Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau. Style of architecture and the decorative arts that flourished in Europe and the USA from c.1888 to c.1914, featuring asymmetrical compositions; attenuated blooms, foliage, roots, and stems with sinuous flowing lines, as though floating in water; the dream-maiden (female figure with long wavy tendril-like hair known as femme-fleur); stylized rose-bowls; intertwining plant-forms; and indeterminate whiplash curved tendrils. It evolved from some late-Gothic Revival patterns, and owed something, perhaps, to Auricular and Rococo ornament. Proto-typical Art Nouveau capitals at Blackfriars Railway Bridge (1862–4) and Holborn Viaduct (1863–9), both in London, demonstrate that the essence of the style was in place in the early 1860s, while the illustrations in Viollet-le-Duc's hugely influential Entretiens sur l'Architecture (Lectures in Architecture–1872) spread images of free-flowing curved forms throughout Europe and America. Certain artists associated with the Arts-and-Crafts movement, notably Arthur H. Mackmurdo, William Morris, and C. F. A. Voysey produced celebrated designs that fall firmly within the style. Named after the Paris shop (Maison de l'Art Nouveau) of the art-dealer Siegfried Bing (1838–1905—which stocked artefacts that were not reproductions of styles of earlier periods, but were modern and often oriental, and had interiors designed by Henry van de Velde (1896)), the style was associated first with the Aesthetic Movement, and then with modernity (in France it was also known as the Style Moderne, in Spain as Modernismo, Estilo Modernista, or Modernisme (Catalan), in The Netherlands as Nieuwe Kunst (New Art), in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Scandinavia as Jugendstil (Youth style), and in Italy as Stile Floreale or Stile Liberty (from Liberty's shop in London which stocked Art Nouveau objects), so its new, youthful, and modern associations were emphasized by its various names). In architecture the style reached its heights of virtuosity with the buildings of d' Aronco in Milan, Gaudí in Barcelona, Guimard in Paris, Horta in Brussels, and Shekhtel′ in Moscow. Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), furniture by Louis Majorelle (1859–1926), designs by Margaret Macdonald (1865–1933) and her husband C. R. Mackintosh, graphic work by Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), glassware by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1913), and architectural designs by Émile André (1871–1933), Basile, Hankar, Hoffmann, Jourdain, Jules Lavirotte (1864–1924), Olbrich, and Louis Sullivan, all display characteristic Art Nouveau elements. Journals such as L'Art Décoratif (Decorative Art), Die Jugend (Youth), Kunst und Kunsthandwerk (Art and Craft), Pan, and The Studio disseminated the style, which was also promoted in German-speaking countries by various Sezession groups (in Austria-Hungary the preferred term was Sezessionstil rather than Jugendstil). In the Ottoman Empire traditional Muslim and Turkish motifs and ways of handling space blended with new ideas from Western Europe, so that some extraordinary Art Nouveau works were erected in Istanbul around 1900: curiously, they are not well known in Europe or America.

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