

at the turn of the 20th century.

Paris was overcrowded, filthy

and simmering with anti-Semitic tensions.

At the World Fair, Art Nouveau was at the height of its popularity,

and for a brief moment it seemed like an antidote

to the ugliness of the modern age.

But on the cusp of the 20th century, how did this upstart new style

threaten to upstage the conservative ranks of traditional French design?

It was only five years before the 1900 World Fair

that Art Nouveau had begun to emerge

from the licentious bohemian quarter of the city.

In 1895, Montmartre,

the playground on the edge of the French capital,

had become a magnet for artists

looking for inspiration and excitement.

Degas and Toulouse Lautrec painted the local prostitutes and dancers,

and they became emblems of the city's sexual freedom.

Decadent, licentious, drug-fuelled, absinthe-soaked -

there was a downside, as well, of course,

but it was here in Montmartre that the artists of the day,

the avant-garde artists earned their stripes.

Of all the artists who set the scene for Art Nouveau,

Charles Baudelaire was the most subversive.

In 1857 he shocked Paris to its breeches

with his first volume of poetry, Les Fleurs Du Mal.

It's all there in the title, really, isn't it?

The Flowers Of Evil.

He was fascinated by the dark side of nature...

..and human nature.

Sex, death, vampires, lesbians,

and all this at the same time as Anthony Trollope

was writing Barchester Towers.

It was in the back-street drinking dens and hash joints of Paris

that Baudelaire's ideas about nature and art

were handed down to Art Nouveau designers.

Louise, what is Baudelaire telling us about nature?

He embraces all that's artificial, you know,

he vaunts the merit of artificiality over nature,

and that's the beginnings of decadentism, if you like,

a rejection of naturalism and of its values.

Is that because science and industry was giving us so much,

one day we could tweak nature if it suited us?

Yeah, there's a desire to improve on nature.

To take it, to work on it,

and to do something better and something different.

And this leads us into decadence, it leads us into Art Nouveau.

The dancers and performers from Paris' nocturnal world

embodied these dangerous new ideas.

Like moths to a flame, Art Nouveau designers were drawn to these women.

And none was more nocturnal than the divine Sarah Bernhardt.

She was Art Nouveau's ultimate muse.

Bernhardt was celebrated as the greatest actress of her day,

as much by herself as anyone else.

The word bohemian could almost have been invented for her.

Amongst her many lovers she counted crowned heads of Europe.

It's even said she slept in a coffin,

believing that playing dead might improve her tragic roles.

Baudelaire would have been proud of her.

Just look at Sarah there, reclining on her chaise longue with her fan,

her eyes imploring, no, demanding,

that you give her your full attention.

And that dog at her feet represents fashionable Parisian society,

writers, poets, artists for whom Sarah was a muse.

But look deep into Fido's eyes.

I think he's seen things in the boudoir

no animal should be exposed to.

Sarah was about to play a new role

in the Paris debut of Art Nouveau.

It was Christmas Day 1894.

Sarah needed a poster to advertise her new play, Gismonda.

But who to turn to?

Alfonse Mucha was a Moravian artist

who'd worked his way across Europe to study art in Paris.

He really wanted to be a fine artist, not a commercial one,

but he was living hand to mouth.

Then he was approached to create the Gismonda poster.

He put his ambitions on hold and got to work.

This is Mucha later in life,

but today it's his grandson John and John's wife Sarah

who take up the story.

The first poster of Art Nouveau.

Well, it's the first poster that Mucha did for Sarah Bernhardt, yes.

This is indirectly the first step

to actually make art available to the general public,

you no longer have to be rich.

How did it come about?

It came about

in a most extraordinary way,

because what happened was that Mucha,

who was a struggling artist at the time,

was doing a favour for a friend,

he was correcting some proofs at the printers,

and it was at Christmas time so everybody else was off on holiday,

and suddenly the manager of the printers came rushing in.

Sarah Bernhardt had said she had to have a new poster

for her re-presentation of Gismonda in the new year

and she wanted it now.

