A staircase like a plant
Brussels, 1893. Anyone entering Professor Émile Tassel’s new town house stood in a stairwell that seemed to grow. Iron supports branch out like stems; lines swing across floor, walls and ceiling. The architect Victor Horta had designed not only the house but also the railings, lamps and mosaics. The Hôtel Tassel is considered one of the first Art Nouveau buildings and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A style with many names
Hardly any style became international so quickly, and hardly any has had so many names. In France and Belgium it was called Art Nouveau, after the Paris gallery “Maison de l’Art Nouveau” of the dealer Siegfried Bing, which opened in 1895. In Germany “Jugendstil” prevailed, after the Munich magazine Jugend (Youth), published from 1896. In Italy people spoke of the Stile Liberty, after a London department store; in Catalonia of Modernisme; in Vienna of the Secession style.
What they all shared was the aim of breaking free from Historicism, which in the 19th century had imitated the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. Instead, artists looked for new forms in nature: leaves, blossoms, waves, swans and flowing hair.
Art for every area of life
Art Nouveau recognised no boundary between fine art and craft. In Nancy in Lorraine, Émile Gallé made glass vases with plants and insects. In Paris, from 1900, Hector Guimard designed the Métro entrances with their green, stem-like lamps. Alphonse Mucha, from Moravia, became famous overnight when in 1894 he designed the poster for Gismonda for the actress Sarah Bernhardt.
In Munich in the mid-1890s, Hermann Obrist designed an embroidered wall hanging with a cyclamen plant whose lashing line gave the characteristic Art Nouveau line its name, “whiplash”. In Darmstadt, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig founded the artists’ colony on the Mathildenhöhe in 1899, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Vienna: to every age its art
In 1897 young artists around Gustav Klimt left Vienna’s traditional artists’ association and founded the Secession. Klimt became its first president. Joseph Maria Olbrich built them an exhibition building with a dome of gilded laurel leaves. Above the entrance are the words: “To every age its art. To art its freedom.”
In 1902 Klimt painted the Beethoven Frieze there; a few years later, in his “golden period”, came The Kiss. In 1903 Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte, which made furniture, jewellery, textiles and tableware in strict geometric forms, already pointing beyond Art Nouveau.
Glasgow: The Four
In Glasgow the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair developed a slender, cool style of their own. The group became known as “The Four”. Margaret Macdonald created gesso panels and designs that also attracted great attention in Vienna. Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art building was damaged by fire in 2014 and largely gutted by a second fire in 2018.
The swift end
Art Nouveau faded as quickly as it had blossomed. By around 1910 many considered ornament outdated. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos attacked all decoration in his lecture Ornament and Crime, and the Deutscher Werkbund relied on plain forms suited to industrial production. The Bauhaus later built on these ideas.
Why it still matters
Art Nouveau was one of the first great attempts to give artistic form to the whole of life, from the house to the cutlery. This made it a forerunner of modern design. Its posters, buildings and paintings are among the most popular images in art history, and cities such as Brussels, Vienna, Riga and Barcelona owe it a good part of their appearance.
Further reading
- Klaus-Jürgen Sembach: Art Nouveau: Utopia: Reconciling the Irreconcilable (1990).
- Paul Greenhalgh (ed.): Art Nouveau 1890–1914 (2000). Victoria and Albert Museum catalogue.