The Macklowes in Nancy

I was starting to get embarrassed whenever clients would ask me about the birthplace of French Art Nouveau, so Hillary and I decided to visit Nancy during our recent trip to France. With our friend Amelie Marcilhac, who has written extensively on the works of such Art Deco designers as Marc du Plantier and Marcel Coard, we planned a daytrip from Paris by their fast train known as the TGV, leaving from the Gare de l’Est at 9:15am. The only problem was that we were a bit late leaving our apartment and didn’t realize that hailing a taxi, which we were so used to doing in New York, simply does not exist in Paris. As the minutes sped by, so did every chauffeur de taxi in Paris, on the way to clients who had known to reserve the night before. Finally we realized we were going to miss the train, and arrived in the Gare de l’Est thirty minutes late and cursing a blue streak. Fortunately, our friend Amelie was not only the epitome of kindness and understanding, she had also gotten us tickets for the next train ninety minutes later.

After a changeover in Metz, we finally arrived in Nancy at 1:00pm, a full two and a half hours later than planned. We hopped in the first taxi in the queue and asked him to take us to the Galeries Poirel for their special exhibition dedicated to Louis Majorelle. The driver turned to us and smiled and pointed thirty yards away and suggested we might be able to get there faster on foot! We laughed, thanked him and sheepishly made our way across the plaza.

The goal of the Galeries Poirel exhibition was to show the full breadth of Louis Majorelle’s work in wood, ceramic and bronze. There were mass-production tables and chairs next to some of his most breathtaking rarities, which I think would be a challenge to the casual viewer but made for great fun for me. I took great pleasure in showing Hillary and Amelie the special pieces such as the Magnolia table lamp made in collaboration with Daum and in particular helping Amelie

understand that great modernist design didn’t begin after World War I. There was a brilliant table labeled

as a special order piece with which we would become reacquainted later in the day.

With our heads spinning from the quantity and quality of the Majorelle exhi

bition, we made our way back to the taxi queue and asked the driver to take us to the Museum of the School of Nancy. I began to tremble with excitement and I understood how a pilgrim must feel approaching Jerusalem or Mecca for the first time.

Sitting upfront I expressed this to the driver, who very nonchalantly told me

“Il y a du mieux qu’au Musee de l’Ecole de Nancy” which roughly translates as: “There’s much better t

hings around here than inside the doors of the museum”. I was shocked and sure he was kidding.

Would a taxi driver in Amsterdam dare tell a visitor that better van Goghs were to be found away from the museum that bears his name? But Bruno was insistent, so I asked him if he could bring us to see any of these hidden gems. He smiled like the Cheshire cat and, giving me his card told me to call him when we were done at the museum.

Now, despite what was to come after, the Museum of the School of Nancy did not disappoint. Located in

what had been a gorgeous private home of Monsieur Corbin, a department store magnate, the architecture is at once impressive and modest in scale. Room after room is filled with true masterworks of the period, most of which were made on commission and thus never on the marketplace. I had seen almost all these pieces in books over the last 25 years but what shocked me was the scale and detail of the pieces. I had always assumed the book binding of Flaubert’s Salammbo would be quite small, but Victor Prouve’s tooled and tinted leather masterpiece is in fact 30 x 15 inches! I was also floored by the Emile Galle bed “Aube et Crepescule”, “Dawn and Dusk”, with opalescent glass and deeply intricate inlay of mother-of-pearl.

We strolled the garden, stopping by the “aquarium” which is still lovely despite no longer containing any fish to speak of. By now it was close to 3:00pm and we had completely missed our chance at lunch and were starting to get a might peckish. Bruno came to pick us up and said his friend could see us if we went right away. As he was taking us out of town I spied the girls in the rearview mirror and could see they were, shall we say, “trusting me” not to lead them into a scene from “Deliverance” a la Francaise.

A few minutes later we pulled through a set of private wrought iron gates

into the property of the Wizard of Oz, otherwise known as the Bichaton family of Malzeville, France. Gerard and his sister Nicole were there to greet us and show us around their property that ran for several acres and was filled with flowers and lovely stone grottos. We were enjoying the stroll

despite our grumbling bellies but wondering why exactly Bruno had brought us there since their house didn’t seem very Art Nouveau from the outside. Then they sprung it on us, La Cure d’air Trianon! In 1902 an enterprising restaurateur thought to create a two-level open-air restaurant for the people of Nancy looking to escape the summer heat. He hired Georges Biet who created a masterpiece of French ironwork built with the same rivet technology and some of the same design aesthetic as the Eiffel Tower.

Jacques Gruber was hired to create stained-glass windows advertising the restaurant’s offerings, which made the overall feeling familial and gay. As the photos attest, the brilliant ironwork is all that remains of this suburban sanctuary. In fact the restaurant only stayed in business for seven years and the Bichaton’s grandfather purchased it in 1909, expanding the property to its current size. Nicole kindly offered us a beverage and took us into the parlor floor to show us a Majorelle “nenuphar” (water lily) console that I never knew existed, and to show us pictures of their other Majorelle pieces at the Galeries Poirel exhibition, including the commissioned table that had so impressed us earlier in the day.

I wanted to stay and share more stories with these fellow lovers of Art Nouveau but it was nearly 4:30 pm and I was pretty sure either Hillary or Amelie was going to die of hunger if I didn’t get them to a restaurant right away, so with great appreciation and even greater regre

t we took our leave from Nicole and Gerard who kindly gave us a folio about the Cure d’air Trianon.

Before we got in the taxi I took Mr. Bichaton by the arm to thank him again for such a

remarkable and special experience and he shed a few tears at recognizing me as a fellow traveler in the sometimes lonely universe of lovers of Art Nouveau.

On our way back into town as the women tore into Hillary’s gluten-free cookies I thanked Bruno for such an unexpected and pleasurable experience, to which he replied “Tu n’as rien vu”, which roughly translates as “You didn’t see squat”. It seems that Grandpa Bichaton was friendly with Majorelle, and commissioned him to furnish the entire upstairs. So there are five bedrooms and two offices filled with Majorelle furniture, which we obviously will have to see on our next visit to Nancy!

So dear clients and friends the moral of the story is that true travelers are always more interested in the journey than the destination and that sometimes the best train is the one you miss first thing in the morning! Needless to say, we owe our thanks both to our enigmatic and resourceful driver Bruno and to the Bichaton family for an incredible day in Nancy, the birthplace of Art Nouveau.

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