So there was no-one else to ask, so Mucha got the ask.

So the printer went on holiday, came back from holiday

and said "Where's the poster?"

And Alphonse presented this and the printer had a fit.

Why did he have a fit, John?

He'd never seen anything like this, nothing.

Sarah Bernhardt wanted to see it, so it was rolled up

and the printer took it to Sarah Bernhardt.

Alphonse was depressed because, you know,

he thought he'd made a terrible mistake.

Almost immediately, a message came back from Sarah Bernhardt

that she wanted to see Mucha, so he went to her boudoir,

with a very heavy heart,

because he thought he was going to get a bollocking,

and this is in Alphonse's own words, I mean, true historical fact,

she got up, embraced him and said,

"Mr Mucha, you have made me immortal."

You know, she might have been in her 50s

and have done all sorts of things, but when she was on stage,

she was this woman with a vision, with a purity in her heart.

What Mucha did was that he saw Sarah Bernhardt

and he made her look the way she felt and wanted to be seen.

And that's what he's communicating,

is who she saw herself as.

Then she immediately signed him up for a six-year contract.

This was like a lightning from blue sky.

Mucha's Gismonda captured the moment.

The nouvelle woman was born.

He crowns the divine Sarah with stylised flowers.

Using pale muted shades rather than bold primary colours,

he revolutionised poster design.

The poster appeared on the 1st January 1895

on the streets of Paris.

It caused a sensation from the get-go.

This was the first public declaration of the new art

in the French capital.

The public went wild for the poster.

As quickly as Gismonda was put up, she was taken down again.

Bill stickers were followed and bribed to hand her over.

Mucha became an overnight success.

He moved to a swanky new studio,

where he experimented with the new art of photography.

And he took this wonderful series of photographs of his models.

His new women have definitely burnt their corsets, haven't they?

They stare back at you, brazen and proud of their bodies.

He produced this book, Documents Decoratifs,

a bible which later spread Mucha's style around France and Europe.

Well, these are a bit more candid than those Sarah Bernhardt pictures.

They're beautiful, graphically ahead of their time,

and also, I suppose one has to say, quite risque for the 1890s.

Some of these girls are very demure,

they seem to merge with the wildlife they're pictured alongside,

the flowers, but others, like this, dare I say it, hussy here,

definitely have a bit of "come into the garden, Claude," about them.

What my mother might have called a bit forward.

Champagne,

cigarettes,

Mucha discovered that sex could sell anything.

It could even sell holidays on the newly-developed Riviera.

And the selling point was the nouvelle woman,

the icon of Art Nouveau.

The growing middle class was learning to love spending its money

in bars and restaurants

and the new department stores that were springing up everywhere.

It was spend, spend, spend.

There was a plethora of new products on the market,

and every one of them needed to be advertised.

In the new age of mass advertising, mass production

and mass consumption, Art Nouveau was itself mass produced.

Mucha made Art Nouveau de rigueur, fantastique, formidable.

Wow, or even, mon dieu!

What about this place?

When Georges Fouquet inherited

his father's exclusive jewellery business in 1895,

he wanted some of that Mucha magic.

He started designing jewellery with him,

and commissioned Mucha to create a shop

that would indulge his clients' taste for Art Nouveau luxury.

Can we go back in time?

It's Paris, you're a man of means, you've got a few bob, or francs,

and you want to impress that special person in your life.

Well, this is where you come, this jewellery shop,

for that piece, that rock, for a special occasion.

Maybe a birthday, a Valentine, an anniversary.

But over the decades, what is quite clear

is that the shop itself, the jewellery shop, is the true gem.

It's the gift that goes on giving.

In this shop, Mucha used the full Art Nouveau palette,

curves inspired by the natural world,

feathers, gilt, finery.

Every inch of it decorative and sensual.

Sex and Art Nouveau were intimate, promiscuous bedfellows.

Look at the figure up here.

A beautiful, almost classical pose at first, but then notice,

her arms are behind her head, emphasising her splendid bust,

and even a modern haircut.

