L\'esprit Nouveau Pavillon De L\'esprit

L'Esprit Nouveau

Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau

The Art Nouveau movement of the early twentieth century that really found its heyday in the Jazz Age, the period of glitz, glamour, and luxury that occupied the 1920s and formed a high road of optimism between World War I and the Great Depression, was considered by most practitioners and critics of the period itself to be a purely decorative art, with no real practical value. Indeed, the progression of this movement and of art in the twentieth century make sit clear that ultimately, art nouveau is to be relegated to the decorative arts, having failed to take hold in more practical applications such as architecture and industrial design (Gronberg 1992). This is the judgment of history and what actually ended up occurring, however, and should by no means be taken as a certain or even strong indicator of the potentials that existed for the period and the style (Gronberg 1992).

It cannot be denied that the proponents of the Art Nouveau movement, and even those critics that were not as adamant in their approval of the movement's aesthetics, could be quite vehement and vociferous in their defining and limiting of the manner in which they thought this aesthetic ought to be applied (Gronberg 1992; Gronberg 1198). This no doubt had a major effect on the trajectory of the movement and the fact that it was never really incorporated into architecture or industrial design in any meaningful or lasting way (Gronberg 1998). This does not mean, however, that absolutely everyone in the art world shared this view of the lack of practical value and the purely decorative nature of the art nouveau style, and certain individuals managed to show that this movement absolutely could have a place in practical design (Gronberg 1992).

Le Corbusier was one such individual; he found much of the artistic movement in early twentieth century Paris distasteful, trivial, and completely lacking in any real social progress or merit (Gronberg 1998). The artistic emphases and criticisms that proliferated during this period, for the most part, made Paris a, "city acknowledged as modern only to the extent that its women were well dressed," rather than a place of real substance and worth in the minds of more progressive artists and for the industry of the day (Gronberg 1998, pp. 156). Certain individuals from a variety of walks of life, Le Corbusier included, sought to redefine this image that they saw not only as disparaging, but truly unwarranted if the surface elements of the city and its fashion could be seen past (Gronberg 1998). Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveaue was most essentially a statement to that effect, deliberately upsetting accepted aesthetic modes (Gronberg 1992; Gronberg 1998).

Critics and colleagues saw the "machine for living" that Le Corbusier created as an installation at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, 1925, as an abandonment of aesthetic principles and roundly shunned both the structure and Le Corbusier (Gronberg 1992). Seeing modern life more as an extension of the efficiency and productivity of the office rather than the personalization and decorations of a traditional home, the living space that Le Corbusier presented was very minimalist and truly belonged more to the school of modernism -- which hadn't even really solidified -- than Art Nouveau (Gronberg 1992; Gronberg 1998). As striking as this departure was, the backlash from critics is somewhat understandable.