Art nouveau in Paris....

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope these first few days of 2010 were great and that the rest of the year will bring you what you wish for.

I just came back from France where I spent the holiday season with my husband and my family. We stayed a couple of days in Paris and took advantage of some of the current exhibits.

At the Musee d'Orsay we saw an Art Nouveau exhibit (with an entire room and portions of rooms reconstituted with wooden panels, furniture and accessories. Breathtaking!) as well as an exhibit of Art Nouveau inspired art (some pieces were very nice, some I really did not care for but it was actually interesting to see the influence of Art Nouveau in so many contemporary ordinary things such as packaging or vinyl record covers.)

There is a lot of Art Nouveau around Paris (for example most of the metro gates in the center of the city.) So when we left the museum and walked along some of the well-known boulevards we saw several beautiful buildings, wrought iron gates and balconies, tiled house fronts, etc.

Most of the much older stone buildings in the center of the city, including Notre Dame, have been cleaned and the black grime that covered them is gone, leaving the beautiful creamy stone visible. Even on a dreary day, it was gorgeous.

This is the Louvres seen from the Seine

I spent another afternoon in Paris before I flew back home and went to see the Tiffany exhibit at the Musee du Luxembourg. It was ironic that most of the objects on display were on loan from museums or collections in the US and Canada. But what a treat that was! I had only seen photographs of Tiffany's works and had not realized how textured their surfaces are. The stained glass panels are made of layers of glass on top of each others so the surface is not smooth and the feeling of depth is incredible. I also realized that the glass is made with many different textures and techniques. There was a stained glass panel with an angel whose wings were made of rippled glass that really looked like feathers. The lamps on display, most of them designed by Clara Driscoll, were just stunning. I must add that everything was perfectly displayed and lit and it was really hard to leave the room and its brilliant colors to go back outside into the dreary winter . I cannot share any photos with you because photography was not allowed in the museum.