Art Nouveau
Guimard's cast-iron métro entrances, Lalique's glass, Mucha's posters for Sarah Bernhardt — the style that tried to redesign everything at once, and took its name from a dealer's shop that opened in Paris in December 1895.
What Art Nouveau Was
Art Nouveau is an international style of architecture and design that emerged in the 1890s, built on sinuous lines and flowing organic shapes taken from plant forms.[1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates it from the 1880s to the First World War, and Tate says flatly that the war killed it.[2][1] Brussels, Paris and Munich were its three centres.[3] It took its forms from nature, and it applied them to everything: buildings, furniture, glass, jewellery, posters, book covers, cutlery, door handles.
The line is what people recognise. The Victoria and Albert Museum defines the whiplash as an ornamental S-curve that writhes and coils, and reads the line itself as a metaphor for artistic freedom; the Met reads it the same way, as a release from the weight of artistic tradition.[4][2] It was derived partly from botanical drawing and partly from illustrations of deep-sea creatures, above all those the German biologist Ernst Haeckel published in Kunstformen der Natur in 1899.[2] Two earlier British books had already argued that nature should be the designer's first source: Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin's Floriated Ornament of 1849 and Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament of 1856.[2]
Art Nouveau and Symbolism overlap so much that the same artist often belongs to both. The Metropolitan Museum of Art puts the tie directly: Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, the Nabis in particular, had close ties to Art Nouveau, and the same designers carried those painting styles into furniture, interiors and pattern.[2] Gustav Klimt's heavily ornamented surfaces are where the two are hardest to tell apart.[5]
Its ambition was not decorative but total. Art Nouveau designers worked towards the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, in which a building and everything inside it were designed together as one thing.[2] That ambition is also why the style was expensive, and part of why it did not last. It came out of two English movements that had argued the same case a generation earlier, the Arts and Crafts movement and Aestheticism, and behind those stood John Ruskin and the French Gothic Revival architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who had both argued that painting and sculpture should not be ranked above the decorative arts.[2][3]
Where the Name Comes From
The movement is usually said to be named after a shop, and mostly it is. In December 1895 Siegfried Bing opened a gallery at 22 rue de Provence in Paris and called it L'Art Nouveau, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art credits that gallery with popularising both the style and the term.[2][6][7]
The words were already in use, though. The Met and the Victoria and Albert Museum both trace them to the 1880s, in the Belgian journal L'Art Moderne, where they described the work of Les Vingt, the Brussels group of twenty painters and sculptors who wanted reform through art.[2][3] The V&A is careful about the attribution and says only that the term's popularity "was said to" come from Bing's gallery.[3]
The name was never the only one even in France. The same style was also called Style Jules Verne, Art belle époque, Art fin de siècle, Le Style moderne, Le Style nouille, and Le Style Métro, that last one after Hector Guimard's iron and glass entrances to the Paris underground.[2][3]
The Dealer Who Named It
Siegfried Bing was born in Hamburg on 26 February 1838 and died in 1905. He became a naturalised French citizen and spent his career in Paris, first in his family's porcelain and glass firm.[8][6]
Before he sold anything called Art Nouveau he sold Japanese art, and that is the part of his career that explains the rest of it. He opened a shop of Far Eastern objects on the rue Chauchat in 1878, travelled to Japan with his brother Auguste in 1880 and 1881, and in 1890 mounted the first comprehensive exhibition of ukiyo-e prints in Europe, with more than seven hundred prints and more than four hundred books.[9][6][8] He and Hayashi Tadamasa were the two principal dealers of Japanese art in Paris, and both were given the Legion of Honour.[6][8]
He also published a magazine. Le Japon Artistique ran monthly from 1888 to 1891, thirty-six issues, each printed in French, English and German.[8][6] Its stated purpose was not connoisseurship. Bing designed the whole programme to supply models to manufacturers, craftsmen and designers, with a complete renewal of the decorative arts in view.[9] The gallery he opened seven years later was the same project by other means.
The two halves of the business stayed physically separate. A visitor to 22 rue de Provence entered the Art Nouveau galleries at the front; Japanese art had its own entrance around the corner on the rue Chauchat. Bing kept that division until ill health forced him to give up the business in 1904.[6]
What he sold was arranged rather than displayed. The Van Gogh Museum describes him combining paintings, prints, furniture and everyday objects into ensembles, so that the new art arrived as a whole environment rather than a set of purchases.[10] The Musée des Arts Décoratifs records interiors in the gallery by Eugène Gaillard and Edward Colonna, and a gilt-wood side table decorated with a poppy that Georges de Feure made for it in 1901.[7]
What It Was Called Elsewhere
Every country that took up the style gave it a different name, and several of the names were insults.
