Maison de l'Art Nouveau

The storefront at twenty-two rue de Provence features an unassuming limestone facade with a prominent arched entrance. In eighteen ninety-five, Siegfried Bing opened this gallery to sell Japanese woodblock prints and contemporary furniture that rejected traditional ornamentation. He named the shop Maison de l'Art Nouveau. While critics initially mocked the curved, organic designs as eccentric, the gallery became the epicenter for a new international style. Bing commissioned artists like Henry van de Velde to decorate the interior, turning the retail space into a cohesive artistic experiment.