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Hier kommt
Seite 2.tif

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NORBERT WOLF

PRESTEL
MUNICH LONDON NEW YORK

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12

INTRODUCTION

14

I THE NEW STYLE: AN APPROACH

18

ART LUXURYLUXURY ART

20

THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

23

A NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHT

25

LUXURY FASHION AND REFORM DRESS

30

MOBILIZING INWARDNESS OR THE

BREAK WITH THE STATUS QUO

32

SELF-PROMOTION: THE ART MAGAZINES

36

II PROBLEMS OF STYLE

40

VISIONS OF UNITY AND SPIRITUALIZATIONS

41

YOUTHAWAKENING

46

SACRED SPRING

59

TOTAL WORKS OF ART

62

A CONSCIOUSNESS OF STYLE

64

RINASCI

68

III THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF STYLE

70

THE CULT OF BEAUTY

71

THE BEAUTY OF WOMEN

78

THE MAGIC OF JEWELRY

84

SYNESTHESIA

85

BUILT SYMPHONIES

87

PAINTED MUSIC AND DANCED ARABESQUES

98

ORNAMENTS AND LINES

99

POLARIZATIONS

106 JAPONISM

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110

IV PRELUDES

114

THE ENGLISH PATH

115

FROM BLAKE TO BEARDSLEY

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120 FROM RUSKIN TO THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

188 AUSTRIA

121

189 THE WIENER WERKSTTTE

WILLIAM MORRIS, THE PRE-RAPHAELITES,

AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

190 Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser

126 THE FRENCH PROPHETS

194 THE UNITED STATES

127 TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

195 NEW YORK AND TIFFANY

128 GAUGUIN AND THE NABIS

197 CHICAGO AND SULLIVAN

132 IN THE ORBIT OF SYMBOLISM

200
136

V EVERYWHERE AN
AWAKENING: THE GREAT
CENTERS OF ART NOUVEAU

140 GREAT BRITAIN

141

GLASGOW AND MACKINTOSH

148 FRANCE
149 PARIS

VI IMAGE SYSTEMS

204 FRANZ VON STUCK

214 GUSTAV KLIMT
224 FERDINAND HODLER
232 EDVARD MUNCH
238

VII ART NOUVEAU AND THE AVANTGARDE

240 THE PARADIGM OF ARCHITECTURE

149 La Maison Bing

241 VIENNA: BETWEEN RINGSTRASSE

AND WHITE CITY

150 Guimard

241 Otto Wagner

153 Mucha
154 GALL AND THE COLE DE NANCY
160 BELGIUM
161

HENRY VAN DE VELDE: THE HOUSE IN UCCLE

162 VICTOR HORTA

166 THE NETHERLANDS
168 SPAIN
169 ANTONI GAUD
172 GERMANY

246 Adolf Loos

252 THE CASTING OUT OF ORNAMENT
256 THE PARADIGM OF PAINTING
257 Frantiek Kupka
257 Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter
262 Piet Mondrian and De Stijl
266

VIII CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTS

268 BETWEEN REALITY AND UTOPIA

173 BERLIN AND WORPSWEDE

272 THE SEMANTICS OF DESIGN

177 MUNICH

276 THE REVIVAL OF ART NOUVEAU

179 THE ARTISTS OF THE DARMSTADT MATHILDENHHE

180 Joseph Maria Olbrich

282 APPENDICES

182 Peter Behrens

290 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

183 HAGEN, WEIMAR AND VAN DE VELDE

295 INDEX OF NAMES

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INTRODUCTION

Art Nouveau cannot be presumed to have the

same degree of art historical and cultural historical signicance as, for example, Impressionism or
Expressionism. For this reason I will approach its
origins and historical development as carefully as
possible, that is to say as impartially as possible.
CHAPTER I concerns phenomena linked with the
styles self-promotion. Did it react to the modern
world of consumerism with what Walter Benjamin
called a mobilization of inwardness or did it
place priority on an attempt to avoid being cloistered off from the world and rather to oppose the
contemporary industrialized world?
CHAPTER II seeks to clarify a problem rooted in the
contemporary terms Art Nouveau, Jugendstil,
Modern Style, and so on: whether the self-image
expressed in these gives us the right, from the perspective of art historical scholarship, to similarly
speak of a style. I believe that a comparison with
the paradigm of Renaissance style permits important conclusions to be drawn, which additionally
illuminate Art Nouveaus penchant for the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.
The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk also creates
a transition to the idea of the physiognomy of
style, discussed in CHAPTER III, whose most important features lie in the all-encompassing cult of
beauty (which proves itself obsolete in the further
course of the twentieth century), in the striving for
synesthetic harmony, and in the immense signicance of ornament and decoration.
In order to classify these qualities within the historical development, CHAPTER IV introduces those
nineteenth-century artistic movements that led