Belgium
Style nouille, the noodle style, and Style coup de fouet, the whiplash style.[2]
Germany and Austria
Jugendstil, meaning young style, after the popular journal Die Jugend. In Austria and Hungary it was the Sezessionstil, after the Vienna Secession.[2]
Spain
In Barcelona it formed part of the wider Modernista movement, whose chief exponent was Antoni Gaudí, 1852 to 1926, the architect who took over the Sagrada Família, begun in 1882.[2]
Italy and Britain
In Italy it was Arte nuova, Stile floreale, or Lo stile Liberty, this last named after Liberty & Co. of London, the firm that had been selling Asian ceramics and textiles to aesthetically minded Londoners since the 1870s and that produced the Celtic-revival Cymric and Tudric silver ranges designed by Archibald Knox.[2]
1867–1942
Hector Guimard
Guimard was born in Lyon in 1867 and died in New York in 1942.[11] He entered the École nationale des arts décoratifs in 1882, aged fifteen, and later taught geometry there; he was admitted to the École des beaux-arts in 1885 and stayed until the age limit of thirty without ever presenting the final architect’s diploma.[11]
That missing diploma shaped his whole career. Without it he could not enter the public competitions through which most large French building work was awarded, so he built for private clients and for a private company.[11]
The turn came in 1895, on a study trip to Brussels, where he met Victor Horta and Paul Hankar. The Ville de Paris treats that meeting as decisive for everything he did afterwards.[11] His own Auteuil villas from 1891 and 1893 are not yet Art Nouveau.[11]
Castel Béranger
He got the commission in late 1894, at twenty-seven, from Elisabeth Fournier, a member of the Catholic bourgeoisie of Auteuil, who gave him a free hand. Structural work ran from the autumn of 1895 to December 1896, and the building at 12–14 rue La Fontaine in the 16th arrondissement was occupied by 1898.[12][13]
He designed all of it, inside and out: panelling, wallpaper, fireplaces, door furniture, ironwork cast at the Durenne foundry at Sommevoire, stained glass by Georges Néret. Paul Signac was one of the tenants.[12]
On 28 March 1899 the results of the City of Paris façade competition were announced and the Castel Béranger was among the winners; the Figaro put it on show in its own salons that April.[12] The competition had been created because Haussmann’s Paris was by then thought monotonous, and it rewarded owners who broke the uniformity with a remission of half their street dues.[12]
The French state’s heritage register lists the building as classified since 31 July 1992, and its statement of interest is four words long: manifesto of Art Nouveau.[13]
The Métro entrances
The first Métro line opened on 19 July 1900. Guimard designed the entrances in iron, cast iron, glass and enamelled lava, with tall candelabra and the lettered sign that is still the shorthand for Paris.[11] The style was named after them: French Art Nouveau came to be called le style Métro and le style Guimard.[14][2]
There were two kinds. The covered édicules went up at a handful of stations; everywhere else the company preferred the open railings called entourages, and the reason was Parisian — covered structures would have spoilt the regularity of the avenues.[11]
He built 167 works across 107 stations. Eighty-eight survive.[11] The two stations to see are Porte Dauphine, whose édicule facing 90 avenue Foch is the only survivor of five of its type installed in 1900 and 1902 and keeps its orange enamelled-lava panels, and Abbesses, whose covered entrance was not built for that station at all: it stood at Hôtel de Ville on line 1 until 1972, when it was dismantled for an underground car park and re-erected on the Nord-Sud line, for which Guimard never designed anything.[15][16]
Both were listed as historic monuments by decree of 12 February 2016, superseding an earlier listing of 1978.[15][16]
The campaign against them
Within a few years the entrances were being called outmoded, and the Art Nouveau of them too aggressive and too wild. The Ville de Paris describes a campaign of open hatred: the green was likened to German uniforms, the édicules were said to have come from the depths of the Apocalypse, and the candelabra were described as strange lampposts holding glass fruit shaped like half-sucked barley sugars.[11]
The company began taking them down from 1904 and replaced them with cheaper stone or wrought iron.[11] Between the 1930s and the 1960s the Métro sold some of the removed entrances to collectors and museums. One now stands in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a gift of the RATP, and another is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.[14][17]
Art Nouveau did not return to favour in Paris until the 1980s.[11]
His other Paris buildings
He built the Hôtel Mezzara at 60–62 rue La Fontaine in 1910 and 1911 for Paul Mezzara, a textile manufacturer and lace designer; it keeps his furniture and a large coloured glass roof over the central patio, and was classified in 2016.[18] He built one religious building in his life, the synagogue at 10 rue Pavée in the 4th arrondissement, between April 1913 and June 1914, designing its lighting, candelabra, benches and railings as well as the structure.[19]
The Other Paris Buildings
Guimard was not alone, though the list is short. Jules Lavirotte built the block at 29 avenue Rapp in the 7th arrondissement in 1900, and its façade won the City of Paris competition the following year. The ceramicist Alexandre Bigot owned the building, and its façade worked as a shop window for what his workshop could do.[20] Lavirotte and Bigot worked together again on the Céramic Hôtel at 34 avenue de Wagram in 1904.
