Western Design

The Art Nouveau EraThe highly varied ornamental style called Art Nouveau develops first in England in the 1890s as an outgrowth of the Arts and Crafts movement and soon spreads to the European continent, where it is called Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Stile Floreale (or Stile Liberty, after Liberty and Company in London, the fashionable store and manufacturer of cotton cloth.)

in Italy, and Modernismo (or Modernista) in Spain.

It represents a deliberate attempt to create a new style, free of the imitative historicism that has dominated much of 19th-century art and design.

Influenced by experiments with expressive line by the painters Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the movement is also partly inspired by a vogue for the linear patterns of Japanese prints (ukiyo-e).

The movement's distinguishing characteristic is its use of a long, sinuous, organic line, which often takes the form of flower stalks and buds, vine tendrils, insect wings, and other delicate and sinuous natural objects; the line may be elegant and graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and whiplike force.

The term Art Nouveau first appears in print in describing the group "Les XX," a group of Symbolist artists who exhibit together in Brussels during the years 1891­93.

Siegfried Bing's Paris galleryshop, which exhibits work in the developing new style, opens as L'Art Nouveau in 1895, and gives its name to the movement in the French and English-speaking countries.

The European-centered movement, which begins in earnest in 1898 and is internationally current at the end of the century, produces a remarkable body of work in architecture, interior design, jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration.

Architecture particularly shows this characteristic synthesis of ornament and structure.

Art Nouveau architects give idiosyncratic expression to many of the themes that had preoccupied the 19th century, ranging from Viollet-le-Duc's demand for structural honesty to Sullivan's call for an organic architecture.

They employ a liberal combination of materials&emdash;ironwork, glass, ceramic, and brickwork&emdash;in, for example, the creation of unified interiors in which columns and beams become thick vines with spreading tendrils and windows become both openings for light and air and membranous outgrowths of the organic whole.

This approach is directly opposed to the traditional architectural values of reason and clarity of structure.
In furniture design, the continental Art Nouveau and Jugendstil styles and the English Arts and Crafts give rise to original chair designs by Eugène Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, Hector Guimard in Paris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland, but these new furniture styles are not destined to exercise wide, let alone decisive, influence.

Nor is the Art Nouveau style in furniture design as popular in England or in the United States as it is on the Continent.

In the eastern United States, Gustav Stickley introduces what will come to be called the Mission style as an expression of democratic values.

In southern California, the Greene brothers design similarly inspired furniture for their Pasadena bungalows
By 1910, tastemakers find Art Nouveau old-fashioned and limited and designers generally abandon it as a distinct decorative style; the Craftsman aesthetic soon meets a similar fate.

We can thus characterize the dozen years from 1898 through 1909 as the Art Nouveau era in Western design.

This thread features numerous links to interesting images and related Web sites.