EXPOSITIONS AND SALONS THE SHOWCASE. Page: 2
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In view of later developments, this room seems a bit overdecorated in the Victorian manner, but the pastel colors, the graceful use of line in the wood and metal ornamentation, as well as the relatively light furniture, are startling innovations. Here was presented to the Parisian his first opportunity to discover on a large scale the stylistic elements which characterize the Art Nouveau.
In an article in The Craftsman in 1902, A. D. F. Hamlin commented on this style as a negative movement away from eclectic revivalism towards nothing. He foresaw (and correctly, as it turned out in France and Belgium) that the Art Nouveau would lead to no developments beyond that of interior decoration, and that only in Austria and England, where the style was practiced in a restrained fashion, would a further development ensue.
This article was answered by Jean Schopfer, writing in the same magazine the following year. Schopfer maintained that during the development of a style, no direction need be indicated, citing as an example the lack of a predetermination on the part of Romanesque architects to develop Gothic structuralism. On the other hand, Schopfer says that the Art Nouveau is positive in character inasmuch as it revived the interior decorative arts, dead since the eighteenth century, yet turned to nature for inspiration instead of merely copying eighteenth century examples.
Samuel Bing wrote shortly afterwards that the duty of France was to fuse the "solid but crude" developments of the northern (Belgian and German) designers with her ( France's) innate sense of delicate refinement and grace, at the same time acknowledging the debt to England for the earlier efforts of Morris and his followers.
The Art Nouveau was not by any means received with enthusiasm on all sides. In the Revue des Arts Décoratifs, Victor Champier wrote that "art is inevitably bound to the French styles of the past" and a style cannot, therefore, be invented or created. Such an invention becomes, perforce, a caprice; and, by way of detail, he adds that floral decoration is completely unarchitectonic. "The Art Nouveau, therefore, shows us that the English are good cabinet-makers only and that the Belgians no longer have a sense of line". A year later, however, Emile Grasset, tempering this criticism, maintained that, although a real Art Nouveau is impossible, modern materials and their uses should be recognized by means of a compromise with past styles. In this way, the outmoded elements of the past would automatically drop out of the vocabulary of contemporary design, producing, as a result, a truly progressive art form.
A critic writing in Art et Décoration at about the same time stated that the French artists and designers are too hampered by tradition, and only the English and the Belgians have broken with it, demonstrating, as a consequence, the courage to rebuild. He cites as exceptions in Paris Charles Plumet and Tony Selmersheim, who were then the leading decorators of the Art Nouveau.
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