The most public example did not go down well. Frantz Jourdain rebuilt the Samaritaine department store in steel between 1905 and 1910, with exterior decoration by Francis Jourdain, a shop sign drawn by Eugène Grasset, ironwork by Edouard Schenck and ceramics again by Bigot. The heritage register records the reception plainly: Parisians did not like the Samaritaine of 1905, and the Art Nouveau decoration in particular.[21]
The 1900 Exposition Universelle
Art Nouveau reached the general public in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the last and grandest of the world’s fairs that had been running roughly every eleven years since 1798.[2] It opened in April, ran 212 days, covered more than two hundred hectares of central Paris, and drew fifty-one million visitors at a time when the population of France was forty-one million.[22][23]
A great deal of what visitors now think of as permanent Paris was built for it or finished in time for it: the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, the Pont Alexandre III, the Gare d’Orsay, and the first line of the Métro, which opened on 19 July while the fair was running.[23][22]
The Petit Palais was built by Charles Girault, chosen by competition in 1896 at forty-four and given four years to do it. He conceived it as a model museum, and the Petit Palais itself describes the result as combining classical references, the Art Nouveau style and technical innovations such as reinforced concrete.[23] The heritage register describes the Grand Palais as neo-Louis XIV with eighteenth-century references and an influence of Art Nouveau, which is a fair description of a building that is not really of the style but could not avoid it.[24]
The gate that was a sea creature
The fair’s monumental entrance stood at the corner of the place de la Concorde and was designed by René Binet. It was forty-five metres high, a hemispherical dome on three great arches, studded with thousands of blue and yellow glass cabochons and lit with electric light, and it was built to pass forty thousand visitors an hour.[23][2]
Its shape was taken from a radiolarian, one of the microscopic marine organisms in Ernst Haeckel’s plates — the same source the style had been drawing its curves from.[23] On top stood a six-and-a-half-metre figure called La Parisienne by Paul Moreau-Vauthier, wearing an evening coat over a modern dress designed by the couturière Jeanne Paquin.[23]
What else was shown
The Pavillon Bleu was a restaurant beside the Pont d’Iéna at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, fitted out with work by Gustave Serrurier-Bovy. Siegfried Bing built a pavilion of his own, Art Nouveau Bing, a suite of six domestic interiors that included Symbolist art among the furnishings. The Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs had a pavilion too, and it existed for two stated reasons: to stimulate the economy and to express national identity.[2] Henri Sauvage built a theatre-museum for the dancer Loïe Fuller, with sculpture by Pierre Roche.[25]
Two more exhibitions followed quickly and most of the European names showed at one or the other: Glasgow in 1901, with Fyodor Shekhtel’s Russian pavilions, and Turin in 1902, which showed Carlo Bugatti’s furniture.[2]
An exceedingly vulgar show
Not everyone was convinced. George Donaldson, who sat on the exposition jury, bought thirty pieces of Art Nouveau furniture at the fair, including a table and chairs from the dining room Eugène Gaillard had designed inside Bing’s pavilion, and gave them to the Victoria and Albert Museum.[26]
The British press went for it. The Times called the gift an exceedingly vulgar show and the Manchester Guardian called the pieces ill-mannered specimens of upstart art.[26]
The high point
Institutions agree that 1900 was the peak. The Petit Palais describes Paris giving the international movement an immense hearing and marking the high point of a style soon called simply 1900; Paris Musées says the style became known in France as le style 1900 and that the period marks its culmination; the Victoria and Albert Museum says it was the 1900 exposition that brought Art Nouveau to the world at large.[23][25][3]
Furniture, Glass and Jewellery
The furniture shown in Paris in 1900 was made in the new taste while carrying on an older French tradition. Luxury veneers and finely cast gilt mounts run through the work of the leading cabinetmakers of the moment — Georges de Feure, Louis Majorelle, Edward Colonna and Eugène Gaillard — and the Metropolitan Museum reads that combination as a neo-Rococo inheritance from François Linke.[2] The style borrowed from the French Rococo and its nineteenth-century revivals, from fantasy, and from Japanese art.[2]
Lalique, Bernhardt and a pendant with a documented history
In jewellery, René Lalique, Georges Fouquet and Philippe Wolfers built female figures into their pieces as fairies and sirens.[2] What made Lalique different from the jewellers around him was what he was willing to use: horn, glass and enamel set beside precious stones, so that the value of a piece sat in its design rather than its carat weight.
