Two new galleries at Belgium’s Art & History Museum have gathered together some of the most significant artifacts of the years when Brussels was a world center of Art Nouveau and then Art Deco design.
The museum, in Cinquantenaire Park, seems an ideal place for the exhibits: it is, itself, a centerpiece of Belgium’s celebration of its 50th anniversary in 1881, also marking the beginning of the first of these decorative movements. The exhibition, which starts with Belgian decorative art of the late 19th century, also features a careful reconstruction of a lost Art Nouveau masterpiece, a Winter Garden designed by Victor Horta, one of the stars of Belgian architecture and a founder of the Art Nouveau movement.
Despite that, the museum’s curators are careful to point out that while Horta was a giant figure of Art Nouveau and later of Art Deco, it’s not all about him. The galleries, among their 700 pieces, also feature others who contributed to Belgium’s moment at the center of design, including Paul Hankar and the artists, metalworkers and others who worked with the architects.
The Horta winter garden was part of a home he built for a client in 1900; in a misguided 1960s modernization movement it, along with a number of other classic buildings, was demolished, but one of Horta’s former apprentices managed to salvage and store the elements of the garden structure. It took six years at the museum to complete the restoration.
