Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau Decorative style flourishing in most of western Europe and in the USA from about 1890 to the First World War. As the name suggests, it was a deliberate attempt to create a new style in reaction against the imitation of historical forms that had been such a prominent feature of 19th-century architecture and design. Its most characteristic theme was the use of sinuous asymmetrical lines based on plant forms; flower, leaf, and tendril motifs are common features, as are female figures with abundant flowing hair. At their most typical these motifs are found in the decorative and applied arts, such as interior design, metalwork, glassware, and jewellery, but Art Nouveau also had a major vogue in illustration and poster design and its influence can be seen to varying degrees in much of the painting and sculpture of the period—in a fairly pure form in the work of Alfred Gilbert and Jan Toorop, for example, and in certain aspects of such diverse artists as Munch (his penchant for undulating lines) and Matisse (the flat arabesque forms of the trees in some of the landscapes of his Fauve period).

The style takes its name from a shop called La Maison de l'Art Nouveau opened in Paris in 1895 by the German-born art dealer Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), a leading propagandist for modern design. Paris was one of its most important centres, but its origins were diverse (Celtic and Japanese art have been cited as influences) and its roots were less on the Continent than in England, where the Arts and Crafts Movement had established a tradition of vitality in the applied arts. In France, indeed, Art Nouveau is sometimes known by the name ‘Modern Style’, reflecting these English origins. In Germany the style was called Jugendstil (from the Munich journal Die Jugend, founded in 1896); in Austria, Sezessionstil (after the Vienna Sezession); in Spain, Modernista; and in Italy, Stile Liberty (after the London store that played so large a part in disseminating its designs). The style was truly international, its archetypal exponents ranging from Mucha, a Czech whose most characteristic work was done in Paris, to Tiffany in New York, and to the Spanish architect Antoní Gaudí (1852–1926) in Barcelona, the centre of a distinctive regional version of the style characterized by exaggerated bulbous forms. This cosmopolitanism was encouraged by the great international exhibitions that flourished during this period, and the style perhaps reached its apogee at the Paris ‘Exposition Universelle’ of 1900. It nowhere survived the outbreak of the First World War to any extent, but with its stress on the expressive qualities of form, line, and colour, it played a significant part in shaping modern aesthetic attitudes.