Many New York buildings exhibit a French influence, as one might expect in a city with so many Paris-trained architects. If few French architects have worked in New York, we make up for it by the number of French artists who have embellished our buildings. Jules-Felix Coutan’s and Paul Helleu’s contributions to Grand Central Terminal come to mind, as do the Rockefeller Center reliefs by Alfred Janniot. Less known is the Belmont Building, on the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 34th Street. Built in 1925, this building’s base features exquisite wrought ironwork by Edgar Brandt, among the most significant French artists working in the style we would later call Art Deco.

In the year of this building, Paris held its legendary Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs et Industriel Modernes, a vast exhibition of le style moderne, as it was then called. The French government decided in this period of changing taste and technology to promote French designers and artisans in the hope of maintaining that nation’s prestige in the decorative arts. Historians credit the global influence of this exhibition as the dawn of Art Deco, though as that style evolved it incorporated Austrian and, later, American influences as well.

Though the Belmont Building as a whole is a successful “setback” sky scraper of its era, its first four floors command the greatest interest. These floors were leased to a company called Cheney Brothers, of South Manchester, Conn., a manufacturer of silk fabric. Cheney hired the New York architect Howard Greenley to design its showrooms and show windows. Greenley also designed the building’s distinctive lobby. Like many New York architects, Greenley had attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, having earlier worked for Carrere & Hastings. He designed some very good buildings, such as the Prince George Hotel, on East 28th Street, in 1905, but was best known for his creative designs of pageants (e.g., New York’s Beaux-Arts Balls, and the dedicatory pageant for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.) and exhibitions. For Cheney, Greenley designed two-story show windows on Madison and on 34th. Within these high, deep spaces Cheney unfurled great bolts of silk. Enhancing the windows, and the building’s entrances on Madison and on 34th, was Brandt’s lovely ironwork, of stylized floral forms, “colored by a secret process.” These iron designs represent one of the first full-blooded public exhibitions of le style moderne in New York, which would in short order become the world’s Art Deco pacesetter.

Brandt was a major contributor to the Paris Exposition that year. His work was everywhere throughout the exhibits – metalwork, grilles, folding screens, lighting fixtures, and much more. Brandt even designed the ironwork of the exposition’s main entry gate. One of his objects from the exposition, a five-panel, iron-and-brass folding screen, “L’Oasis,” sold at Christie’s in 2000 for $1.9 million – a record for an Art Deco work.

Brandt’s work on 34th Street reminds us yet again of how Beaux-Arts begat le style moderne, in both cases profoundly enriching the streets of New York.