to Art Nouveau or that closely touched upon it, in

particular Symbolism.
CHAPTER V is devoted to the main centers of the
style and their artistic exponents, with the exception of four outstanding painters for whom I
reserve a special chapter, which follows.
CHAPTER VI examines the works and impact of
Franz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler,
and Edvard Munch. It also returns to the question
raised previously of whether the art form of painting must be excluded from Art Nouveau; whether,
that is, Art Nouveau is realized only in the crafts
and in architecture.
CHAPTER VII deals with the relationship between
Art Nouveau and the Functionalism of the early
twentieth century, which sought to allow art to
be absorbed into everyday usefulness and thus
to dispense with superuous decoration. The
apologists for an ornament-free art categorically
condemned Art Nouveau as a cosmetic aesthetic
of repression, as a fundamental self-delusion and
cultural illusion; was this condemnation based
upon appropriate premises?
CHAPTER VIII returns to this problem in a resumptive
look back at the history of Art Nouveau and in light
of its revival, which began a couple of decades ago
(metaphor of a utopian hopesee below).
Two positions, which I single out from the literature, offer extremely contrasting perspectives on
Art Nouveau, which ventured the attempta late
one in terms of cultural historyof combining
intrinsically artistic forms, but also fashion, dance,
the culture of eating, and an environment suit-

12

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13

able for children, into a style of life and of binding

these to an ideal.
The rst sees the new movement, which began
toward the end of the nineteenth century, in terms
of cultural psychology, and locates its guiding image
in Narcissistic self-love: Man is never less immediate than when he seeks to bring forth the immediate
expression of himself. The idea of Jugendstil [as contemporary Germans termed Art Nouveau] was to
surround people, in fact the era in its entirety
with nothing but reections of their own inner
selves Narcissus died because he lost himself in
his own reection.1 According to this view, Art Nouveaus autism, its aesthetic self-reection in a mass
society, necessarily led to its swift conclusion.
The second interpretation, which could title
itself How Modernism Learned to Walk, locates
the failure of Art Nouveau not in its Narcissism,
but rather in the opposing attempt, namely in its
effort to bring about a reconciliation of conventional expectations about art with the phenomena
of the technological age, and especially with the
driving impulses of technocratic motion. The fact
that something like this was possibly a self-contradiction can be suspected, but it became certain
rst through Jugendstil. This was surely painful;
its continuing popularity can therefore only be
interpreted as the irrational desire to repeatedly
delay this moment of realization. For this reason
Jugendstil will probably live on forever as the
metaphor of a utopian hope.2

there any intention to list designers, artists, and their

works anywhere near completely.3
The present book thus investigates fundamental
aspects. It raises, not least, the question of whether
one must presuppose an inborn failure on the part
of Art Nouveau, or whether this assumption is not
the result of an overly narrow avant-garde view, into
whose coordinates art nouveau does not quite t.
These objectives simultaneously declare what
the book does not aim to achieve: It is not one of
that large group of publications that organize the
development of Art Nouveau chronologically or
in terms of art as a whole. Only chapter VII follows
this model, with the intention of making it possible
to glean synoptic information of undoubted signicance. But all the other chapters examine the fundamental problems with which Art Nouveau saw
itself confronted in the historical and socio-cultural
context of the epochal threshold around 1900.
In order to keep the bibliography within bounds,
I have limited myself to important works that are
relatively easily accessible to the reader. I also
sought to set limits to the footnotes by generally
citing only quotations or particularly important
sources of ideas from the literature. As a rule I have
avoided listing again in the footnotes publications
already in the bibliography that clearly deal with
concrete artists, factual matters, and so on. This
limitation should not lead the reader to falsely presume that my investigations are not indebted to all
the publications mentioned.

