The house as a total work of art - Art Nouveau

UNESCO Courier, August, 1990 by Cecile Duliere

The house as a total work of art

THE birth of Art Nouveau can be dated to 1893, the year when the first issue of The Studio, a magazine devoted to the propagation of ideas about art i interior decoration, was published in London. It was also the year in which the Belgian architect Victor Horta built the Hotel Tassel--the first private residence to be constructed in a radically new technical and plastic style and to be conceived as a "total work of art".

"Art nouveau", a term which symbolized a feeling that a new age was breaking away from the past, was an artistic phenomenon closely linked to the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century new forms of energy (electricity), new mass-produced materials (iron and glass) and new inventions (the railway, telegraphy, the telephone, photography) transformed both landscapes and ways of living.

Confidence in human progress and faith in the future were reflected in a series of great international exhibitions. The first of these was held in 1851 in London, the capital of the world's then most powerful and most highly industrialized country, in a vast construction of iron and glass, the Crystal Palace. The 1851 Exhibition attracted over six million visitors and was a huge popular success. English artists were, however, revolted by the ugliness of mass-produced articles for everyday use. They mobilized in protest.

Arts and Crafts

The English artist William Morris (1834-1896) launched a crusade against the "virus of ugliness". He maintained that rather enclosing themselves in an ivory tower and serving only the privileged few, artists should work for the greatest number and play a part in the creation of everyday objects. The distinction between artist and artisan should be abolished, together with the traditional differentiation between the "major" arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) and "minor" arts such as cabinet-making, ceramics, and tapestry. Despite its rejection of the machine, Morris's Arts and Crafts Movement was important for making the first attempt to apply artistic principles to the fabrication of everyday objects--what later came to be known as design.

True to his principle of "decorative honesty", Morris did not conceal the natural colour of the bricks of the "Red House", the home he had built at Upton in Kent, beneath the usual covering of stucco, and he commissioned his painter, architect and sculptor friends to decorate and furnish its interior. In 1861, he established his own firm, Morris and Company, in London, to market the new artistic style of furnishing and interior decoration which had become his major preoccupation. Several English painters, sculptors and architects followed his example and became "artist designers".

Walter Crane (1845-1915), the "philosopher of the nursery" as he was jokingly called, took Morris's ideas even further. He set out to instil a sense of beauty in children at the earliest possible age and the success of his children's books did much to publicize the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement elsewhere in Europe. The propagation of these ideas owed more, however, to a number of specialized magazines, the most famous of which was The Studio. An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art. Resolutely modern in tone and with "Use and Beauty" as its motto, it carried interviews with artists and reviews of exhibitions organized prize competitions and was lavishly illustrated, mainly with photographs.

Morris brought a new style of floral decoration to his wallpapers and printed cotton and velvet fabrics. Abandoning the stylized flowers of the past, he established a much closer link with Nature, selecting for his designs humble meadow or garden plants such as pimpernels, daffodils, violets and daisies or, more often, such climbing plants as blackhorn and honeysuckle. His experiments with the decorative effect of sinuous plant stems and silhouettes against a monochrome background were continued by others including Charles Annesley Voysey (1857-1941) and Arthur Mackmurdo (1851-1942), who, in the early 1880s, designed a number of flame-like abstract floral motifs.

The sinuous lines of this floral decoration, the dynamic play of interlaced curves, became the hallmark of Art Nouveau whose influence was transmitted through fabrics designed for soft furnishings and through the illustration and design of books and magazines. The terms Modern Style used in France, and Stile Liberty and Stile Inglese, used in Italy, relect the great debt Europe owed to English proto-Art Nouveau.

It was in Beligium, that these new ideas from England really blossomed and were given an architectural dimension they had previously lacked. It was from there that Art Nouveau spread through Europe. In the 1880s Burssels was a leading centre of avant-garde art. Formed in 1883, the Brussels group known as "Les XX" (the Twenty)--which ten years later became "La Libre Esthetique"--invited the most original and controversial foreign artists to its annual exhibition (it was there that Van Gogh made his only sale). From 1891, the exhibition was opened to the applied arts and included items such as illustrated books by Walter Crane, tapestries, ceramics and even complete room furnishings, such as the "craftsman's room", exhibited in 1895, created by the architect and decorator Gustave Serrurier-Bovy (1858-1910), who was the first to import into Belgium textiles and objects made in England.