This is one of the extensive ‘World of Art’ series published by Thames and Hudson. On the plus side the texts in this series are always readable and authoritative. On the down side, most of the illustrations are in black and white, and very small. It’s a series in which to read about art and art movements, but not necessarily to enjoy the actual art.
A revolt against Victorian mass production
Duncan emphasises that Art Nouveau wasn’t a style, it was a movement. What he means is that around 1890 a whole generation of designers, illustrators, craftsmen, architects and artisans right across Europe revolted against the heavy hand of mass-produced industrial products, dull designs and routine architecture, and against the Victorian home filled with a horrible mish-mash of clutter and bric-a-brac from all styles and periods – and determined to produce something fresh and new, and integrated in style and look.
He attributes the revolt against mass-produced, machine-made, shoddy tat, and the call to return to the values of hand-crafted, beautiful objects, created in a unified style – to William Morris, who emerges as one of the most influential men in the history of Western Art. Right across Europe, designers, artisans, ceramicists, decorators, fabric-makers and so on took up his Art and Crafts ideas with a passion.
The ubiquity of the impulse and its Europe-wide provenance is reflected in the bewildering variety of names given to it.
In Austria it is known as Secessionsstil after Wiener Secession; in Spanish Modernismo; in Catalan Modernisme; in Czech Secese; in Danish Skønvirke or Jugendstil; in German Jugendstil, Art Nouveau or Reformstil; in Hungarian Szecesszió; in Italian Art Nouveau, Stile Liberty or Stile floreale; in Norwegian Jugendstil; in Polish Secesja; in Slovak Secesia; in Russian Модерн (Modern); and in Swedish Jugend.
The name Art Nouveau simply comes from the Maison de l’Art Nouveau (House of the New Art), a gallery opened in 1895 by the Franco-German art dealer Siegfried Bing to publicise and sell objects made in the ‘new style’, such as the ground-breaking new jewelry by René Lalique. The interior was designed by Henry van de Velde and the American, Louis Comfort Tiffany, supplied the stained glass. The gallery became the place for rich and fashionable Parisians to buy objects in the ‘new look’.
A few years later the art critic turned entrepreneur, Julius Meier-Graefe, who had founded the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) magazine Dekorative Kunst in 1897, opened La Maison Moderne, a gallery that showcased Art Nouveau works in Paris in 1898. These two boutiques led the fashion.
Elements of Art Nouveau
Although Duncan goes into immense detail about the regional variations in the style, I looked in vain for a really definitive verbal description of the characteristic Art Nouveau ‘look’, so recognisable when seen, so hard to put into words.
So I drew up a list of common features. Art Nouveau consists of linear simplicity, but the lines are always curvilinear, with tall sinuous curves explicitly or implicitly based on the stems of flowers – the word ‘tendrils’ recurs, and ‘stems’. The ‘eyes’ in the tails of peacocks became an obsessive motif.
Chair by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1883)
The slender, parallel black lines in Mackmurdo’s pioneering chair design (above) anticipate Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations from the 1890s (below). The Beardsley drawing below actually features a peacock as the source of the peacock-feather head-dress worn by Salome and the luxurious long arabesque lines ending in stylised versions of peacock ‘eyes’.
Illustration for Salome by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)
As an example in a different medium, take this Peacock vase produced by the undisputed master of Art Nouveau design in glass and glassware, the American Louis Comfort Tiffany. He had signed an exclusive contract with Bing and via Bing’s boutique became the latest thing in glassware.
Peacock vase by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1896)
Japonisme was important. The fashion for Japanese style derives from the treaty signed between the Japanese and American governments in 1854 which opened up the country for trade after centuries of self-imposed isolation. World fairs held in the 1860s and 70s included more and more Japanese products, but it was the delicacy, the deliberate flatness and decorative design of Japanese woodcuts by the likes of Hiroshige and Hokusai which influenced European artists and designers.
Blossoming Plum Tree with Full Moon by Ando Hiroshige
Slender, tall, undulating, curving lines with a flower motif underpin the most famous aspects of the style. New at the time, just looking at something like this makes you feel how heavy it would be and how…. dated. The kind of thing you see in junk shops, tarnished and striking but totally out of place in a modern home.
French Art Nouveau glass and bronze table lamp by Emile Gallé
The Glasgow School which flourished from the 1890s was dominated by The Four, comprising the painter and glass artist Margaret MacDonald, architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, MacDonald’s sister Frances and Herbert MacNair. The Four defined the Glasgow Style’s fusion of influences including the Celtic Revival, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Japonisme. Among their works were the wall decorations for the Glasgow Tea Rooms, which highlight the movement’s interest in tall, elongated figures, in slender, elegant curved lines, in highly stylised flower imagery, and in simplified human features (‘ghost-like visions of attenuated young women’, p.50, ‘attenuated virgin maidens’, p.71). Note the heavy heads of hair of the maidens in this painting, similar to the hair in Beardsley, ornate and heavy like flower-heads.
The Wassail (1900) by Charles Rennie Mackintosh
In Paris the most famous Art Nouveau artifacts to be seen today are Hector Guimard’s entrances to a number of Métro stations. Note the curves, the flower and plant motifs in the ironwork – and also the wonderful lettering.
Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau entrance to the Abbesses station of the Paris Métro
There was never an Art Nouveau school of painting. Art Nouveau was a way of thinking about design, not fine art. That said, many painters shared Art Nouveau themes such as: the simplification of form, the flattening of space, the evocative powers of an undulating line and an affinity for the decorative elements of symbolism.