One object carries the whole Paris story in its provenance. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs holds Lalique's Pendentif Aiglon, made around 1898 to 1900 in chased and cast gold with enamel and cabochon rubies, on a gold chain set with two pearls, signed on the reverse of the tail. Sarah Bernhardt bought it at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and afterwards gave it to the poet Rosemonde Gérard, who was married to Edmond Rostand — the author of L'Aiglon, the play in which Bernhardt had taken the title role.[27]
Bernhardt is the thread running through a good deal of this. Mucha's posters made her face the emblem of the style; the jewellery she bought at the fair went to the wife of the playwright who wrote the part she was famous for.
Émile Gallé and the glass from Nancy
Not all of it was made in Paris. Émile Gallé worked at Nancy in Lorraine, and his glass is the other thing people mean by French Art Nouveau. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds his Oakleaf vase, cased, wheel-cut, acid-etched and fire-polished, one of his own favourite designs; he made versions both polished as this one is and left rough with the carver's tool marks still on them.[28]
The museum records something that explains the work better than any stylistic description. Gallé used many woods in his furniture, each with a meaning he attached to it, and the doors of his factory were carved oak bearing his personal motto: Ma racine est au fond des bois. My roots are in the depth of the woods.[28]
Where you bought it in Paris
Bing's gallery at 22 rue de Provence is documented from the other end, by the things people took home from it. The Victoria and Albert Museum owns a stoneware bowl by Alexandre Bigot with a silver-gilt mount by Edward Colonna, and its record says plainly that it was bought from Siegfried Bing's shop, L'Art Nouveau, 22 rue de Provence, in 1895.[29]
Colonna's career is the international traffic of the style in one biography: he trained as an architect, worked in America for Tiffany, then settled in Paris and worked for Bing.[29] Bing also retailed Louis Comfort Tiffany's Favrile glass, which is how an American glassmaker's name became one of the names for the style in his own country.[2]
Bing's was not the only shop. La Maison Moderne, with premises on the rue de la Paix and the rue des Petits Champs, was commissioning its own designs by about 1900, including a coffee service by Maurice Dufrène.[30]
Alexandre Bigot, who made the surfaces
Alexandre Bigot supplied the surfaces for a good deal of Art Nouveau Paris. He ran a ceramics workshop at 13 rue des Petites Écuries and made architectural ceramics to other people's designs, including those of Henry van de Velde, Hector Guimard and Louis Majorelle.[29] He owned the Lavirotte building at 29 avenue Rapp, whose façade advertised what his workshop could do, and he supplied the ceramics for the Samaritaine.[20][21]
The Posters
Art Nouveau was something most Parisians met on a wall in the street rather than owned. Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were the graphic artists who mattered most, and the Metropolitan Museum reads their posters as a record of how women were pictured in Belle Époque society, running from the femme nouvelle, the new woman who rejected conventional ideas of femininity, domesticity and subservience, to the demimonde.[2]
Two things made the street possible. Chromolithography brought the cost of large colour printing down far enough to cover a city.[31] And the law of 29 July 1881, best known as the law on the freedom of the press, considerably liberalised the right to advertise anything of public interest in graphic form; its text is the one still printed on French walls as the notice forbidding fly-posting.[32]
Jules Chéret, who made it technically possible
Chéret, 1836 to 1932, is the one the museums call the father of the modern poster, and the reason is technical rather than stylistic. Large-scale colour printing had defeated artists for decades until he worked out a three-stone process with relatively transparent inks: the design was separated into individual colours, each drawn on its own stone, and overlaid in printing.[33][34] He is credited with the first colour lithograph posters in 1866, the year he opened his own printing house in Paris.[34][35]
He also drew his lettering by hand rather than setting it, which pulled the words and the image into one design.[34] He made more than a thousand posters before retiring to Nice, and in 1890 the French government gave him the Legion of Honour for the artistic poster.[35]
Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge
Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864 to 1901, made his first commissioned poster in 1891, advertising the dancer La Goulue and the acrobat Valentin le Désossé at the Moulin Rouge. Thousands of copies went up around Paris and it made his name immediately.[36]
He made about thirty of them in total, and the two museums that would know disagree: his own museum at Albi, which holds the complete set, counts thirty-one made between 1891 and 1900.[37][35] The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that his part-caricature, part-realist style was widely criticised at the time, whatever his standing now.[34]
Mucha and Sarah Bernhardt
Mucha was born in Moravia in 1860 and came to Paris in the autumn of 1887, studying at the Académie Julian on fees paid by a count who had employed him.[38][35]
The story of how he became famous is told by the Mucha Foundation itself in two ways, and the difference is worth keeping. On its timeline the Foundation states that on 26 December 1894 Mucha was at the Lemercier printing works correcting proofs as a favour to a friend when Sarah Bernhardt demanded a new poster at a week's notice and every regular artist was away for the holidays.[38] On its page about Bernhardt the same Foundation introduces the same account with the words legend says.[39] It is a good story, told by the people who hold his archive, and they are not certain of it.
