The Art Nouveau style
(1880-1914)
History and Illustrations
At the turn of the century one of the most controversial movements in art was brought into existence. This great artistic movement fascinates with its fantasy of invention and its prediction of 20th century functionalism.
But what precisely is Art Nouveau which consistently refuses to be categorized and appeared about the same time as the Arts and Crafts movement and the Modern movement?
Most often the term refers to designs of free flowing or organic forms, based on some plant—like, floral abstraction, linear, undulating and rhythmic. Its whiplash curves convey the sense of powerful movement, restless, nervous and agitated. In brief, the ornamental value of line is its main artistic development and dominates all other considerations. In many other designs the tender curve of Art Nouveau is hardened, is kept in check, and in some cases entirely omitted. This aspect of the movement lies in the direction of rational and geometrical construction, which strives much more for architectonic than for organic form. Thus Art Nouveau is not one style, but several movements with a wide variety, even conflict, of stylistic trends.
The roots of this style may be traced back to English stylistic trends of the early 1880's, which were an offshoot of the Arts and Crafts movement. This earlier stylistic phenomenon, often conveniently called proto-Art Nouveau, was floral in inspiration and linear in essence and came into existence in the environment of the late Pre-Raphaelite illustrators and designers. For this reason it is two-dimensional in character and mainly restricted to flat surfaces. It is the English designer's attitude toward Nature and his aesthetic theories which are of particular interest.
Designers such as Selwyn Image and Arthur Mackmurdo who founded in 1882 the Century Guild, which was one of the groups that influenced the abrupt flowering of Art Nouveau between 1890-1895, felt that the exact imitation of Nature was pointless unless the source itself was consciously revised and changed. In brief, Nature, which had ruled over art for the first half of the nineteenth century, would continue as a source of inspiration, with the one big difference that the new aesthetic required more than just a faithful depiction of plant forms. Instead Nature would be restyled and transcended and finally abstracted.
Art Nouveau may be placed midway between Historicism (the infatuation for past styles) and the emergence of the Modern movement (an applied art that would be more appropriate to a machine-age existence). Already nascent in the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts movements, it blossomed all over Europe by 1890.
Essentially there was not one point of origin, but several, as the style sprang up almost simultaneously in several countries, the incentive in each country stemming from the work or personality of an outstanding individual, such as Mackintosh, Gallé, Tiffany or Van de Velde. Its fanciful and fiery youth covered the last five years of the century and it was in full bloom by 1900.
Confronted by the aesthetic bankruptcy of mechanization and the necessity for creating a new style, the Art Nouveau artists made an attempt to return to craft conditions, to revive handicraft. Like the Arts and Crafts movement, it was the style of the individual designer, who relied on the work of men's hands, not on machines.
From 1890 in capitals as London, Vienna, Paris and Glasgow, craftsmanship was restored to its former eminence. In fact, this extraordinary revival of crafts and craftsmanship which happened at the end of the century brought a significant change, many artists turned away temporarily or permanently from the fine arts to the applied or decorative arts. It developed to a point where Walter Crane in England pointed out that the objective was "turning our artists into craftsmen and our craftsmen into artists". As a consequence, and a most important contribution, a sense of unity in the art of interior design was reestablished. To conceive of a room and its contents as a unified whole was perhaps the one feature found in each country's interpretation of the new art.
Gothic, Baroque and Rococo, each in its own manner contributed to mold this style. Gothic contributed theory; Baroque its plastic conception of form, and Rococo its principle of asymmetry. However, to free themselves from Historicism, the furniture designers threw accepted principles of design to the wind. They were scarcely aware of the nature of materials. Wood was twisted into strange shapes and metal writhed in tortuous curves inspired by the flowing interlacings of Nature, for the style as a whole is based on Nature, not only its decoration but also its structural conception. An awareness of this fact is necessary to the understanding of the new art, as it was in Art Nouveau that Nature as an aesthetic expression reached its highest point.
The last antique furniture style
The Turin Exhibition of 1902 marked the decisive point as well as the crossroads of the style. It was evident to everyone that it was already declining. Although a number of artists continued to use it up to the outbreak of the First World War, the main artistic development after 1902 tended toward simplicity, more emphasis on structural function and less on ornamentation. The real underlying reason for the abrupt rejection, was the rumblings of a new movement; the Modern.
Gradually the artists realized that the answer to the stylistic problems, which social and economic evolution had brought forth, lay in constructive principles. Simplicity of form and honesty toward materials and working processes, ideals for which the Arts and Crafts movement fought. It was then that the leading artists discarded Art Nouveau in order to give their creative energy to a wide movement supporting these ideas. Their interest focused on new shapes and decorative problems became subordinated.
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