Art Nouveau 1890-1914

Magazine Antiques, April, 2000 by Paul Greenhalgh

Imagine yourself as a designer working in an age before modernism, or before any real idea of what it might be existed. Imagine then that you are asked to create objects that should look modern and represent the modern world. What would you make? Where would you get your ideas? What materials would you use? The designers and artists associated with the art nouveau style were in exactly this position in that they set themselves the task of creating a modern style. Their reasoning followed the romantic logic of the leading French critic Gabriel Mourey (1865-1943) in 1902:

This change is taking place. Here and there, in every country, men with willing minds are endavouring to basten it. Will they succeed? Why not? What right have we to fix the limits of human progress? And even if we bad enough foolish pride to do so, would that prevent what is destined to happen from coming to pass? [1]

The world was changing, and if art was to survive it too had to change. The art nouveau designers were the first to take on a modernist agenda. We are about to be given an opportunity to judge whether their vision of the modern was successful in a travelling exhibition on the theme of art nouveau that opens at the Victoria and Alberta Museum in London on April 6.

It is the largest such exhibition staged anywhere since the decline of the style itself just before World War I. Masterpieces in all mediums have been brought together from some twenty countries because the exhibition treats art nouveau not as a cultural event affecting France and Belgium alone but as an international phenomenon that spawned many versions of itself.

After the exhibition closes in London on July 30, about half of the four hundred objects will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. There the exhibition will be supplemented by objects emphasizing the art nouveau movement in Turin and Chicago. Finally, the exhibition will travel to Japan.

Seldom in the history of art has there been a more dramatic, innovative, and controversial style than art nouveau. It exploded onto a largely unsuspecting public in 1893 and proceeded to spread around the cities of Europe and North America faster than any stylistic development before it. By 1900 it existed in some form in Brussels, Chicago, Glasgow, Munich, New York City, Paris, Turin, and Vienna (which are all given special treatment in the exhibition at its various stops) as well as in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Budapest, Darmstadt, Helsinki, London, Milan, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, Riga, and Tokyo.

The style is found in all the arts, not by chance, but as a matter of philosophical principle. Following the lead of the Pre-Raphaelites and the arts and crafts movement in London and the Nabis in Paris, those involved in art nouveau sought to create an aesthetic that ranged across the whole of the lived environment. Consequently, there are major architectural works spread across Europe, from the extraordinary edifices of Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926) in Barcelona to the gemlike buildings of Victor Horta in Brussels and the majestic structures of Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) in Chicago. There are also stunning paintings and sculptures, but the decorative arts were at the core of art nouveau. An extraordinary number of masterworks were produced in book design, ceramics, furniture, glass, jewelry metalwork, prints, and textiles.

If today art nouveau appears to be unquestionably part of the Western stylistic canon, this has only very recently been the case. The style has been the subject of intense and violent debate ever since its demise, while during its lifetime it was often characterized as being an aggressive revolution, which often led potentially supportive critics to be cautious of it. One of these was the American architect and teacher A. D. F. Hamlin (1855-1926), writing in 1902 in the Craftsman, a magazine vital for the introduction of the style in the United States. He thought art nouveau to be a disparate number of threads which have in common little except an underlying character of protest against the traditional and the commonplace....L'Art Nouveau is, therefore, chiefly a negative movement....away from a fixed point, not toward one....Protest unsupported by affirmative purpose is short lived. Mere negation means final extinction. [2]

Others were far less gentle than Hamlin. Those who invented and promoted art nouveau had an informed patronage that included museums, which warmly supported the style. However, it was fanatically attacked by many, who felt it heralded the end of civilization. Indeed, the strength and longevity of feeling against it remain a most surprising and interesting indication of the extent to which art affects life. Sir Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934), the sculptor who created the famous statue Eros (the Shaftesbury Memorial) of 1885-1893 in Piccadilly Circus, London, was typical in his annoyance and confusion:

L'Art Nouveau, Forsooth! Absolute nonsense! It belongs to the young ladies seminary and the duffers paradise. Have I understood Art Nouveau rightly, or is it still a matter of the grave to which I must come, before I understand? [3]