She is the femme fatale, a classic symbol of Art Nouveau.

And imagine presenting your femme fatale with this Fouquet brooch.

Now, that would put a smile on her face.

In its early days, Art Nouveau was still the preserve

of the rich bohemian elite of the city.

Amongst them was an ambitious and talented young designer

who would embrace the new style and revolutionise jewellery design.

When the great society jeweller Rene Lalique

was beginning his career in Paris in the 1870s,

jewellery wasn't about design.

It was all about the bling, about the rocks.

And not just any rocks - diamonds.

Diamonds as big as the Ritz in Paris.

Lalique changed all that.

He's probably better known today for his glass designs,

but he trained as a goldsmith

and built his reputation on his pioneering Art Nouveau jewellery.

These days, you have to go to museums to see his precious pieces.

'Philippe Thiebault is curator in chief at the Musee d'Orsay,

'and he has the key to the Lalique jewel box.'

-Hello, Philippe, I'm Stephen.

-Nice to meet you.

Very nice to meet you.

I see you have an interesting object in your hand.

'Before Lalique, valuable jewellery was produced by artisans

'from precious metals and gemstones.

'The bigger the rocks, the more desirable and valuable the piece.

'Lalique turned all that on its head.'

So it's a piece by Lalique, it's a hairpin in horn.

Horn? So that's cheap...

It's very, very cheap,

and it's a characteristic of the art of Lalique,

because Lalique was not very fond of expensive material.

When he chose materials, it was not for the price of the material,

but for the colour, the texture of the material.

So with Lalique, it wasn't the gemstones in the jewellery,

it was the design, that's what added the value.

Yes, yes. It's a very naturalistic piece, you know.

It is engraved to imitate, to suggest, the angelica.

It's a plant, you know.

And here you have little diamonds

to suggest the reflections of the sun on the plant.

-Right.

-It's a very lovely piece.

And the gentleman who bought this from Lalique,

he would be buying this for his wife?

-Maybe not, maybe not.

-Well, this is Paris.

Many men went to Lalique,

and they asked for jewels for a lady.

"Can you make something for my special friend," that kind of thing?

Yes, yes.

What about Lalique, how did he feel about women himself?

Lalique, I think...

We know that Lalique did love many women during his life,

had many mistresses in Paris and London, everywhere,

and it's the reason why he is a good designer of jewels,

because I think he loved very much women.

Some of his pieces are erotic.

We have a box, and you will see at the centre, a naked woman,

and she opens her cloak...

-Her cloak?

-Yes.

And so around her, you have young men, also naked.

They are completely dazzled by the nudity.

Are they? They're falling away, the shock, thrilled.

It's like a goddess, you know.

She is like a butterfly, or maybe like a bat.

Because bats and butterflies were very appreciated

by the artists of Art Nouveau.

Lalique created dramatic jewellery about women, for women.

His world, like so much of Art Nouveau, is a no-man's land,

where the woman reigns supreme.

Lalique's fascination with natural forms of all kinds wasn't unusual.

Collecting and categorising nature was the great obsession of the time.

To study insects close-up, Lalique came here to Deyrolle,

the cabinet of curiosities, in the St Germain district of Paris.

This extraordinary bestiary is really a trophy cabinet

of what was going on in the late 19th century.

There was an explosion in international travel,

in collecting, in taxidermy, in botany.

This kind of stuff was brought home by gentlemen in their swag bags.

In the middle of the 19th century,

Darwin's radical new theories about evolution

and man's place in the natural world

exploded established beliefs.

Nature, savage nature, red in tooth and claw.

This was a new battleground between religion on the one hand

and science on the other.

For designers, it was a badge of modernity,

a new way of understanding the world.

They brought nature into Paris.

But they did so on new terms.

For designers like Lalique, nature was there to be embellished.

The lily was there to be gilded.

Swarms of insects, clouds of butterflies, birds, bats,

they all buzzed and flapped around Lalique's work.

In fact, if it hadn't all looked so beautiful,

it might have been like a Hitchcock film.

This is the art of metamorphosis.

