Art Nouveau

The world that Art Nouveau was born in was subject to constant change. This style was a response to the transformation that underwent society through modernisation.  

Between the years 1870 and 1900, the cities of Europe and North America improved immensely in a remarkable urban revolution. This led to generations of the city residents to see their natural environment converted to brick, steel and tarmac.  Apart from the city, improvements related also to trade and technology, which was backed by military machines. These took control of the earth and made it cosmopolitan. These changes were also introduced in psychology and intellectual outlook of the individual, since he transformed change, and it was also he who was transformed by it.

Art Nouveau is best known to be a style belonging to the visual arts that developed in a number of European and North American cities. Art Nouveau emerged from the intense activity of a collection of movements and manufacturers among others, and though this style affected all kinds of visual forms of culture, its main areas of interest relate to decorative arts.

What defines Art Nouveau is modernity. Art Nouveau was the first internationally based attempt to change completely visual culture. In a world, which was hungrily being modernized, it was inevitable that the artists of that period would not react to such cultural context. 

Several factors make the beginnings of Art Nuoveau difficult to distinguish from one another. The style has had three broad phases.

In the first period, between 1893 and 1895, the first very mature works arose. There are four particular moments in which a total of these years can amount to. The first occurred in London, March 1893, as a first issue of a new journal called ‘The studio’. The work of Aubrey Beardsley was illustrated here. 

This is a print from Oscar Wilde's play 'Salome'. This was the very first mature image in the Art Nouveau style. 

The second moment, also in 1893, this time happened in Brussels. Victor Horta, an architect, completed a commission for his patron, Emile Tassel, for a terraced town house in the St-Gilles district of the city. The house was the first fully developed exercise in Art Nouveau architecture and interior design.

The third moment is situated in 1894, also in Brussels. Here, Henry van de Velde published a pamphlet form, ‘A Clean Sweep for Art’, which gave an intellectual context to his actions. It spoke of a new generation of artist-designers who believed that the art world was expiring and corrupt.

‘The time has come: the idea of love will be communicated to all men; art will return to the light in a new form…’.

In his writings and design work, van de Velde powerfully promoted two of the ideas that were to become central to the style. The first was related to the perceived status of the decorative arts and design in relation to the higher arts. The second idea was that all the arts should work in harmony to create a total environment. The idea then was that everything that related to an interior should be connected to everything else. Van de Velde’s architecture and interior design, alongside many Art Nouveau designers, lived up to this maxim.

The forth creative moment originated in December 1895, in Paris. Siegfried Bing opened a new gallery on the rue de Provence in Paris. The gallery was named ‘L’Art Nouveau’.  By the late 1895, this new style was beginning to flourish all over Europe. In Glasgow, Munich, Vienna and Nancy breakthroughs were made that added to the already growing popularity of the style. One of the most famous of these was a set of embroideries by a German designer Hermann Obrist, known as ‘whiplash’.

Speed characterized the spread of Art Nouveau from 1895. The second phase from 1895 to 1900, experienced the growth of this new style in unban centres in Europe and North America.

The third phase, from 1900 to 1914, saw the style become a widely known, practiced and discussed wonder, a fact that was present everywhere in the international cultural. Art Nouveau had became ordinary, a trade standard that could be applied to goods of all kinds. 

Art Nouveau was a style that was dependent on a market that was committed to the consumption of modern luxury goods. Architect-designer, Hector Guimard generated his own literature to show his patrons what was available in ‘Le style Guimard’.

Art Nouveau was a diverse style and every centre added upon the style their interpretation and different individuals created a variety. All styles were supplemented by the circumstances in which they were made. Different Art Nouveau designers looked at different sources for inspiration. The first and most important was nature. Animals, plants, and landscape formations dominate a large number of the movements that make Art Nouveau. Furthermore, schools also experimented with previous historical styles, augmenting them to make them appropriate for the modern age. Art Nouveau designers did not use historical forms to evoke the past, but they intended to re-interpret it.

In addition, several types of Symbolist art, such as literature, were also vital for the development of Art nouveau. French Symbolism was especially significant for the infusing of a sense of mystery and psychic depth to objects and images.

