Frantz Jourdain
Frantz Jourdain (3 October 1847 – 22 August 1935) was a Belgian architect and author. He is best known for La Samaritaine, an Art Nouveau department store built in the 1st arrondissement of Paris on three stages between 1904 and 1928. He was respected as an authority on Art Nouveau.
Life
Frantz Jourdain was born in 1847. In the 1860s he studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. He obtained French citizenship in 1870.
Critic
Jourdain was a theoretician of Art Nouveau. He began writing on the arts in 1875, and by the end of his life had published about two hundred articles in sixty magazines and newspapers, at first news items but later critical articles in which he expressed his thoughts on art. Some of these were gathered into collections in 1886 and 1931. His writings were eclectic. Apart from writing on artistic questions he published a picareque romance, two collections of short stories, a novel, a play and two collections of portraits of artists.
Between 1880 and 1910 Jourdain was at the forefront of the movement to renew and synthesize the arts, and played an important role in introducing new ideas. He discovered unknown painters of the late 19th century and was a great admirer of the Galerie des machines of the Exposition Universelle (1889), designed by Ferdinand Dutert and Victor Contamin. In 1887 he was admitted to the Société des gens de lettres. He had become a prominent and often quoted art critic by the 1890s, an opponent of academic training and of the English Arts and Crafts movement. He was hostile to institutions such as the Beaux-Arts, which stifled new talent, and thought the Prix de Rome which sent artists to the Villa Medici to study the well-known antiquities was a waste of time.
Jourdain
Jourdain is a surname.
People with the surname Jourdain:
See also
Jourdain (Paris Métro)
Jourdain is a station on line 11 of the Paris Métro in the 19th and 20th arrondissements.
The station opened as part of the original section of the line from Châtelet to Porte des Lilas on 28 April 1935. It is named after the Rue de Jourdain (French: Jordan Street), referring to a nearby church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, who baptised Christ in the Jordan.
Station layout
References
Podcasts:
