'A terrifying and edible beauty.' - Art Nouveau architecture in Latin European countries

UNESCO Courier, August, 1990 by Ezio Godoli

'A TERRIFYING AND EDIBLE BEAUTY'

ART Nouveau architecture in Latin Europea embraced such a wide range of styles, even within individual countries, that it is hard to find a common denominator between them.

It spread like a language, like a lingua franca that was enriched by contact with and borrowings from local dialects, but kept unchanged certain elements of syntax. A form of architecture intent on collaboration with all the figurative and decorative arts, it could call on a wide diversity of artistic traditions. Its composite nature and its variety were due as much to its cosmopolitan tendencies as to a desire to extend the traditional repertoire of regional or national art forms.

Art Nouveau architecture developed somewhat later in the Latin countries than elsewhere in Europe and, with the exception of Catalan Modernism, in which the early stirrings of a desire to affirm national identity can be detected, there were no strong local movements to help it on its way.

Although it would be vain to try to discover a common stylistic thread linking the Latin countries of Europe (with the possible exceptions perhaps of Spain and Portugal), the poetics of their distinct architectural languages do share certain common features which may help us define some essentially Latin characteristics of Art Nouveau architecture.

This line of approach was first suggested by Salvador Dali in one of the earliest and most penetrating assessments of Art Nouveau architecture, his essay On The Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Modern Style Architecture, which was published in 1933 in the Parisian surrealist magazine Minotaure.

With this provocative appraisal of Art Nouveau architecture made in the mid-1930s, at a time when the rest of the world subscribed to the theories of rationalist architecture, Dali issued a double message which historians should take into account. Drawing from the poetrics of Art Nouveau those elements most readily assimilable by surrealist art, he declared firmly that, between Art Nouveau and the twentieth-century avant-gardes, there was a network of inter-relationships far more complex than most historians admit. By emphasizing the most "alogical", almost "demential" aspects of Art Nouveau architecture, he showed that, to fully understand the contribution of Art Nouveau to modern art and architecture, those works most tainted with bad taste should not be ignored. Highly significant artistic statements can even be found by rummaging through these artistic rejects.

Some Art Nouveau buildings in Paris and Barcelona possess the "terrifying and edible beauty" of which Dali wrote (among the examples used to illustrate the Minotaure article were works by Guimard, Jules Lavirotte and Gaudi). The values highlighted by Dali are found not only in Catalan and Parisian Art Nouveau architecture but also in that of other Latin regions. This is particularly true of the quality of "movement which...is primarily intended to arouse a kind of great 'primeval hunger'", like "the ultimate, ideal architecture which would embody the most tangible and delirious goal of hypermaterialism...not only because it denounces the violent materialistic banality of immediate needs..., but also because it unashamedly alludes to the nutritive, edible nature of houses of this type, which are nothing other than the first edible houses, the first and only erogenous buildings whose existence is an affirmation of that 'functional' trigger of the amorous imagination--to be able in the realest possible sense to eat the object of desire."

Is not this need for "hypermaterialism", given metaphorical expression in the art of cooking, the threat that links certain Paris buildings by S. Wagon and Paul Auscher, whose florid ornamentation calls to mind some elaborate piece of confectionery, to those works of Gaudi which are decorated with ceramics as some cakes are decorated with crystallized fruit? Is it not also this same need that links the subtle erotic allusions of certain Modernist Catalan architects to the unabashed trivialities of Lavirotte's building in the Avenue Rapp, in Paris, or to some of the more fantastic projects of the Italian architect Adolfo Coppede?

Is not the revolutionary architectural framework that Gaudi, thanks to his remarkable knowledge of construction techniques, introduced in some of his buildings (one has only to think of La Pedrera, which seems to defy the laws of gravity, or of the prolific Doric colonnades of the Guell Park) in some respects a unique manifestation of "the profound devaluation of intellectual systems"?

And is it not in the Latin countries that we find the most eye-catching examples of ornamental excess, of "hysterical sculpture", of the multiple metamorphoses of Baroque/Art Nouveau and Rococo/ Nouveau pastiche, from which all sense of restraint is absent? Are not the dragons of a fantastic Orient refashioned by Gaudi's imagination, or the strange cast-iron fauna evoking the world of the ocean depths and recalling the sculptured gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, that adorn Guimard's buildings and lend their forms to this entrances to the Paris Metro, virtually unique examples, in the European context, of that incursion into the fantastic world of dreams, that return to infancy of which Dali speaks?