art nouveau

art nouveau

Exploring the Influence and Legacy of Art Nouveau

1. Introduction to Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau remains a vital and intriguing movement and continues to influence today’s aesthetics. It provides a message which speaks with equal force to moderns and giants, and its legacies are manifold. It was Art Nouveau that began to erode the long-established and formidable barriers between high and low art. It created a definition of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ which was not necessarily suitable for its time but spoke to many future generations. Art Nouveau also identifies for us the problems and approaches of Modernism before WWII. It is an approach which continues to have a profound influence on much design today, particularly in the field of architecture. It continues to draw our eye towards the forgotten art in the gardens, cemeteries, and museums of yesterday and today.

The Art Nouveau movement – what we typically think of as the term for the genre in Germany and internationally as a whole – was known as Jugendstil. Deeply influenced by the Romanticism of the previous century, Art Nouveau was international in scope and was practiced in most of the arts – from painting to design, architecture, applied and decorative arts. It was dedicated to beauty as an ideal, and to social reform. Art Nouveau’s passionate ideas and somber mood did not fit the political tenor of the time just prior. However, it is not its lack of support from the establishment that has diminished Art Nouveau’s significance and made it a recent addition exclusively for the aesthetes.

2. Key Characteristics and Elements of Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau brought a playfulness and ornament to everything it touched. Lots of the style’s decorative accents are interlacing flowers, overloaded patterns, and curvilinear botanical elements. Treatments of natural imagery often blended with a fantastical element. Plant forms and florals repeat in designs and help blend ornament into the object, eliminating the stiffness of a border. A similar emphasis on curvilinear elements balances Art Nouveau’s often heavy asymmetry, a style made for one-of-a-kind design over mass production. This helps to create a flexibility, as well as a jeweled effect of Art Nouveau designs.

Art Nouveau’s organic whiplash and curvilinear lines draw from a variety of unexpected sources, like Japanese prints, the Arts and Crafts movement, and styles from medieval Europe. The style took the form of everything from furniture to architecture to decorative and fine arts. The flat, abstract designs of its practitioners were little more than a historical afterthought until a revival begun by Alphonse Mucha’s graphic work in the 1960s. The obvious influence and longevity of Mucha’s graphic explorations of the style have helped to make Art Nouveau more accessible to contemporary audiences. A quick look at over 500 Art Nouveau collectibles available on 1stDibs.com supports this concept.

3. Notable Artists and Architects of the Art Nouveau Movement

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was also heavily influenced by the idea of the artist; every aspect contributes to the beautiful whole. Unlike Guimard, Toulouse-Lautrec was fascinated with the common people, the working and folk environments. He was also influenced by the woodblock and Japanese printmakers who depicted the daily life of the Edo people. Although his art was not advertised as much as some of his contemporaries, when he died at the age of 36, Lautrec had left over 700 paintings and 275 prints. These meticulously document the lives of Montmartre, the performers, entertainers, and the working class. Toulouse-Lautrec was accepted by neither group and was dismissed as an outsider and voyeur. However, due to his talent and dedication to his art, he is considered to be the artistic heir of Daumier, Courbet, Pissarro, and Manet.

The artists and architects embraced the idea that every part should be a harmonious whole. Everything a person used daily should not only be useful but also beautiful. This is exemplified in the work of Hector Guimard. Arguably, his most famous and still extant work is on the entrances to the Paris Metro. If you were a supporter of Art Nouveau and harked back to the glory and majesty of the past, why would your work be so modern in form? Guimard was influenced by the Gothic architecture of Victor Horta and decided that his creations should be a present and a future echo of the Gothic. To him, the Gothic was the quintessential artistic heritage of France. Guimard saw in the Gothic form an organic and self-explanatory logic.

4. Global Impact and Influence of Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau ceramic work was characterized by its encrusted and vigorous surfaces that enhanced the sculptural quality of the clay. Pioneering artists such as Eugène Grasset, designer of Art Nouveau posters, and Japanese woodblock artists such as Hokusai were early catalysts in the design process and contributed to the development of Eugene Gaillard’s lacquer cabinet, which, today, is part of the collection at the Geneva Museum of Art and History. Entropy, a concept only recently investigated from a scientific point of view, was articulated at the core of the individual creative output of Art Nouveau artists. This paper explores the influence, development, and final energy of the widespread Art Nouveau movement without examining the application of any particular scientific method.

Hungarian József Rippl-Rónai traveled and studied in Belgium with a variety of Art Nouveau artists during the 1890s and was deeply influenced by Les Nabis, a movement of precursors to the modernist movement in the 20th century. These connections tied the roots of Art Nouveau to the ideas of Internationale Moderne, giving both young artists and a broader public their first chance to participate in an artistic experiment that used an international design language—Art Nouveau. Kasimir Malevitch, Paul Klee, and many other artists felt the full effect and expectations of Art Nouveau. The Verbund belongs to just a few electricity utilities that house their heritage in a specialized museum. In the vast majority of cases, collectors such as Didier Brault helped to preserve objects that could have otherwise been destroyed or lost to humankind; hence, he contributed to convey the remarkable and diverse visual language of plants that inspired Art Nouveau artists in a very palatable way. Without artists, visionary entrepreneurs and collectors, the development of historic art movements of the past would have been very different.

5. Contemporary Revival and Reinterpretation of Art Nouveau

It is still a subject for passionate study, one that has excited and continues to excite historians of art and architecture to the same extent as contemporary painters, artists, and architects from every corner of the globe. It was, at the time it emerged, considered by many to be a movement uncomfortably close to mass production, yet it did not remain within the restrained confines of the applied arts, and many remarkable monuments also appeared. The use of new materials, the surprising interpretation of organic motifs, the lithe comportment of women, and the illusion of freedom and independence contradict the image of an immoral and licentious style that still lingers. These features were also treated with a solemn yet not altogether humorless decorum that is often dusted over by historians. Another little-known aspect is that a number of monuments, due to their essentially ephemeral nature, have disappeared altogether, and that many of those that have been preserved have suffered damage from alterations over time.

The term “Art Nouveau” was coined by a group of Belgian artists known as Les Vingt in the late 19th-century Viennese exhibition organized in 1900 by the Vienna Secession group when it exhibited illustrations by the artist Aubrey Beardsley. However, it was soon criticized for being a French and Belgian initiative and for overlooking the contributions made by the larger group of artists and architects from countries as diverse as Spain, Britain, the United States, and Italy. The first of these 20th-century debates tempers the passion of today’s enthusiasts who fail to reach a comfortable consensus as to the style’s true scope. The second of these discussions is touched upon in the other sections of this chapter, shedding light upon and analyzing some of these omissions. The absence of specific books on these omissions and additions makes the dissension over the issue all the more vivid.