Birds, insects and women dissolve in and out of each other

in weird and wonderful ways.

Nature's sensuous, but sinister.

It's blue skies and bumblebees one minute,

and bats at bed-time the next.

Lalique may have used cheap materials,

but his jewellery was lavish and dramatic -

perfectly designed for the dim electric lights

of Paris' nocturnal world.

This is the world-famous restaurant Maxim's.

Sarah Bernhardt and the literary crowd

partied here till the early hours.

Entrepreneur Eugene Cornuche redesigned it in Art Nouveau style

in 1899 for the World Fair.

He knew that Art Nouveau, famous artists

and a ready supply of courtesans could turn his investment into gold.

Today it has the feel of an upmarket bordello.

They say every man who came here arrived with a woman,

but it was never his wife.

You can practically hear the violins soaring away,

the booming laughter and gossip of the politicians

and the artists and actors and painters who came here,

and the tinkling laughter of their new muses or courtesans.

Pierre Andre, thank you so much for letting me see Maxim's.

You are very welcome in this incredible place.

-It is incredible, isn't it?

-It is.

With its mirrors and gilt,

the spiral staircase.

It is a symbol of what we call in France La Belle Epoque.

It really represents

such a dream in people's minds

that it stays from that time,

and it's still today the same.

Maxim's was Art Nouveau.

Is there a sense that the normal rules didn't apply?

-Once you stepped over the doorway of Maxim's...

-Absolutely.

The only rules correct in such a place

was elegance and glamour.

In Maxim's, many times we had writers, novelists...

Like Marcel Proust, did he come here?

-Of course, he came many, many, many times.

-Sarah Bernhardt?

And Sarah Bernhardt, who was one of our best clients.

It was really the place where you had to come to see and be seen.

It showed exactly all the taste they had at that period,

and the best was all around Art Nouveau.

Maxim's sensuous curves

and women in their gardens of Eden -

they play on the idea of innocence, purity, and, of course sin.

There are mirrors absolutely everywhere in here.

It's like a hall of mirrors from a circus.

Or maybe something a bit seedier, a bit kinkier,

a little bit more sinister.

In 1899, Maxim's typified

much of the Art Nouveau that was being created.

Fashionable and extravagant,

it had come to represent fin-de-siecle decadence and excess.

But there is another side to this story.

If you think that Art Nouveau

is all exquisite vases and curly furniture,

well, you couldn't be more wrong.

Amongst the Art Nouveau designers at the 1900 World Fair,

at least one felt that the new style had a more serious mission.

His stand featured a working furnace,

and surrounding it, a display of glass vases.

They were all dedicated to a cause

which exposed a seismic rift in French society.

The designer behind this display was Emile Galle.

Emile Galle was the troubled genius of Art Nouveau,

he was creative, an innovator, an entrepreneur.

He was also a passionate believer and campaigner for social justice.

That, in the end, would cost him dearly.

Emile Galle is one of the most fascinating characters to emerge

in the story of the French arts in the latter part of the 19th century.

He was absolutely a man of his time, and in that respect,

is a key figure in the story of Art Nouveau.

Philippe, what sort of a man was Galle?

Very complex personality,

a poet, one might say, a philosopher, a dreamer,

who found his medium, particularly in glass.

A man with very diverse interests,

he was a great botanist, he had a strong political agenda,

he was a liberal with a tremendous social conscience.

Emile Galle was also an industrialist,

who built from an inherited family business

a very substantial and successful

glass, furniture and ceramics factory.

With his master craftsmen, Galle created stunning prototypes,

while on the workshop floor, designs were mass produced

for a hungry market across France.

Art and industry went hand in hand.

So he was experimenting to develop different techniques,

colouring and texturing the glass,

creating effects within the mass of the glass,

layering colours and cutting back with acid

or engraving to achieve cameo and other effects.

He ended up really being capable of making pieces of glass

of a technical complexity that had never been achieved before.

Engraved with quotations and dedications,

his exhibition pieces go way beyond the purely decorative.

