1900 a la Mode

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Judging from the stately exhibition "1900," shown last spring in Paris, the citizens of the Western world fairly glided from the 19th century into the 20th, rather like the couples departing Cythera in Watteau's lovely idyll: with unfailing grace, rare fashion and more than a soupcon of nostalgia for what was being left behind. Assembled by a team of curators from various departments of the Musee d'Orsay, "1900" showcased architecture, design and photography as well as painting and sculpture, the exclusive concerns of the contemporaneous London-New York show called "1900: Art at the Crossroads." Where the latter exhibition boasts a subtitle which points to a moment of consequential choice, the Paris show was simply named. That almost diffident gesture at once understated the sheer gorgeousness of the objects arrayed and reflected the dearth of historical urgency with which they were presented.

Notwithstanding the thematic sectioning that shaped the installation of "1900," this was first and foremost a show about the triumph of style. From the merest damask dust cloth, embellished with a linear Jugendstil pattern by Joseph Maria Olbrich, to the massive wooden cabinet designed by Lars Kinsarvik and carved with motifs from Norse legend, the show portrayed a culture that inscribed its desires, esthetic or nationalistic, on the surfaces of beautiful things. The spirit of ornament prevailed as it had not since the Rococo, and the arts of painting and sculpture bowed to the imperatives of decoration. Discriminating patrons finished their salons and music rooms with wall panels commissioned from Edouard Vuillard, Odilon Redon and Maurice Denis. In the case of easel painting--whether Akseli Gallen-Kallela's robust The Curse of Kullervo (1899), based on the Finnish national epic and created at a time of heightened Russification imposed on Finland by Czar Nicholas II, or Paul Signac's bucolic anarchist manifesto, To the Time of Harmony. The age of gold is not in the past: it is in the future (1895)--artists safely allegorized urgent political yearnings that might have been, well, displeasing if bluntly expressed. In this exhibition, strictly focused fine-arts issues, like those explored in a section that considered the head in sculpture (via works by Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Medardo Rosso, Picasso and others), seemed vaguely beside the point.

"1900" was staged in Paris's Neo-Baroque Grand Palais, which, like its sibling Petit Palais, had been built to serve as an art exhibition hall during the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Nearly 400 objects from scores of collections in 21 countries were reverentially presented in a suite of sonorously colored galleries. The works marked a roughly 20-year period that spanned the century's threshold. Among the early items were an 1896 volume of Chaucer from William Morris's Kelmscott Press, with medievalizing illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, and Aristide Maillol's courtly tapestry, La Musique (or Concert de Femmes), from around 1895-96. A few objects stretched the exhibition to 1912, among them Alfred Boucher's marble sculpture Le Reve, a charming potboiler of a female torso that is shamelessly derivative of Rodin, and Alvin Langdon Coburn's The Octopus, an often-reproduced photograph of radiating pedestrian paths that was shot from a tall building. The catalogue touts the downward-looking composition as prefiguring the photographs of Moholy-Nagy, but its debt to the painted urban prospects of Pissarro and Caillebotte is no less striking.

Between those chronological extremes lay a host of mostly delectable creations by artists and designers of varying renown. The forgivably familiar opening section spotlighted major paladins (Henry van de Velde; Hector Guimard; Olbrich, Peter Behrens and the Darmstadt Colony; Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Four; Otto Wagner and the Vienna Secession; Josef Hoffmann, Kolomon Moser and the Wiener Werkstatte) in the crusade for a "total art," one that would engage every aspect of the designed environment in a comprehensive renewal of craft and taste. Their work was followed by Charles F. A. Voysey's wallpapers with stylized serpents and acorns, plump ceramic vases from the Iris workshop in Porvoo, Finland, and cloisonneed and bejeweled metalwork by Rene Lalique. The crisp grids favored by Mackintosh and Moser were met by voluptuous foliate curves, as seen in the cascade of silver that forms the plantlike candelabrum designed by A. Srobl and in the arcing stems of the cyclamen in the foreground of Edward Steichen's darkly glamorous photograph of New York's trendsetting Mrs. Philip Lydig.

The exhibition offered some intriguing pairings of historical all-stars and their less well known compatriots. Wagner's perspective rendering of a chastely cubic-looking residence hung near drawings for the more daintily ornate Villa Vojscik by his student Otto Schonthal. A fabulous flower box from Gaudi's Casa Battlo, inlaid with ceramic and mirror and looking like an Amazon's brooch, exemplified design in Barcelona, as did the filigreed facade drawing for the Casa Lleo Morera by Lluis Domenech y Montaner, the other great Catalan modernist who used mosaic and terra-cotta to invoke the region's Moorish heritage.