What is not in doubt is the effect. The Gismonda poster was on hoardings across Paris on the morning of 1 January 1895 and caused a sensation.[38] Collectors bribed the bill-stickers or went out at night and cut the posters down with razors.[38][34] Bernhardt put him under contract to design her posters, sets and costumes; the Foundation gives the term as six years.[38][39]
One detail usually gets garbled. The poster did not advertise the opening of Gismonda. Victorien Sardou's play had already opened at the Théâtre de la Renaissance on 31 October 1894; Mucha's poster was made for the production that reopened on 4 January 1895.[40][41]
Six more Bernhardt posters followed under the contract, all built on the Gismonda pattern of a tall narrow sheet with a single standing figure in a shallow alcove: La Dame aux Camélias and Lorenzaccio in 1896, La Samaritaine in 1897, Médée and La Tosca in 1898, and Hamlet in 1899.[39]
Art for people who could not buy art
From 1896 Mucha worked with the printer Champenois, who extended him from posters into decorative panels, calendars, postcards, theatre programmes and menus, and licensed the designs across Europe and North America.[38] The panel sets came out of that: Les Saisons in 1896, so popular that Champenois ordered further sets on the same subject in 1897 and 1900, then Les Fleurs in 1898 and The Arts in the same year.[42][38]
Mucha was explicit about why this mattered to him. He said he was happy to be involved in an art for the people rather than for private drawing rooms, inexpensive and accessible, at home in poor families as well as affluent ones.[42]
He also resisted the label. The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that Mucha did not want to be called an Art Nouveau artist, even as his women became the most copied motif in it.[4]
Steinlen and the Chat Noir
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Swiss, born in Lausanne in 1859, came to Paris in 1881 and joined the Montmartre circle that included Toulouse-Lautrec.[43] His poster for the Chat Noir advertised the cabaret's reopening on 3 October 1896 and its theatre three days later; the black cat on it echoes the silhouette cats painted on the club's own walls.[43]
He was better known than Toulouse-Lautrec in their own lifetimes, because he took more commercial work and so reached more people.[43]
Affichomanie
The 1890s produced a word for the mania: affichomanie, poster madness.[44] Posters covered the boulevards, the hoardings, the scaffolding, the Morris columns, the kiosks, the urinals and the shop windows, and were even pulled through the streets on carts.[45] They rarely lasted a week before the weather, a fresh pasting or a collector took them.[45]
Critics at the time called the result a museum in the open air, free and changing daily.[45] It is also why so many survive: the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds about three hundred thousand posters, one of the largest collections anywhere, built mostly through legal deposit by the printers.[44]
Mucha's Zodiaque of 1896 shows how much a poster could be asked to do. It is a calendar for the magazine La Plume, whose offices were at 31 rue Bonaparte, and it advertises the magazine's exhibition series, the Salon des Cent. Mucha printed the months across the foot of the sheet and set a zodiac above the woman's head, so that an advertisement was also a thing worth keeping on a wall for a year.[46]
Outside France
Brussels, Paris and Munich were the three centres, and the Belgian claim is the strongest for getting there first.[3]
Belgium: Victor Horta
Four Horta town houses in Brussels are inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage list: the Hôtel Tassel of 1893, the Hôtel Solvay of 1894, the Hôtel van Eetvelde of 1895, and Horta's own house and studio. They were inscribed in 2000.[47]
UNESCO calls Horta one of the earliest instigators of Art Nouveau architecture and says the appearance of the style in the closing years of the nineteenth century marked a decisive stage in the evolution of architecture in the West.[47] It does not call the Hôtel Tassel the first Art Nouveau building, though the house is often described that way.
The Victoria and Albert Museum calls Horta's houses total works of art, everything in them from the iron banisters to the stained glass canopies to the door handles carrying the same organic decoration.[3]
Austria: the Vienna Secession
The Secession was founded in 1897 by artists around Gustav Klimt who had broken with the conservative Künstlerhaus, and Klimt was its first president. The founders included the painters Kolo Moser and Carl Moll and the architects Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich.[48]
Olbrich, then barely thirty, designed the building that became the Secession's home, and the city granted permission only for a provisional exhibition pavilion to stand no more than ten years. The foundation stone was laid on 28 April 1898 and the building was finished on 29 October the same year.[49] It is still there.
