Revisiting the Style of ART NOUVEAU.

• Author: GREENHALGH, PAUL

"Art Nouveau's modernity was achieved through the combination of disparate sources ... making it one of the most complex intellectual and aesthetic forces in the history of decorative art."

THE ART NOUVEAU (French for "new art") movement grew as a reaction to the excesses of other more-academic 19th-century revivals. Its proponents reinterpreted their sources of inspiration--the art of Japan, nature, and geometry--in their efforts to reform the arts and create a new visual vocabulary suited to modern life. These designers sought to create a total and complete decorative style that combined all the arts--including sculpture, painting, graphics, decorative arts, and architecture--in a single, expressive whole.

Expressing both the nostalgia and decadence of its fin de siecle (end of the century) period and the modernism of the dawning 20th century, Art Nouveau spread throughout Europe and major American cities from about 1890 to World War I, when it fell out of fashion. By rejecting rote repetition of historical styles from the past and incorporating modern materials and themes, Art Nouveau liberated the arts. The streamlined designs favored by many Art Nouveau artists paved the way for the abstracting tendencies that would dominate 20th-century art and design.

Art Nouveau is best viewed as having a phased development. It arrived in the years 1893-95, then rose rapidly to prominence and spread to many urban centers between 1895 and 1900. Finally, in the first decade of the new century, it became the ubiquitous voice of modernism, constantly on the edge of vulgarity and increasingly loved by a mass audience in inverse ratio to the loathing it attracted from design professionals. It collapsed and ceased to be a force of consequence in the years immediately before World War I.

The first phase principally concerned individuals and groups in London, Brussels, and Paris. Despite the fact that the English had failed to consolidate an Art Nouveau movement of their own, they provided vital forebears and, in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, created some of the very first mature images in the style. In Brussels, the style was developed to its fullest pitch across most media. An extraordinary generation of architects--including Victor Horta, Paul Hankar, Paul Saintenoy, and Gustave Strauven--built hundreds of houses, department stores, and public buildings in the style.

Paris was the commercial capital of high art and design, and it was through its galleries, shops, publications, salons, and exhibitions that Art Nouveau arrived in front of an international audience. Entrepreneur Sigfried Bing gave the style its most lasting name when he launched his gallery, L'Art Nouveau, in December, 1895. The style was a powerful presence at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.

In the second phase, after 1895, the style became self-consciously international, as movements appeared all over Europe and North America. Cities as varied as Glasgow, Prague, Budapest, Helsinki, Munich, and New York showed that, while there were considerable concordances among the various schools of thought, each also developed a strong local flavor. The style was recognized as an international phenomenon, but it was also made to adapt to serve as a weapon in regional cultural and...