Art Nouveau was an extremely diverse style: both the look of the objects and the meanings they convey were achieved through the combination of many other styles and ideas. Moreover, Art Nouveau objects are simple, and their simplicity veils a complicated combination of visual ideas from wildly diverse places. Art Nouveau is a complicated style that existed for a complicated age, when many contrary forces were forced to live together such as the old and the new, the city and the country, science and religion, the individual and the community, the local and the cosmopolitan. Those who were involved in creating Art nouveau believed that all the arts should work in a together. For instance, if the objects of everyday existence contained poetry, then the mass of people might contribute in poetry. It was a radical attempt to decorate the world so as to give it more meaning.  

An evidence of the Gothic revival theory is illustrated in the structural logic behind Eugène Gaillard's chair (right), and Richard Riemerschmid's chair (left).  

Furthermore, (on the left) Charles Rennie Mackintosh shows his inspiration from the Rococo movement by the oval and the cabriole leg of the chair. 

Josef Hoffmann's chair (on the right), which was manufactured by Thonet, indicates the folk tradition. 

C.R Ashbee, decanter

In addition, it was believed by most major schools that the English design was a major inspiration. Most influences include William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Aesthetic movements led by such characters, such as Oscar Wilde spoke of an elegant simplicity that proved important. Together with such influences, John Ruskin provided many of the Europeans with their political commitment to design reform.

Furthermore, French paintings of the period between 1880 and 1900 provided Art Nouveau with much of its narrative content and many of its forms. Post-Impressionists such as Toulouse Lautree are often included in the Art Nouveau camp.

The French Symbolist painters, influenced by literary Symbolism, viewed art as a way of discovering the soul. Art Nouveau artist-designers such as Alphonse Mucha, Emile Galle, Rupert Carabin and Jean Carries were deeply affected by them.

Art Nouveau practitioners did not discard the Classical past. What they did was that they changed it into something that reflected their own contemporary concerns. All the Art Nouveau centres, explored the Classical style in order to create an Art of Modern life. The work of Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann for instance, loses much of its meaning unless read as an ironic exploration and re-orientation of Classical form.

The Barouque and Rococo styles were also popular with Art Nouveau designers all over Europe. Rococo was however the most important. This was mostly adapted in the major French centres of Paris and Nancy. Rococo was delicate and sensuous development of Baroque.

Jean Lamour; details of Place Stanislas gates

The High Rococo style of the Louis XV era became a French national style. The asymmetric profile, the use of cabrioles, ovals and floral detailing of this period were a constant presence in Art Nouveau, especially in furniture, ceramics and glass. Despite all this, for Art Nouveau designers Rococo also carried associations of corruption and eroticism. As the French state officials were proud of the styles nobility, Huysmans, a novelist, interpreted it only as having a high sensual character. ‘it is the only age which has known how to envelop a woman in a wholly depraved atmosphere, shaping the furniture on the model of the charms, imitating her passionate contortions and spasmodic convulsions in wood and copper.’

Normally, the artists of this era would incorporate style that they thought were outside normal expectations. Folk art made it in this criterion. Folk art was known to hold pure and honest values, and was imitated to achieve such honesty. In much the same spirit, Celtic and Viking forms were also brought back to life in the Nordic countries, Britain, Ireland and parts of America. The twisting linear motifs in both these traditions are clearly important for the work of a number of Art Nouveau designers.

This image (right) illustrates a plaster cast of doorway from 11th century church at Urnes, Norway. such an influence can be viewed in Lars Kinsarvik armchair (left).

The most important source of Art Nouveau however was nature. During the nineteenth century nature became increasingly viewed as a science. This occurred due to the development of the evolutionary theory. This was influenced by the publication of the ‘Origin of the Species’ 1859, and ‘The Descent of Man’ 1871, both by Charles Darwin, that fundamentally changed the position of humanity in the natural scheme of things. Art Nouveau intellectuals related evolutionary theory to cultural processes, suggesting that evolution in nature was analogous to progress in culture.

Furthermore, some designers worshiped nature, and painted animals and plants with spirituality, and many were those who merged animals, plant and human forms. This may be illustrated with a piece by Rupert Carabin.

Art Nouveau finally ceased just before the First World War. It was its complex use of sources that caused its termination. As the new times emerged, Art Nouveau started to become unfashionable. The evolving concern of the modernists regarding technology and utility, started to take over, and post war years reflected a new interest back to the historical. Unfortunately, Art Nouveau began to be seen as an insignificant transition style.

In the present day, Art Nouveau is recognized as a style that tried to represent a complicated and complex modern movement, where the spread of development and the rate at which it happened, did not only change people’s experience of the world, but also to what the new years might offer.

Bibliography: 

Paul Greenhalgh. Essential Art Nuoveau