Klimt made the Beethoven Frieze for the fourteenth Secession exhibition, held from 15 April to 27 June 1902, one of twenty-one artists working under Josef Hoffmann's direction.[50]
Hoffmann's Palais Stoclet in Brussels, commissioned in 1905 by the banker Adolphe Stoclet and finished in 1911, was decorated by Wiener Werkstätte artists including Klimt and Koloman Moser.[51]
Spain: Gaudí, and a word about the label
Seven works by Antoni Gaudí, 1852 to 1926, are inscribed by UNESCO: Park Güell, the Palau Güell, the Casa Milà, the Casa Vicens, the Nativity façade and crypt of the Sagrada Família, the Casa Batlló and the crypt of the Colònia Güell.[52]
Gaudí is routinely filed under Art Nouveau and the institutions are more careful than that. The UNESCO listing never uses the words Art Nouveau at all. It places him in Modernisme, calling him the most representative and outstanding of the Modernista architects, and describes his work as a synthesis of the Arts and Crafts movement, Symbolism, Expressionism and Rationalism.[52] The Victoria and Albert Museum files him the same way.[3] The Museum of Modern Art did include him in its 1960 Art Nouveau survey.[53]
Scotland: Mackintosh and Macdonald
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow in 1868 and married Margaret Macdonald in 1900. In the spring of 1902 the publisher Walter Blackie went looking for an architect for a modern villa at Helensburgh, and got the Hill House.[54]
The National Trust for Scotland is careful to describe the interior as a collaboration, and quotes Mackintosh on his wife twice: that he had the talent but she had the genius, and that Margaret was more than half, three quarters, of all he had done.[54]
What Mackintosh contributed to Art Nouveau, in the Victoria and Albert Museum's reading, was orderliness — a severe and eccentric geometry imposed on the style — and the Austrians took it from him.[3]
Germany and the United States
In Germany the style was Jugendstil, popularised by the magazine Die Jugend, founded in Munich in 1896, and German taste ran to a more geometric and symmetrical version of it.[3] In America it was called the Tiffany style, after the glassmaker and jeweller Louis Comfort Tiffany.[3]
How It Ended
Tate puts the ending in six words: Art Nouveau was killed off by the First World War.[1] The Victoria and Albert Museum says the same thing at more length, that the style's popularity was already shrinking as the war approached and that Modernism was stirring in its place.[3]
The more interesting part is that the style produced its own successor from inside. UNESCO reads the austere geometry of Hoffmann's Palais Stoclet as a turning point that foreshadowed Art Deco and the Modern Movement, and says the Vienna Secession heralded both.[51] The V&A makes the same connection through people: the linear, geometric variant of Art Nouveau, Hoffmann and Mackintosh in particular, fed Art Deco's search for modern forms.[55]
Art Deco itself is the direct successor. The V&A calls Art Nouveau its forerunner, the fin de siècle style that fell out of fashion in the years before 1914, and dates the pivotal moment for the new style to the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 — the fair that eventually gave Art Deco its name, though the term itself was only coined in the 1960s.[55]
The usual explanation, that handcraft simply cost too much against mass production, is harder to support than it sounds. What the Museum of Modern Art said in 1960 is close to the opposite: that Art Nouveau architects and designers denounced the imitation of hand-craftsmanship and accepted the machine as a means toward creating a new art form.[53] The Bibliothèque nationale de France does note that a style demanding sustained attention to every detail sat badly with fast production.[56]
The Surrealists Kept It Alive
Art Nouveau fell out of favour quickly and stayed there for decades. The group that kept taking it seriously in the meantime was the Surrealists, and the Musée d'Orsay treats that as the first step in its recovery.[57]
In 1933 Salvador Dalí published an article in the journal Minotaure called On the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture. It was illustrated with photographs by Man Ray and by Brassaï, Man Ray shooting Antoni Gaudí's buildings and Brassaï shooting Hector Guimard's.[57] Dalí had already paid his own tribute to Gaudí in the painting The Enigma of Desire: My Mother, My Mother, My Mother.[57]
He did not drop the subject. Into the 1970s he was still setting what he called the ignominious design of Le Corbusier against Guimard's ornament, which he thought the most libidinous of all.[57]
Dalí also took up the painter Clovis Trouille, who introduced himself as a survivor of 1900 and kept making Art Nouveau references long after they were fashionable.[57] In the same decade the Finnish designer Alvar Aalto was producing the sinuous, free-flowing forms that would make him the master of organic design, close in shape to the most abstract Art Nouveau of forty years before.[57]
The formal rehabilitation came in 1960. The Museum of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition simply called Art Nouveau, from 8 June to 6 September, with more than three hundred objects ranging, in its own phrase, from jewelry to buildings. Its press release described the style with a candour worth quoting: the style of fashion and of the avant garde in the late nineties, later rejected, and now considered a significant early phase of the modern movement.[53]
Peter Selz, who directed the exhibition, put the case for it in one sentence: the style had a liberating function, discarding outworn conventions and setting the stage for the extraordinarily rapid developments of the twentieth century.[53]
Where to See It in Paris
Maxim’s, at 3 rue Royale in the 8th arrondissement, still trades at the same address and keeps the rooms it became famous for. The French state’s heritage register protects the three ground-floor salons and their decor, inscribed in December 1979, and attributes the restaurant interior to Louis Marnez in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.[58] The register does not itself use the words Art Nouveau for them. It is a working restaurant, so the rooms are easiest to see if you are eating in them.
