Art Nouveau.pdf

Art Nouveau

Jean Lahor

and 1890s in the West. Born in reaction to the industrial revolution and to the

creative

vacuum it left behind, Art Nouveau was at the heart of a “renaissance” in the decorative arts.

The primary objective of the movement was the creation of a new aesthetic of Nature through

a return to the study of natural subjects. In order to achieve this, such artists as Gustav Klimt,

Koloman Moser, Antoni Gaudí, Jan Toorop, and William Morris favoured innovation in

technique and novelty of forms.

After its triumph at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900, the trend continued and has inspired

many artists ever since. Art Déco, the successor of Art Nouveau, appeared after World War II.

Text: Jean Lahor (adaptation)

Translator: Rebecca Brimacombe

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A rt Nouveau designates a decorative and architectural style developed in the 1880s

- Contents -

I. The Origins of Art Nouveau

II. Art Nouveau at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris

Conclusion

Major Artists

Notes

194

Bibliography

195

Index

196

I. The Origins of Art Nouveau

there is no denying it currently reigns triumphant over all Europe and in every

English-speaking country outside Europe; all it needs now is management, and

this is up to men of taste.” (Jean Lahor, Paris 1901)

Art Nouveau sprang from a major movement in the decorative arts that first appeared in

Western Europe in 1892, but its birth was not quite as spontaneous as is commonly believed.

Decorative ornament and furniture underwent many changes between the waning of the Empire

Style around 1815 and the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris celebrating the centennial of the

French Revolution. For example, there were distinct revivals of Restoration, Louis-Philippe, and

Napoleon III furnishings still on display at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Tradition

(or rather imitation) played too large a role in the creation of these different period styles for a

single trend to emerge and assume a unique mantle. Nevertheless there were some artists during

this period that sought to distinguish themselves from their predecessors by expressing their

own decorative ideal.

What then did the new decorative art movement stand for in 1900? In France, as elsewhere,

it meant that people were tired of the usual repetitive forms and methods, the same old

decorative clichés and banalities, the eternal imitation of furniture from the reigns of monarchs

named Louis (Louis XIII to XVI) and furniture from the Renaissance and Gothic periods.

It meant designers finally asserted the art of their own time as their own. Up until 1789

(the end of the Ancien Régime), style had advanced by reign; this era wanted its own style.

And (at least outside of France) there was a yearning for something more: to no longer be slave

to foreign fashion, taste, and art. It was an urge inherent in the era’s awakening nationalism, as

each country tried to assert independence in literature and in art.

In short, everywhere there was a push towards a new art that was neither a servile copy of

the past nor an imitation of foreign taste.

There was also a real need to recreate decorative art, simply because there had been none since

the turn of the century. In each preceding era, decorative art had not merely existed; it had

flourished gloriously. In the past, everything from people’s clothing and weapons, right down to the

slightest domestic object – from andirons, bellows, and chimney backs, to one’s drinking cup – were

duly decorated: each object had its own ornamentation and finishing touches, its own elegance and

beauty. But the nineteenth century had concerned itself with little other than function; ornament,

finishing touches, elegance, and beauty were superfluous. At once both grand and miserable, the

nineteenth century was as “deeply divided” as Pascal’s human soul. The century that ended so

lamentably in brutal disdain for justice among peoples had opened in complete indifference to

decorative beauty and elegance, maintaining for the greater part of one hundred years a singular

paralysis when it came to aesthetic feeling and taste.

The return of once-abolished aesthetic feeling and taste also helped bring about Art Nouveau.

France had come to see through the absurdity of the situation and was demanding imagination

from its stucco and fine plaster artists, its decorators, furniture makers, and even architects, asking

Félix Vallotton,

L’Art Nouveau, Exposition Permanente,

1896.

Poster for Siegfried Bing’s gallery, colour

lithograph, 65 x 45 cm.

Victor and Gretha Arwas collection.

“O ne can argue the merits and the future of the new decorative art movement, but

Unsigned,

Peacock Table Lamp. Patinated bronze,

glass and enameld glass.

Macklowe Gallery, New York.

all these artists to show some creativity and fantasy, a little novelty and authenticity. And so there

arose new decoration in response to the new needs of new generations. 1

The definitive trends capable of producing a new art would not materialise until the 1889

Universal Exposition. There the English asserted their own taste in furniture; American

silversmiths Graham and Augustus Tiffany applied new ornament to items produced by their

workshops; and Louis Comfort Tiffany revolutionised the art of stained glass with his

glassmaking. An elite corps of French artists and manufacturers exhibited works that likewise

showed noticeable progress: Emile Gallé sent furniture of his own design and decoration, as well

as coloured glass vases in which he obtained brilliant effects through firing; Clément Massier,

Albert Dammouse, and Auguste Delaherche exhibited flambé stoneware in new forms and

colours; and Henri Vever, Boucheron and Lucien Falize exhibited silver and jewellery that

showed new refinements. The trend in ornamentation was so advanced that Falize even showed

everyday silverware decorated with embossed kitchen herbs.

The examples offered by the 1889 Universal Exposition quickly bore fruit; everything was

culminating into a decorative revolution. Free from the prejudice of high art, artists sought new

forms of expression. In 1891 the French Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts established a decorative

arts division, which although negligible in its first year, was significant by the Salon of 1892, when

works in pewter by Jules Desbois, Alexandre Charpentier, and Jean Baffier were exhibited for the

first time. And the Société des Artistes Français, initially resistant to decorative art, was forced to

allow the inclusion of a special section devoted to decorative art objects in the Salon of 1895.

It was on 22 December that same year that Siegfried Bing, returning from an assignment in

the United States, opened a shop named Art Nouveau in his townhouse on rue Chauchat, which

Louis Bonnier had adapted to contemporary taste. The rise of Art Nouveau was no less

remarkable abroad. In England, Liberty shops, Essex wallpaper, and the workshops of Merton-

Abbey and the Kelmscott-Press under the direction of William Morris (to whom Edward

Burne-Jones and Walter Crane provided designs) were extremely popular. The trend even

spread to London’s Grand Bazaar (Maple & Co), which offered Art Nouveau to its clientele as

its own designs were going out of fashion. In Brussels, the first exhibition of La Libre

Esthétique opened in February 1894, reserving a large space for decorative displays, and in

December of the same year, the Maison d’art (established in the former townhouse of

prominent Belgian lawyer Edmond Picard) opened its doors to buyers in Brussels, gathering

under one roof the whole of European decorative art, as produced by celebrated artists and

humble backwater workshops alike. More or less simultaneous movements in Germany, Austria,

the Netherlands, and Denmark (including Royal Copenhagen porcelain) had won over the most

discriminating collectors well before 1895.

The expression “Art Nouveau” was henceforth part of the contemporary vocabulary, but the

two words failed to designate a uniform trend capable of giving birth to a specific style. In reality,

Art Nouveau varied by country and prevailing taste.

As we shall see, the revolution started in England, where at the outset it truly was a national

movement. Indeed, nationalism and cosmopolitanism are two aspects of the trend that we will

discuss at length. Both are evident and in conflict in the arts, and while both are justifiable trends,

they both fail when they become too absolute and exclusive. For example, what would have

happened to Japanese art if it had not remained national? And yet Gallé and Tiffany were equally

correct to totally break with tradition.

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