The magic of them is that as well as being virtuosities of glassmaking,

they are always imbued with this magical poetic quality

which is his signature.

He would evoke nature, he would evoke the cycle of life.

He would draw you into a piece of glass

and somehow you could become lost in it.

And you would be as enthralled as if you were looking up at the stars.

You sort of lose a sense of scale within his pieces.

He was truly an artist.

Galle's view of nature was a complex but also a very honest one.

Yes, he could do blue skies and dragonflies,

but he also appreciated what was rank, decaying, dying.

He'd have been just as happy here on an overcast autumn afternoon

as he would have been at the height of summer.

Like Baudelaire, Galle was trying to find a new language

that could express the realities of modern life and death.

I've come to the Ecole de Nancy museum in Galle's home town.

At the end of the 19th century,

Nancy became a power house of Art Nouveau design.

In 1901, Galle formed an association of local designers.

They included the furniture designer Louis Majorelle

and glass designers Antonin and Auguste Daum.

Today they're big names in their own right,

but Galle was the true visionary.

Now, this is your real Galle McCoy.

This is the stuff that everybody loved, his lamps.

Obviously echoing the flowers in the field, the bloom up here,

but what's very interesting about it is he was trying to show nature

as she really was, not just spring, not just bounty,

but also autumn when everything dies and dries up.

So beneath these buds of poppies about to burst,

at the bottom of the plant, these tendrils, these withered pieces

of the plant, the leaves clinging to it, won't be here much longer,

soon to be blown away.

One of the vases that Galle exhibited at the 1900 World Fair

is here at the museum.

It is called Les Hommes Noirs, The Dark Men.

A collaboration with the artist Victor Prouve,

it tells a story of injustice that threatened to destabilise

the government and the country's fragile peace

at the turn of the century.

This vase was dedicated to one man, Alfred Dreyfus.

In 1895, Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer,

was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason on the basis

of documents that had been faked.

In a humiliating ritual, his badges of rank were torn from him

and his sword was broken.

Dreyfus, we know that he screamed, "I am innocent,"

but it was so loud nobody could hear him, you know.

So this small man was just standing alone against

all the anti-Semitic screams, you know, "Death to Dreyfus,"

"Death to the spy, death to the traitor, death to the Jew."

It was really a very, very violent moment he had to go through.

The anti-Semitism that had been simmering for decades in Paris

now exploded.

The daily anti-Semitic paper La France Juive stoked the hatred.

This whole Dreyfus affair cast a very long shadow here in France, didn't it?

Yes, it did.

The concern was the Dreyfus affair came to such a point

that they thought France would be threatened,

the republic, the democracy, or the republic...

Really? It could bring down the whole government?

Exactly. It came to such a climax of anger and passion.

The streets in Paris became very animated with the Dreyfus case.

So it really divided everybody.

It split the whole country.

Some artists took a stand.

The novelist Emile Zola famously attacked the government

with his open letter, J'Accuse.

Les Hommes Noirs was Galle's J'Accuse in glass.

The dark men symbolise French hypocrisy and injustice.

The words on the case ask, "From where do you come?"

"We come from beneath the earth."

When Galle returned to Nancy after the 1900 World Fair,

he paid a high price for his defence of Dreyfus.

He was ostracised by his neighbours and friends,

and his business suffered.

He was defending an innocent against the army, against the church

and against the justice.

Since he was involved in this Dreyfus affair,

he had lost a lot of customers, the business was not working very well,

so maybe he was a bit upset about the future for his wife

and his daughters, and the future of the factory.

As he was the only one who was designing for his factory,

what would happen next?

What would become of Galle?

Do you think, later in his life, Galle regretted the position

he took over the whole Dreyfus affair?

It's hard to tell, but he was so deeply always involved

in those cases that he was defending.

So I think he regretted it only on the commercial side

because of the lack of orders, of commands,

that came after the Great Exhibition in 1900.

But when he was quoting authors like Victor Hugo,

he said, "Art is like a weapon to defend your ideas."

Soon after the World Fair, Galle found out

that he had another battle to fight.