The Musée Carnavalet, in the Marais, has the best-preserved Art Nouveau interiors in the city, and they are free to walk into. Two rooms of its Belle Époque section hold the decor of the Café de Paris from 41 avenue de l'Opéra, by Henri Sauvage and Louis Majorelle, and the jewellery shop Alphonse Mucha designed for Georges Fouquet in 1901, moved and rebuilt inside the museum.[59]
For the Métro entrances, go to Porte Dauphine on line 2 for the only surviving édicule of its type, and to Abbesses on line 12 for the covered entrance that began life at Hôtel de Ville.[15][16] Guimard's own buildings are in the 16th arrondissement: the Castel Béranger at 12–14 rue La Fontaine, and the Hôtel Mezzara a few doors along at 60–62.[13][18] Jules Lavirotte's ceramic façade is at 29 avenue Rapp in the 7th.[20]
The Grand Palais, on the avenue Winston-Churchill in the 8th, was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and opened with it.[60] It is not an Art Nouveau building in the Guimard sense, but it is the surviving piece of the fair at which most Parisians first met the style.
Art Nouveau connections
Artists
Painter · Illustrator
Alphonse Mucha
Designer
René Lalique
Painter · Illustrator
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Illustrator · Painter
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen
Timeline
1849
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin publishes Floriated Ornament, arguing that nature should be the designer's first source.
1856
Owen Jones publishes The Grammar of Ornament in London.
1866
Jules Chéret opens his own printing house in Paris and is credited with the first colour lithograph posters.
1878
Siegfried Bing opens a shop of Far Eastern objects on the rue Chauchat in Paris.
1881
The law of 29 July liberalises the right to advertise in graphic form on French walls.
1888
Bing begins publishing Le Japon Artistique, monthly in three languages, to supply models to craftsmen and manufacturers. It runs to 1891.
1891
Toulouse-Lautrec's first poster, Moulin Rouge, La Goulue, goes up across Paris.
1894
Guimard receives the Castel Béranger commission from Elisabeth Fournier; structural work had begun in 1895 and finished in December 1896.
1895
Guimard travels to Brussels and meets Victor Horta. Siegfried Bing opens the gallery L'Art Nouveau at 22 rue de Provence in December.
1895
Mucha's Gismonda poster for Sarah Bernhardt appears on Paris hoardings on 1 January.
1896
Mucha signs with the printer Champenois and makes Les Saisons, his first set of decorative panels. Die Jugend is founded in Munich.
1897
The Vienna Secession is founded by artists around Gustav Klimt.
1899
The Castel Béranger is named among the winners of the City of Paris façade competition on 28 March. Ernst Haeckel publishes Kunstformen der Natur.
1900
The Exposition Universelle opens in Paris and draws fifty-one million visitors. The first Métro line opens on 19 July with Guimard's entrances.
1901
Mucha designs the Fouquet jewellery shop in Paris. Lavirotte's façade at 29 avenue Rapp wins the City of Paris competition.
1902
Turin's Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Decorativa Moderna. Klimt shows the Beethoven Frieze at the fourteenth Secession exhibition.
1904
Bing gives up his business through ill health. The Métro company begins removing Guimard's entrances.
1905
Frantz Jourdain begins rebuilding the Samaritaine; Parisians dislike its Art Nouveau decoration.
1911
Josef Hoffmann finishes the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, whose austere geometry points toward Art Deco.
1914
The First World War begins. Tate dates the end of Art Nouveau to it.
1933
Salvador Dalí publishes On the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture in Minotaure.
1960
The Museum of Modern Art mounts the first comprehensive American survey of Art Nouveau, describing a style 'later rejected' and newly reconsidered.
1978
The surviving Guimard Métro works are listed as historic monuments; the listing is renewed in 2016.
1992
The Castel Béranger is classified a historic monument, its official statement of interest reading 'manifesto of Art Nouveau'.
Art Nouveau: frequently asked questions
What is Art Nouveau?
Art Nouveau is a style of architecture and design that ran from the 1880s to the First World War, built on curving lines and stylised natural forms and applied to buildings, furniture, glass, jewellery and posters alike. Its practitioners aimed at the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, in which a building and everything in it were designed as a single thing.
Where does the name Art Nouveau come from?
From a Paris shop. The dealer Siegfried Bing opened a gallery called L'Art Nouveau in December 1895 to sell contemporary decoration, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art credits it with popularising both the style and the term. In France the style was also called Le Style Métro, after Hector Guimard's entrances to the Paris underground.
Who was Hector Guimard?
