On Wednesday of our trip, our first stop was the Met Museum. It’s a huge museum, and would take you a very long time to look at everything.
Some history behind the Met Museum:
It is known as The Art Nouveau (Maison de l’Art Nouveau), meaning house of art. It began as a movement started by a Czechoslovakian born printer, Alphonse Mucha, in 1895. Posters depicting large colorful floral motiffs were put out on the streets of Paris in an advertising campaign addressing the merits and beauty of natural living. The movement quickly spread to Glasgow via Munich and then to Moscow, as more lithographic posters were displayed across big name high street department stores like Fortnum & Masons, Fenwicks and Carneges.
The Art Nouveau exhibit is divided into three parts:
1. The 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, where Art Nouveau was established as the first new decorative style of the twentieth century
2. All the sources that influenced this beautiful style
3. Development of Art Nouveau, and how it came to blossom in major cities in Europe and North America.
The museum is not set up like this at all. I even asked a few of the guards there if they knew how to find it. They said that it’s not on the list, but they had some works that would be counted as Art Nouveau.
Here are some works by Louis Comfort Tiffany:
The fountain was my favorite. It was gigantic. Its colors and how the light hit it just made it glow.
If you can go to the Met museum, take a plenty of time to look at as much as possible.
If you don’t get lost in there for half an hour like I did, take your time to have a good glance at every thing. It will be worth it.