Galle was about to die, he knew he was dying,

so he put a lot of this sadness,

this melancholia, in all his creations.

This is the very last piece of furniture that he produced

in his factory before he died, and it made really a very strong effect

on the people here.

What do you think he's trying to say in this?

It's dawn and it's night-time, the bed, but you could look at it

particularly as the work of a dying man,

as about life and death, in fact.

Yes, that's it, exactly.

Galle used the symbols of the butterflies

and they represent, with the central egg, they represent birth,

the beginning, and they are full of hopes.

But then at the end of the day, they are dead.

And on your back, you can see just above your head,

this night butterfly, the sphinx,

which is slowly falling above you, and it means death.

He is dying and his wings are closing on your head.

It has to make you think of what you make of your life, I think.

Tragically, Galle didn't live to see Dreyfus exonerated in 1906.

He died two years earlier, but in the last years of his life

he'd created some of his most powerful and moving pieces.

Galle had exposed a fault line in French life

at the turn of the century,

but there was a lot more where that came from.

With the population explosion came crime, overcrowding, poverty.

There was disquiet on the streets of Paris,

and the city needed to find new solutions.

For a young architect who was out to make a bit of a name for himself,

a bit of a splash, the time was ripe for trying something utterly different.

Hector Guimard was a young architect with an ego as big as his talent.

Important projects came his way when he was still in his 20s,

and in 1896, when Guimard was not yet 30, he designed the building

that would cement his reputation for bravura, style and ambition.

His mission was to create not just a radically different

sort of building, but a template for a new form of communal living.

Sebastien Cord is an architect himself

and a resident of Castel Beranger, Guimard's most celebrated building.

To see the real Guimard magic you have to get inside the curly gates

to the communal courtyard within.

-So you see the courtyard?

-Stunning, yeah.

Guimard was really young when he built this.

-Security code?

-Yeah.

How long have you lived here?

About five years.

Must be fantastic, since you're in the business of architecture,

to live here. Look at that!

From here you can see the building is asymmetrical,

a crime against architecture in classically proportioned Paris.

Your eye doesn't get bored of it

because there are different contours to it.

That's interesting in the work of Guimard.

It's architecture and art with curving lines.

And the glass up there is beautiful, isn't it?

Is that all original?

Yes.

'Guimard said the logic of nature is impeccable,

'and at Beranger, his visual language is the sea.

'The windows repeated on every floor are stained into voluptuous waves.'

I love these kind of sponge-like bits of stone,

they look like sea sponges, don't they? Is that the idea?

We call it mouliere in French.

'Red brick, anathema to traditionalists,

'butts up against whole stones and engineered stone too.'

Very different to the other buildings I've been seeing in Paris,

the kind of Haussmann buildings, isn't it?

Yes.

'It's Guimard's signature ironwork that gives the building

'its Art Nouveau character and wit.'

It's incredible.

'Why the long face?

'These sea horses press their noses to the walls for good reason.'

It has a structural function also.

-Does it? It's holding the wall up.

-Yes.

-That's good to know.

I believe another unusual thing is that all the apartments

are roughly the same size?

-It wasn't big apartments for the rich.

-Exactly.

Every level have the same height.

You don't have the rich at the first level

and the poor people at the top.

'Really breaking with tradition, Guimard dared to create

'an apartment block that ignored the social hierarchy of Paris.

'At first, the neighbours called this Castel Deranger,

'and when you step in to the building's vestibule, you can kind of see why.'

That's incredible. It's really like a cave, isn't it?

Yes, it's designed like a grotto.

It's a masterpiece of the building made by Guimard.

Just the gateway is remarkable.

It's marvellous. Really original, in fact.

It's like a harp.

A harp?

These are the strings and you can kind of pluck them.

That's rather beautiful, isn't it?

Maybe not the way I'm doing it, but it could be.

'All the geometry of the structure is submerged in iron curves

'and undulating plaster, as if the building itself were made of water.'

So these are meant to look a bit like trees, are they?

Yeah, it's like trees going from the grotto.

