Who would have thought that Art Nouveau, nowadays so admired, had known a long period of disregard before becoming fashionable again?

This is the subject of the fascinating exhibition being held at the Musée d’Orsay: to show how and why an artistic trend can arise successfully, then be pushed into the sidelines, before slowly returning to favour and finally recovering its reputation. A story of taste, in other words. And the case of Art Nouveau is a perfect example.

Born at the end of the 19th century, its radically different style, characterised by its long arabesques, was immediately adopted by France (the famous Gallé vases, the Guimard entrances to the Parisian metro) and spread throughout the world (the Tiffany style in the States, the Modern Style in Great Britain...). But from 1905 onwards, its critics called it the “noodle style” and at the dawn of the First World War it was fiercely rejected.

The exhibition unravels the long process that brought it back into favour, beginning in 1933 with the Surrealists and continuing from the 1960s onwards with designers and graphic artists before spreading into the fields of cinema, advertising and fashion.

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