Art nouveau was a style of international scope and eclectic vitality that resulted from attempts to find an art appropriate for the modern world. Its earliest works appeared in the 1890s. Art nouveau triumphed at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, becoming the style of the age.
Art Nouveau
A critic at the beginning of the nineteenth century complained about the term art nouveau, pointing out that every style was “nouveau” (new) in the beginning. But in fact it was art nouveau’s newness — or more exactly its modernity — that defined it. This surprises us today. We associate art nouveau most immediately with the whiplash curve and fin-de-siècle decadence. We associate it with the decorative, and the decorative arts, and these are not what come to mind when we hear the word “modernity.” We think instead of the spare lines and functional rationality of the Bauhaus — of form following function, of buildings without ornament. But for designers and those who bought their products, art nouveau meant “modern.”
Although we usually call the style “art nouveau” in English, it has a wealth of other names: in Germany it was Jugendstil, in Austria Sezessionstil, in Catalonia the Modernista movement, and in Italy stile Liberty (after the London retailer). Even this incomplete list suggests two things: international scope and great variety. It should be said at the outset that art nouveau is not defined simply by the way it looks. It embraced both sweeping organic forms and controlled geometric ones, and although it was largely driven by the decorative arts, its impact was felt in painting and architecture as well.
Weydeveldt, Léonard van (Agathon) (1841-1923): Dancer
Sculpture, statuette, bronze with gilt. 1915, appx. date.
A Short History
Defining the moment when art nouveau came into existence is difficult. Many point to the 1895 opening in Paris of Siegfried Bing’s commercial gallery, L’Art Nouveau. Bing was an important supporter of the new style, and his shop was a meeting place for artists and devotees. But the first art nouveau works certainly appeared earlier.
In 1893 the inaugural issue of The Studio, “an illustrated magazine of the fine and applied art,” reproduced a startling new work by the young English artist Aubrey Beardsley, an illustration for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé. Its bold sinuous line, so clear in black and white — and its fascination with the femme fatale — would be of great influence on art nouveau design. Some regard this print as the first work of art nouveau.
Journals like The Studio were one of the primary forums in which the new style gained exposure. Also important were the exhibitions organized by avant-garde groups in various cities, which afforded artists a look at new work being done in other regions. One of the most active of these groups was Les XX in Brussels. Brussels was well situated to be at the vanguard of art nouveau, located literally between the English arts and crafts movement and French symbolism (which were also important forces in the emergence of art nouveau; see below). The same year Beardsley’s print appeared, Victor Horta built a radically new townhouse in Brussels for his friend Émile Tassel. Although Horta probably had not seen Beardsley’s work, the profuse — and unified — decoration of curving tendril-like lines throughout the house conveyed much the same spirit.
By 1895, when Bing’s store opened, art nouveau was beginning to flourish in cities all over Europe and North America: Chicago, New York, Glasgow, Brussels, Vienna, Munich, Barcelona, Helsinki, Prague, Paris. In each city, it developed a unique character. In Belgium, France, and Germany, as in the United States, art nouveau design was curvilinear and based on natural forms, and it often adopted a mystical or pantheistic approach to nature. In Scotland and Austria, by contrast, much art nouveau design was geometric.
It was at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900 that art nouveau reached a wider public. Although art nouveau objects by no means dominated in their numbers, they were the works visitors perceived as representing the future of design. Art nouveau became the style of the age, no longer avant-garde but omnipresent, found in public places and in homes, on posters and products of all kinds.
Already by the end of the decade, art nouveau’s ubiquity had cheapened it. As it was applied to shoddy mass-produced goods, art nouveau began to seem debased in the eyes of some of the best artists and designers, even those who had pioneered it. Moreover, art nouveau’s eclectic nature made momentum difficult to sustain. Even before the start of World War I in 1914, art nouveau was no longer in the forefront of design, no longer modern. It was not until the 1960s that it again received serious attention, and only now are its contributions to the future of design in the twentieth century being understood.