The eternal bloom of Art Nouveau - decoration

UNESCO Courier, August, 1990 by Manfred Speidel

The eternal bloom of Art Nouveau

ANYONE who has ever seen dried flowers and leaves that have been pressed for years between the pages of a book and remembers how the faded petals, leaves and stems were twisted and entwined in a two-dimensional pattern should be able to visualize some of the favourite decorative motifs used by Art Nouveau artists to decorate the facades of buildings.

Flowers and plants depicted in this way are quite different from the naturalistic flower pictures painted by late nineteenth-century artists who made pastiches of Gothic or Renaissance ornamentation. Often enclosed within a frame, Art Nouveau plants are stylized, they are geometrical in shape or their proportions are so different from those of real plants as to be almost unrecognizable. The graphic effect is invariably surprising. The images have a pent-up vitality so explosive that they seem ready to burst out of their frames.

Anyone who has observed the world of plants is sure to have noticed how twigs are thicker where they part from the branch and at the bud; how branches twist and turn to form complex concave and convex patterns; how rokcs are sometimes embraced by an overgrowth of roots. Using moulded plaster or cast iron, exponents of Art Nouveau like the French architect Hector Guimard transformed such natural sculptures into architectural forms so ambiguous that they might equally well have been inspired by pictures of bones and muscles in anatomical textbooks. These artists would take the functional aspect of walls and other architectural features as the starting point for the creation of organic forms, just as a pearl grows around a grain of sand in an oyster or a branch grows around an obstacle.

Art Nouveau artists and architects were also fascinated by the way in which the tendrils of climbing plants such as pumpkins spiral around a support. Using the elasticity and tensile strenght of wrought iron they produced such creeper-like effects in their designs for stair railings, lamps and other features of interior decoration. In the houses he designed in Brussels, Victor Horta combined the standards and other structural components of electric lamps with more flexible supports and wiring to make a lattice of sinuous interwoven lines.

The influence

of the Far East

The inspiration for using plant images in this way and transforming them into works of art came from Japanese prints and Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, which began to appear on the Western art market in the 1860s. European artists were excited by the skill with which Oriental artis-calligraphers drew complex characters with ink and brush, and by the balance they achieved between black ideograms and white background. Victor Horta (in his use of woodwork with wrought iron) and Henry van de Velde (in his early designs for charis) were among the brilliant exponents of this kind of balance between figure and background.

This method of transforming flat surfaces was also used by Horta to break up structural elements and dissolve the heavy monumental wall structures of traditional European architecture so as to produce effects of light and a sense of fluid movement which give the same impression as late Rococo.

How was this impression of lightness reproduced on solid stone walls? In Brussels Horta made the transition from stonework to ironwork by paring down the stone where it meets the metal into two or three fine steps so that the stone seems to consist of thin layers. The iron is embedded in a hard inner layer of stone which is enfolded in the thin and softer outer layers as if in a piece of cloth. The effect of fine drapery enwrapping a clumsy load-bearing structure could be achieved more cheaply in plaster, and consequently the Art Nouveau period marked a high point in the use of stuccoed surfaces which gave a rich a light appearance through variety of texture.

The graphic explosion

The idea of using a beautiful surface both to protect and embellish an architectural structure had been put forward in the early nineteenth century by the German architect and writer Gootfried Semper, who pointed out that in early times the walls of dwellings had often been covered with fabric which, like the carpets in a nomad's tent, was both decorative and a means of insulation.

Around 1895 the Vinnese School led by Otto Wagner took up this idea and began to experiment with it. Perhaps stimulated by developments in architecture, graphic artists were working along similar lines. Thus another facet of Art Nouveau design originated in Vienna: the construction of thin layers of surface materials in stone and glass. One way of suggesting that these were thin, non-load-bearing slabs was to leave exposed the screws with which they were fixed to the wall; another was to enclose them within a frame. Wagner and his school thus tried to achieve delicate effects through simple geometrical facades without having to transform stone surfaces into patterns of plants and drapery.

So much for the work of Art Nouveau artists as designers of facades, interiors and furniture. The less gifted architect or craftsman could pick up from art magazines their ideas and patterns for stucco decoration and, by adding a curved gable here or an omega-shaped window there, make it seem that he had designed a building in a new style even though its ground plan was traditional in conception. However, wealthy clients and their architects sought to create surfaces which were nothing less than works of art. The most ambitious architects supervised every detail, inside and out, of the buildings they designed, from heating equipment to door handles. They created a fantastic illusory world of mirror walls and transducent stained glass. Today it is hard not to be amused by the extravagance of invention displayed in the design of such accessories of a luxurious life-style as a door handle transformed into the erotic figure of a woman wrapped in whirling drapery.