Duncan singles out Gauguin’s technique of flattening the subject into areas of raw colour divided by strong black lines, before going on to describe the work of his devotees, the self-styled Nabis painters of Paris, and then goes on to namecheck Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, Burne-Jones, Gustave Moreau and Ferdinand Khnopff – pretty much the same roll call of artists I’ve just worked through in two books about Symbolism.
He ends with Gustav Klimt, the nearest thing to a real Art Nouveau painter, for his use of surface decoration, flowing curves and rich ornamentation, ephemeral beauty, and symbolic female imagery tinged with decadence.
Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt (1907)
Art Nouveau was more at home in commercial posters than in painting. The big names are the pioneer Jules Chéret, who produced some 1,000 posters in the 1880s, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec who produced 32 highly distinctive posters in the 1890s, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlein (who I know from Sue Roe’s book In Montmartre was one of Picasso’s favourite artists) and the great Alphonse Mucha.
Michael Gibson’s big book of Symbolism has an interesting section on Mucha which contains several black-and-white photos Mucha took of his female models, placed next to the resulting finished posters. What is immediately obvious is how Mucha made the poster girls not only prettier than the models they were based on – more simple, sweet and innocent – but also more curvilinear – shoulders or arms which are more or less straight in the photos life were given curves and contours to soften them.
In this poster note the elaborate framing of the central image, which echoes the curvilinear and plant-like design of the ironwork in the Guimard Metro entrance, above.
Poster Advertising ‘Lefevre-Utile’ Biscuits by Alphonse Mucha (1896)
If flowery maidens were much in evidence in Mucha’s posters, naked young ladies swarmed across Art Nouveau sculpture. New techniques of manufacture and an interest in new materials, especially combinations of metals with glass or wood or marble or ivory or shell, led to an explosion in objets d’art which featured lithe, elongated nymphs with perfect bodies and rose-tipped breasts.
The book includes examples of nymph-adorned table lamps, electric lamps, inkwells, candle holders, dishes, candelabra, vases, wall brackets, tobacco jars and clocks.
Obsession and Dream, gilt bronze candelabra by Maurice Bouval (1898)
Architects built buildings in the new style all across Europe. Something I noticed many of them had in common was a kind of semi-circular arch above the windows, often ballooning out wider than the window itself. Plus the inevitable fantastical, slender curved lines of the cast iron balcony.
Villino Broggi-Caraceni, Florence by Giovanni Michelazzi (1911)
It’s a zoomorphic look which finds its climax in the genuinely weird Casa Batlló in Barcelona designed by the great but eccentric Antoni Gaudí in 1904, a building which is evolving into a living organism, made up of biomorphic surfaces and undulating forms.
Casa Batllo, Barcelona by Gaudi (1904)
The decline of Art Nouveau
A key aspect of Art Nouveau is how brief it was. Its high point was the Paris World Fair in 1900, where Siegfried Bing displayed a series of ensemble rooms created by his three top designers, Colonna, de Feure and Gaillard, showing how every element in a modern room could be tailored to the new look. The Fair featured the glassware of Tiffany and the jewellery of Lalique, which were at their peak of popularity.
By 1905 it was all over. Meier-Graefe closed his shop in 1903, as sales fell off. Bing closed his gallery in 1904 and died the next year. The Belgian Art Nouveau, La Libre Esthétique, had dissolved by 1904. Morris died in 1896, Beardsley in 1898, Whistler the great devotee of Japonisme in 1903, Émile Gallé the leading Art Nouveau glass-maker in 1904. Mucha, the great Belle Époque posterist, returned to his native Czechoslovakia in 1910.
It had all seemed so new and exciting in 1895 – but seemed old and boring by 1905. One Mucha poster looks sensational – twenty begin to look predictable. In furniture, lamps, wallpapers, art and architecture, ‘the look’ began to seem tired, not least because (ironically) these lines and motifs had themselves been absorbed into the consumer capitalist machine, copied and mass produced in huge numbers of inferior versions, and in such quantities that the market was flooded. The rich, who set the pace, were looking for new thrills.
Looking back on it from a century later, Art Nouveau – which saw itself as reacting against Victorian clutter and tastelessness – itself seems merely a variation on the same over-stuffed world. Photos of Art Nouveau interiors – a revolution to their contemporaries – now look just as wooden, dark and cluttered as their immediate predecessors.
Art Nouveau dining room at the Casa Requena (1905)
It’s only with De Stijl, Russian Constructivism and the emergence of the Bauhaus after the Great War, that we feel we are in an entirely new century of open, uncluttered space and modern streamlined furniture.
Key phrases
In trying to nail down what Art Nouveau really means, I noted down tell-tale phrases Duncan uses about architecture, interiors, furnishing, lamps and lights and so on:
- serpentine configurations… abstracted plant gyrations… curves and fancies… curvilinearity… elaborate and complex ornament… sculpted decoration… integrated design… lavish mouldings and sculpted decoration… the use of nature, specifically the flower and its components… flair for the bizarre… floriform…
And two new terms struck me:
- Femme-fleur – The dream-maiden with long strands of hair resembling vegetation tendrils, often intertwined with marine-like plant-forms, found in Art Nouveau designs.
- Femme-libellule – dragonfly lady or damsel.
Femme Libellule by René Lalique (1898)
Books & Boots 