Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle). In 2016, Chloé Sarazin, a student curator-restorer specializing in painting at the National Heritage Institute, chose as her memory object a work by a Nancy like herself, Victor Prouvé. It is about Ceramics, one of ten panels delivered in 1925 for the Nancy and Eastern France pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. At the end of the event, this decorative set painted in oil on linoleum was donated by patron Eugène Corbin, director of Magasins Réunis, to the Musée de l’école de Nancy. After the restoration of Ceramicscompleted in 2017, a subscription was launched in 2019 to finance that of the other nine panels. Chloé Sarazin and the team she formed were able to carry out this work from 2021 to 2025.
A “gallery of evolution”
The possibility of presenting these works side by side for the first time since 1925 led another team to give meaning to Nancy’s commemoration of the centenary of Art Deco. The series being dedicated to the alliance of Art, Science and Industry, Susana Gállego Cuesta, director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy and the scientific curators Claire Berthommier, Marion Pacot and Kenza-Marie Safraoui, who represent the Museum of the Nancy-Villa Majorelle school, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Lorraine Museum, chose as starting points the allegory of Art and the representation of professions decorative arts and Lorraine industry (metalworkers, miners) painted by Prouvé. Beyond the Pavillon de Nancy which took place in the center of the Esplanade des Invalides, mentioned in a first room, they therefore decided to present a “gallery of evolution” devoted to Lorraine decorative arts from 1900 to the end of the 1930s and to evoke the lives of rival artists and industrialists (the catalog gives a good account of this) as well as less famous inhabitants of the city, in a section entitled “Nancypolis. Living in Nancy between the wars.“It is therefore not an exhibition on Art Deco”laughs Susana Gállego Cuesta, but from a dive into the era that we associate with this style, in Nancy, then the capital of eastern France.
Jacques Gruber (1870-1936), Stained glass window decorated with birds perched on a basin, 1929-1930, Nancy, Musée de l’École de Nancy.
© J.-Y. Lacôte
The event, which received the “Exhibition of National Interest” label, brings together more than 300 objects from Nancy institutions and numerous private owners of works and documents who responded to the curators’ call. Crystals, ceramics, stained glass, furniture, paintings and sculptures, textiles and clothing, but also private photographs and objects of daily life show a constant flow, from the Belle Époque, of ever-renewed modernity. The city traded with Paris and the rest of the world: in Nancy, regionalism had no place. However, a new style did not suddenly displace the previous one and, at the 1925 Exhibition, both Art Nouveau and Art Deco crystals were presented. Rich in beautiful objects, the route pays a beautiful tribute to the creativity and vitality of the city and its inhabitants in the first third of the 20th century.