It's like a piece of a garden but also with water...

Like an undersea garden.

It's quite strange.

-Yes, it's like Neptune's garden.

-Yes.

'For many years, the full beauty of this weirdly wonderful entrance

'was hidden under countless coats of gloss paint.

'Sebastian's just completed the painstaking task of returning

'Castel Beranger to how Guimard intended it to be.'

That's great, isn't it? Yes.

It's a pleasant way to enter in the building.

It is.

Pardon, monsieur.

'As the space where residents would meet and greet each other,

'it's the heart of Guimard's masterplan for convivial urban living.'

Here she is with her French bread.

That's what we should have done.

I didn't kiss you. Maybe later!

-Let's see how things go.

-After!

OK, after you.

'Guimard moved in here himself, enjoying his bachelor lifestyle

'and his celebrity.

'A tireless self-publicist,

'he sent out postcards of himself at home with his watery Art Nouveau.'

With an award under his belt for Beranger, Paris was his oyster.

As the city was preparing for the 1900 World Fair,

he landed the commission that would make him immortal.

The city was in gridlock.

The Metro, a new railway fit for a new century was being built -

under the ground.

And Guimard was asked to design the Metro entrances

to add a final decorative flourish to this fantastic new-fangled way

of getting about.

He was a controversial choice,

but in time, Parisians warmed to his flamboyant version of Art Nouveau.

This is Port Dauphine, Guimard's finest surviving Metro station.

It's en route to the Bois de Boulogne,

the woods on the outskirts of Paris, and that seems rather appropriate,

because emerging from the station is like leaving a thicket of iron trees.

Guimard brought nature and art into the very heart of the modern city.

Salvador Dali described his designs as

"those divine entrances to the Metro by grace of which one can descend

"into the region of the subconscious."

Guimard's station, which is actually metallic and dense and brittle,

in this wooded setting, shape-shifts into a giant moth or bug

with its gossamer wings, its many, spindly limbs

and those questing, probing antennae.

He chose cast iron to create drooping stalks and rising branches.

And glass, a vulnerable material for a busy urban structure,

seems to be draped over the iron skeleton.

Guimard designed 141 station entrances,

each on a variation of four basic templates,

as well as a loose interpretation of the letter "M" for Metro.

The Metro entrances, redefining the city,

seemed like the portals to the future.

But when the 1900 exhibition was all packed up, the harsh light of the 20th century started to dawn.

This dining room was designed for an apartment in Nancy in 1902

by Eugene Vallin, an associate of Emile Galle.

I've got a theory that this wasn't made by men.

I think it's the work of a species of hyper-evolved bee.

I mean, look at the curves everywhere.

It's as though they looked at what we did with metal and straight lines

and rejected it and everything was masticated out of royal jelly.

Bit freaky for you? Bit acid trippy?

Well, consider, it would be lovely to come here to dinner once,

maybe for a week.

But every day? You would start to feel like Kafka,

who, shortly after this was created, would pen Metamorphoses.

And that was the problem - it was too curly, too decorative,

too dark, too much.

When it arrived in the dining rooms of the middle classes,

the Bohemian elite lost their taste for it.

Like all fashions, Art Nouveau became a victim of its own success.

Like a fickle lover, the city that had once embraced the style

turned against it in the 1920s.

The wonderful Fouquet jewellery shop was dismantled,

and was reconstructed in the Musee Carnivalet in Paris

just 23 years ago.

Even the iconic Metro entrances didn't escape the cull.

Port Dauphine is one of just three glass entrances that have survived.

Sadly, when Art Nouveau dramatically fell out of fashion,

all the others were ruthlessly hacked down.

79 original Guimard designs have been lost,

and Art Nouveau was forgotten until the last decades

of the 20th century.

Today the Metro and Paris go hand in hand again

and the city treasures its Art Nouveau heritage.

The old love affair has been rekindled.

Next time, the roots and hidden gems of Art Nouveau in British cities,

set against a backdrop of scandal and depression,

when artists and designers were on the front line

of sexual and social change.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd