Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga

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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.

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

Atelier Elvira

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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.

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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.

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Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams

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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.

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Exposition kiosks.

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

The Maison Lavirotte

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More Art Nouveau and more Paris…. I can’t believe I missed this place when I was in Paris for a week, staying just a few streets away. The building is at 29 Avenue Rapp in the 7th arrondissement and I crossed that street several times when walking to the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower.

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The architect was Jules Lavirotte (1864–1929) and the building was named after him following its construction in 1901. His other works aren’t as excessively florid as this, nor do they display the Nouveau elegance of contemporaries such as Hector Guimard, so this façade may owe more to the capitulations of fashion than innate style. The attractively unclad figures on the pediment cock their hips at passers-by in a provocative manner that would never be allowed in British architecture of the period, and the door has some great details with stylised peacocks between the windows and a huge brass lizard for the handle.

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Absinthe girls

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The classic absinthe poster from 1896 by Henri Privat-Livemont (1861–1936), one of the best exponents of the post-Mucha style. Don’t let anyone tell you that using unclad women’s bodies in advertising is a new thing.

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And a couple more Mucha-esque examples circa 1900, both credited to “Nover”, from the wide selection of absinthe graphics at the Virtual Absinthe Museum.

The printer was L. Revon et Cie, situated in Paris at 93 Rue Oberkampf. The artist’s signature “Nover” is a mystery—no designer by that name is recorded. Since however the word is a palindrome of Revon, the assumption must be that the artist was Revon himself, or alternatively an anonymous employee of the firm. The same artist was responsible for the well-known Absinthe Vichet poster, also printed by Revon et Cie.

Interesting that so many of these posters show the women holding the glasses aloft as though receiving a libation from the gods. Privat-Livemont’s painting adds to the sacred effect by putting a halo behind the absinthe-bearer’s head.

Also at the Virtual Absinthe Museum is this warning against the dangers of the Green Fairy which would make a good addition to the Men with snakes post.

Previously on { feuilleton }
8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
Smoke
Flowers of Love