Studio: international art (7.1896)

Studio-Talk

PARIS.—The great event of the present
art season has been the opening of the
"Salon de 1'Art Nouveau" at the
house of M. S. Bing. M. Bing, it
must be said, has been somewhat
roughly handled by the press. One may well ask
why ? for his ambitious efforts, even if they have
not attained perfection straight away—no easy
matter, in truth—are certainly deserving of en-
couragement, not so much on account of the
actual results achieved, as from the ideas whence
they have sprung. It was indeed an ingenious
idea to organise a permanent exhibition of works
of applied art in Paris, and M. Bing must be
credited with no small measure of boldness; for it
must be obvious to any one who has any real
knowledge of what the feeling in Paris is with
regard to matters of this kind—a feeling altogether
conventional and belated—that an undertaking
such as this is condemned beforehand to all sorts
of ridicule. What is wanted in Paris is novelty

which is not novel, and even this must first have
received the blessing of the arbitres elegantiarum
—those who decide what is tasteful, and modish,

and chic !

But, to carry the matter to a higher level, M.
Bing was ill-advised in bringing the expression
New Art so pompously into the style of his under-
taking. Apart from the extravagance, both in the
fitting up of his exhibition and in the selection of
his subjects that this title led him into, he thereby
offended a vast number of artistic and fashionable
susceptibilities among the so-called "superior
classes," whose tastes, as I have just remarked,
while ostensibly of the most advanced and most
exacting description, are in reality all that is anti-
quated and retrograde.

Moreover, the things M. Bing shows us are, as a

POSTER FOR THE " CERCLE POUR L'ART," BRUSSELS

BV M. HANXOTIAU

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