Frantz Jourdain (1847 – 1935) was an architect and author from Belgium. He is best known for La Samaritaine, an Art Nouveau department store designed in three stages between 1904 and 1928 in Paris’s 1st arrondissement. He was regarded as an Art Nouveau expert.
Biography
In 1847, Frantz Jourdain was born. He attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1860s. In 1870, he became a French citizen.
Critic
Jourdain was an Art Nouveau theorist. He began writing about the arts in 1875. By the end of his life, he had written nearly 200 articles in sixty magazines and journals, initially as news items but later as critical articles. He shared his opinions on art. In 1886 and 1931, some of these were collected into collections. His writings were eclectic. He wrote a picaresque romance, two collections of short stories, a novel, a play, and two groups of artist portraits in addition to writing on artistic issues.
Jourdain was at the forefront of the effort to renew and synthesise the arts between 1880 and 1910. He was instrumental in developing new ideas. He discovered obscure late-nineteenth-century painters and was a significant fan of Ferdinand Dutert and Victor Contamin’s Exposition Universelle (1889) Galerie des Machines. He became a member of the Société des gens de lettres in 1887. By the 1890s, he had established himself as a well-known and widely quoted art critic, a critic of academic training and the English Arts and Crafts movement. He despised institutions that stifled new talent, such as the Beaux-Arts. He felt the Prix de Rome, which sent artists to the Villa Medici to study well-known antiquities, was a waste of time.
View on Art in Society
In 1928, Frantz Jourdain wrote a history of the Salon d’Automne. In it, he said, “The exclusive presentation of painting, sculpture, graphics, and architecture cannot give a true and complete picture of the aesthetics of an era.” “It is only a small part of the intellectual work of a civilisation that is condensed, not the whole thing.” Giving one art more power than others is a grave and dangerous mistake (Arwas, 1980).
Architect
Ernest Cognacq opened La Samaritaine, a department store, in 1870 after leasing a small portion of a building for commercial purposes. He then purchased the house and, in stages, the building across the rue de la Monnaie. In 1885, he commissioned Jourdain to rebuild the original structure while also beginning to upgrade the exterior. Cognacq agreed to expand the store in 1904.
Jourdain was tasked with creating the most space possible in the shortest amount of time and for the least amount of money. He devised a radical steel structure to do so. His uncle, the decorator Francis Jourdain, the painter Eugène Grasset, the metalworker Edouard Schenck, and the ceramist Alexandre Bigot were responsible for the striking exterior decoration. While it attracted criticism from a new generation of architects who resisted Art Nouveau, his glass and exposed steel frame in this design were radical and practical (Arwas, 1980).
His work was included in the architecture section of the 1912 Summer Olympics art competitions.
Source
Arwas, V., Russell, F. D. (1980). Art Deco. United Kingdom: Academy Editions.
Wikipedia contributors. (2021, February 24). Frantz Jourdain. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:21, April 3, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frantz_Jourdain&oldid=1008644664
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