The architect of the Paris Métro entrances, born in Lyon in 1867 and died in New York in 1942. He never presented the final architect's diploma at the École des beaux-arts, which barred him from public competitions, so he worked for private clients. He built 167 works for the Métro across 107 stations, of which 88 survive, and the Castel Béranger at 12–14 rue La Fontaine, which the French heritage register describes as a manifesto of Art Nouveau.
Where can I see Art Nouveau in Paris?
The Musée Carnavalet holds the best-preserved interiors, including the jewellery shop Mucha designed for Georges Fouquet in 1901 and the Café de Paris decor by Henri Sauvage and Louis Majorelle. For Guimard's Métro entrances, Porte Dauphine on line 2 has the only surviving édicule of its type and Abbesses on line 12 has a covered entrance moved there from Hôtel de Ville. His Castel Béranger is at 12–14 rue La Fontaine in the 16th, and Jules Lavirotte's ceramic façade is at 29 avenue Rapp in the 7th.
When and why did Art Nouveau end?
Tate dates the end to the First World War. The style had already been losing ground before 1914, and it produced its own successor: the geometric strain in it, Josef Hoffmann and Charles Rennie Mackintosh especially, fed directly into Art Deco. The common explanation that handcraft cost too much against mass production is weaker than it sounds — the Museum of Modern Art noted in 1960 that Art Nouveau designers had themselves accepted the machine.
Is Gaudí an Art Nouveau architect?
Institutions are more careful than the label suggests. The UNESCO World Heritage listing for Antoni Gaudí's seven inscribed works never uses the words Art Nouveau. It places him in Modernisme, calls him the most representative of the Modernista architects, and describes his work as a synthesis of the Arts and Crafts movement, Symbolism, Expressionism and Rationalism. The Museum of Modern Art did include him in its 1960 Art Nouveau survey.
What is Art Nouveau called in other countries?
Jugendstil in Germany, after the journal Die Jugend, and Sezessionstil in Austria and Hungary. In Belgium it was Style nouille, the noodle style, or Style coup de fouet, the whiplash style. In Italy it was Stile floreale or Lo stile Liberty, after the London shop Liberty & Co. In Barcelona it belonged to the wider Modernista movement.
References
The sources below include histories, manifestos, scholarly research, and primary materials that informed this page. They document Art Nouveau, its development, and the artists and works associated with it.
5↑Symbolism
WebsiteThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
10↑Art Nouveau
WebsiteVan Gogh MuseumUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
17↑Hector Guimard, Entrance Gate to Paris Subway (Metropolitain) Station
WebsiteThe Museum of Modern ArtUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
19↑Synagogue, 10 rue Pavee (PA00086477)
WebsiteMinistere de la Culture, base MerimeeUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
24↑Grand Palais (PA00088877)
WebsiteMinistere de la Culture, base MerimeeUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
27↑Rene Lalique, Pendentif Aiglon, c. 1898-1900 (inv. 996.33.1)
WebsiteMusee des Arts Decoratifs, ParisUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
30↑Coffee pot by Maurice Dufrene for La Maison Moderne (C.69&A-1989)
WebsiteVictoria and Albert MuseumUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
31↑Les collections d'affiches
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de FranceUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
32↑Review: L'Art est dans la rue
PeriodicalNineteenth-Century Art WorldwideUsed forContemporary reporting or criticism used to document the historical reception and context of Art Nouveau.
33↑Jules Cheret, La Loie Fuller (E.113-1921)
WebsiteVictoria and Albert MuseumUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
36↑Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge, La Goulue, 1891
WebsiteArt Institute of ChicagoUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
37↑Toulouse-Lautrec et l'art de l'affiche: communique de presse
WebsiteMusee Toulouse-Lautrec, AlbiUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
40↑Gismonda, poster by Alphonse Mucha (E.1281-1963)
WebsiteVictoria and Albert MuseumUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
41↑Poster for Gismonda
WebsiteMucha FoundationUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
46↑Alphonse Mucha, Zodiaque (La Plume), 1896-97
WebsiteArt Institute of ChicagoUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
48↑Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
WebsiteVienna SecessionUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
49↑The Secession Building
WebsiteVienna SecessionUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
50↑The Beethoven Frieze
WebsiteVienna SecessionUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
56↑L'Art nouveau (1890-1914)
WebsiteBibliotheque nationale de France (Passerelles)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
58↑3 Rue Royale (Maxim’s) — Historic Monument Record
WebsiteMinistère de la CultureUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
59↑The pathway: Belle Epoque Paris
WebsiteMusee Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris, Paris MuseesUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
60↑The Grand Palais — history of the building and its present programme
WebsiteGrandPalaisRmnUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
61Alphonse Mucha, La Gismonda (Sarah Bernhardt), 1894/95
WebsiteArt Institute of ChicagoUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
62Symbolism
WebsiteTateUsed forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Art Nouveau page.
These references provide the documented foundation for this movement's history and interpretation. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.
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