Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau (“New Art”) was an international style of art, architecture, and the decorative arts that flourished from about 1890 to 1910 throughout Europe and the United States.¹⁵¹⁶ It is characterized by long, sinuous, organic lines and by motifs drawn from the natural world — flowers, leaves, vines, tendrils, and insect wings — rendered in undulating, asymmetrical “whiplash” curves.¹⁵² The style was a conscious effort to break free from the historicism, academicism, and eclecticism that had dominated 19th-century design, and it aspired to create a genuinely modern idiom of its own.¹³¹⁵

Art Nouveau touched nearly every design discipline — architecture, interior design, furniture, jewelry, glass, ceramics, metalwork, posters, and illustration.¹⁵¹³ Practitioners drew on modern materials such as iron, glass, ceramic, and brickwork, often refusing any distinction between structure and ornament.¹⁵¹⁷ In graphic work, designers made color rather than tonal modeling the primary visual attribute, using stylized abstract shapes, contoured lines, and flat space.¹⁵ The movement reached its widest public exposure at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, after which the style spread rapidly across France and beyond.¹⁸¹³

Origins and influences

Art Nouveau grew directly out of two nineteenth-century English developments centered on design reform: the Arts and Crafts movement and the Aesthetic movement.¹⁶² The Arts and Crafts movement, and the ideas of William Morris?, championed a return to handcraftsmanship, traditional techniques, and the values of craftsmanship, nature, and social reform, and its ideals of artisanal work and stylized floral forms resonated with Art Nouveau artists.¹³²³ The Aesthetic movement contributed its credo of “art for art’s sake”.¹⁶ Both were shaped by the socially aware teachings of Morris, who founded his firm in 1861 and produced wallpapers, textiles, stained glass, and tapestries; his ideas influenced figures including Émile Gallé, Josef Hoffmann, Henry van de Velde, and Antoni Gaudí.¹⁰¹⁶

The style also inherited an ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk? (“total work of art”), the synthesis of the fine and applied arts into a single unified environment.¹⁶²³ This drew on nineteenth-century theoreticians such as the French Gothic Revival architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and the British critic John Ruskin, who argued against the segregation of painting and sculpture from the “lesser” decorative arts.¹⁶ Viollet-le-Duc’s Entretiens sur l’architecture, published from 1863 to 1872, championed iron as the material of a new architecture and served as a near-bible for architects such as Horta, Guimard, and Gaudí.¹⁰

The movement’s sinuous line was derived in part from botanical studies and from illustrations of deep-sea organisms, such as those by the German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel in Kunstformen der Natur (1899).¹⁶ Earlier design manuals also advocated nature as the primary source of ornament, among them Floriated Ornament (1849) by the Gothic Revivalist Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by the architect Owen Jones.¹⁶ Art Nouveau further absorbed elements of Japanese art — japonisme — that flooded Western markets as prints after trading rights with Japan were established in the 1860s, and its graphic designers drew on the stylized shapes and flat space of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.¹⁶¹⁵ Writers have traced the style’s deeper roots to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the Gothic Revival, the Celtic Revival, and symbolism.¹²

Terminology and the international style

The term art nouveau first appeared in the 1880s in the Belgian journal L’Art Moderne, used to describe the work of Les Vingt, a group of twenty painters and sculptors who sought reform through art.¹⁶¹⁸ Its popularity as a label stemmed from the Parisian gallery of the art dealer Siegfried (S.) Bing, who around Christmas 1895 opened his shop under the name Maison de l’Art Nouveau.¹²¹⁸ Contemporary French names for the style included Le Style Métro, after Hector Guimard’s ironwork for the Paris Métro, as well as derisive terms such as Le Style nouille (“Noodle style”).¹⁸¹²

Though “international,” the style acquired distinct names and characters in each country.¹⁸ It was known as Jugendstil (“Youth Style”) in Germany, after the Munich magazine Die Jugend founded in 1896; Sezessionstil in Austria; Modernismo (or Modernisme) in Spain and Catalonia; and Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale in Italy.¹⁵¹⁸¹³ In England, its birthplace, it was first called the Liberty Style, after the London shop founded by Arthur Lasenby Liberty in 1875, and later the Modern Style.¹² In Belgium and the Netherlands it attracted mocking labels such as palingstijl (“eel style”) and slaoliestijl, the latter after Jan Toorop’s 1895 lithographed poster for “Delftsche Slaolie”.¹²

Practitioners and works

In architecture, the Belgian architect Victor Horta? (1861–1947) was one of the earliest initiators of the style.¹⁴ His first independent building, the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels (1892–93), was among the first Continental examples of Art Nouveau and is considered by some the first true Art Nouveau building, notable for its octagonal hall, curved lines, and innovative use of steel and glass.⁴¹⁷ Four of Horta’s Brussels town houses — the Hôtel Tassel, Hôtel Solvay, Hôtel van Eetvelde, and his own house and workshop — were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their open plans, diffusion of light, and the joining of curved decoration to structure.¹¹¹ His Maison du Peuple (1896–99) was the first structure in Belgium to have a largely iron and glass facade.⁴ Horta ranks with Henry van de Velde? and Paul Hankar as a pioneer of modern Belgian architecture.⁴¹⁴

Elsewhere, the style produced the Paris Métro entrances of Hector Guimard, Otto Wagner’s Majolikahaus (1898) and Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession Building (1897) in Vienna, and Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló (1904) and Casa Milà (1905–10) in Barcelona.¹⁵¹⁷ In the graphic and decorative arts it is associated with the poster designs of Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, the glass and jewelry of René Lalique and Louis Comfort Tiffany?, the glass of Émile Gallé, and the furniture of Louis Majorelle.¹⁴¹⁵ In Vienna the Secessionists included the painter Gustav Klimt and the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.¹⁸

An early English precursor is often cited in the fretwork back of a mahogany chair designed around 1881 by the architect A. H. Mackmurdo, whose serpentine floral panel has long been recognized as a forerunner of Art Nouveau, though the rest of the chair remained neo-Georgian in character.³⁶

Decline and legacy

Art Nouveau reached its peak at the 1900 Paris International Exposition and declined after the outbreak of the First World War, which effectively ended it; the style is often described as having lasted only about a quarter of a century.¹³⁵ It was succeeded by Art Deco?, a similarly decorative style that combined modernist forms with straight lines, geometry, and rich materials.¹³²¹ Considered old-fashioned after 1910, Art Nouveau was rehabilitated in the 1960s through exhibitions and retrospectives, and its flowing organic lines were revived in Pop and Op art and in the psychedelic typography of rock and pop album covers and advertising.¹⁵ It is regarded as a transitional movement from Victorian design toward early 20th-century modern art.¹⁵

The style’s built heritage survives in a European Art Nouveau Network of cities that includes Brussels, Barcelona, Nancy, Riga, Vienna, Budapest, Glasgow, Ljubljana, and Oradea, among others.⁹ As of the 2019 general assembly held in Oradea, the network’s president Théo Huguenin-Elie noted the density of Art Nouveau buildings in that Romanian city.⁹