The Masters
Ten careers, nine cities, five media — one curve. Each salon room computes the geometry its artist actually built with.
1867 – 1942 · Lyon / Paris
Hector Guimard
Born in Lyon on 10 March 1867 and trained in Paris, Guimard absorbed Belgian Art Nouveau at Victor Horta's Hôtel Tassel before winning the 1899 Paris façade competition with Castel Béranger. As designer of the Paris Métropolitain entrances from 1900, he put Art Nouveau in front of every Parisian and exported cast-iron kits of his entrances abroad. His style fell from favour after 1905, and he emigrated to New York in 1938, dying there on 20 May 1942.
1860 – 1939 · Ivančice / Paris / Prague
Alphonse Mucha
Moravian-born Alphonse Mucha reached Paris in 1887 and broke through overnight with the Gismonda poster for Sarah Bernhardt at Christmas 1894, signing exclusive contracts with her and then with the printer Ferdinand Champenois. His long-haired, halo-framed women defined the movement's look so thoroughly that contemporaries called it 'le style Mucha'. He later devoted himself to Czech themes and the twenty-painting Slav Epic, dying in Prague on 14 July 1939 shortly after interrogation by the Gestapo.
1848 – 1933 · New York
Louis Comfort Tiffany
Son of jeweller Charles Lewis Tiffany, Louis Comfort Tiffany turned from painting to glass in the late 1870s and developed opalescent Favrile glass with related patented techniques. His Tiffany Chapel triumphed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Tiffany Studios in Corona, Queens supplied windows, lamps and mosaics to an international clientele into the 1920s. He became first design director of Tiffany & Co. in 1902 and died in New York on 17 January 1933.
1861 – 1947 · Ghent / Brussels
Victor Horta
Victor Horta, born in Ghent on 6 January 1861, transformed the Brussels town house with the Hôtel Tassel of 1893, integrating exposed iron structure, open plans and the curving 'whiplash' line into a unified language. A sequence of private hotels for liberal-bourgeois patrons through about 1901 made Brussels the capital of Art Nouveau architecture. Later working in a classical idiom and teaching for decades, he died in Brussels on 8 September 1947; four of his town houses are UNESCO World Heritage sites.
1862 – 1918 · Vienna
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt, born near Vienna on 14 July 1862, trained as an architectural decorator before leading the break with the establishment as founding president of the Vienna Secession in 1897. His university ceiling paintings provoked a public scandal, after which he turned to private patronage and his gold-ground 'Golden Period', producing The Kiss and the designs for the Stoclet Frieze. He died in Vienna on 6 February 1918 after a stroke, leaving unfinished canvases that define Austrian modernism.
1846 – 1904 · Nancy
Émile Gallé
Émile Gallé, born in Nancy on 8 May 1846, inherited his family's glass and ceramics works and built them into Europe's most inventive art-industrial studio, showing internationally from the 1878 Paris Exposition onward. His cameo, internal-inclusion and marquetry techniques gave glass the plasticity of plant and sea life, and his furniture carried the same botany in carved wood. A founder and first president of the École de Nancy, he died there on 23 September 1904.
1852 – 1926 · Reus / Barcelona
Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, born in June 1852 near Reus, graduated in Barcelona in 1878 and built a series of houses — Casa Vicens, Casa Batlló, Casa Milà — alongside park and church commissions in a personal Catalan Modernisme drawn from ruled-surface geometry and observed nature. From 1883 he directed the Sagrada Família, living on site in his final years. Injured by a tram in June 1926, he died in Barcelona and is buried in the basilica crypt.
1860 – 1945 · Ay / Paris
René Lalique
René Jules Lalique, born at Ay in Champagne on 6 April 1860, trained with the goldsmith Louis Aucoc and by 1890 ran the Paris workshop whose jewels of horn, enamel, glass and semi-precious stones judged by art rather than carat made him the supreme Art Nouveau jeweller, exhibiting at Samuel Bing's Maison de l'Art Nouveau. After about 1905 he shifted to glass, mass-producing scent bottles for François Coty from 1907 and later vases, fountains, chandeliers and car mascots. He died in Paris in May 1945 and is buried in Père Lachaise.
1868 – 1928 · Glasgow / London
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born in Glasgow on 7 June 1868, apprenticed in the office of Honeyman and Keppie while studying at the Glasgow School of Art, where he joined Herbert MacNair and the Macdonald sisters as 'The Four'. The Glasgow School of Art building (1896–99, 1907–09), the Cranston tea rooms and Hill House fused Scots baronial mass, Japanese asymmetry and rose-motif abstraction into a proto-modern language. Continental praise outlasted British neglect; he left architecture for watercolour and died in London on 10 December 1928.
1856 – 1924 · Boston / Chicago
Louis Sullivan
Louis Henri Sullivan, born in Boston on 3 September 1856, joined Dankmar Adler in Chicago in 1879 and with him perfected the steel-framed skyscraper — Wainwright, Guaranty, Schlesinger & Mayer — expressing the tall office block in vertically unified piers. His essays coined 'form ever follows function', and his office mentored Frank Lloyd Wright, who called him lieber Meister. After the partnership dissolved in 1895 his practice declined into small banks and stores, their ornament still exuberant; he died in Chicago on 14 April 1924.