Obviously, the organizational structure of this book

necessarily ignores a whole array of points: in particular technological aspects and questions of production technology have been set aside, for example
in the case of decorative glass and furniture, just as
has a listing of factory, workshops, and so on. Nor is

In addition I would like to thank Stefanie Penck of

Prestel Verlag, who supported this project from the
very beginning; Anita Dahlinger for her astute and
thorough image research; and not least Eckhard
Hollmann, whose editorial supervision of the text
was performed with reliable and seasoned diligence.

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I
THE NEW
STYLE: AN
APPROACH

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PLANTS ARE ORGANIZED

BEINGS, POSSESSED OF
A POWER OF GROWTH.
Christopher Dresser, 1859

WHAT IMPEDES THE ENGLISH

IS THEIR INABILITY TO FREE
THEMSELVES FROM THE
FLOWER.
Julius Meyer-Graefe, 1896

The English designer Christopher Dresser4 began

teaching at the design school of Londons South
Kensington Museum, todays Victoria and Albert
Museum, in 1859. That same year he published
his book Unity in Variety. Deduced from the Vegetable Kingdom in London. On the very rst
page can be found the sentence quoted in the
epigraph above, which ultimately relates all
individual forms of vegetation back to essential
lines of life.
It was just this clinging to plant-based ornament by the English applied arts that became the
subject of criticism by German art writer Julius
Meier-Graefe on page 77 of volume 1, book 2
of the magazine Dekorative Kunst. To his mind,
the dominance of the ower obstructed the
forward-looking path of the pure line, freed
from mimetic functions. What Meier-Graefe
might have meant in 1896 by linear emancipation can be seen in a dust jacket designed three
years earlier by Henry van de Velde for a volume
of Max Elskamp poems entitled Salutations, dont
dangliques (g. bottom). A comparison of its
decoration with that of a dust jacket designed by
Aubrey Beardsley in 1893/94 for Le Morte d Arthur
(g. bottom) makes it clear that, although van de
Velde too draws upon natural models, the Belgian

artist sees the ow of line as the formal echo of a

non-objective, poetical sentiment and as a result
abstracts it much more severely.
Henry van de Velde was one of the most important representatives of a new style, one that
understood itself as the beacon of a new cultural
era. In 1902 it made its impressive collective
appearance on the international stage: With its
motto Le Arti Decorative Internazionali Del Nuovo
Secolo, the great decorative arts show in Turin
brought together products from America, England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Hungary, and the host country Italy.5 The exponents
represented all possible design options, ones that
would have pleased someone like Meier-Graefe as
well as ones that abandoned themselves unreservedly to a horror vacui of oral ornament. Self-celebratory ostentation, which carried forward the
bourgeois historicism and exoticism of the previous years clothed in a new stylistic dressand
that not infrequently crossed the line into kitsch
encountered an unadorned formalism that even
today is still considered classically modern.
The new aesthetic, to which a different nomenclature was applied in each country, is considered
by some art historians to be the last unied style
since the Baroque; by others, however, it is seen as
a non-style, since allegedly any common design
criteria manifested themselves only in architecture
and the applied arts, but not in painting or sculpture.
Klaus-Jrgen Sembach wrote in 1990 that Art Nouveau expressed itself only in the eld of the applied
arts and that to transfer the stylistic term to painting
was to obscure matters, since the spokesmen of
the time no longer sought a high art but rather its
abolition.6 This was diametrically opposed to the
view of someone like Peter Behrens, who in 1900,
phrased it as follows: For this reason we will have
a new style, our own style in everything we create.
The style of an era does not refer to specic forms in
some specic type of art. ... The style ... symbolizes
the total feeling, the entire attitude to life of an era
and manifests itself only in the universe of all the
arts.7

16

HENRY VAN DE VELDE

DUST JACKET FOR SALUTATIONS, DONT
DANGLIQUES, BY MAX ELSKAMP, 1893
LWL-LANDESMUSEUM FR KUNST UND KULTURGESCHICHTE, MNSTER
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
COVER FOR LE MORTE DARTHUR, 1893/94
MUSEUM FR KUNST UND GEWERBE, HAMBURG

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Harry Graf Kessler, too, at the end of the

nineteenth century, deemed the cooperation
between high and applied art as a gain for the
latter: Now, he enthusiastically stated, for the rst
time, the applied arts [participate] in the mystical
radiance that has always transgured the great
art, architecture, sculpture, and painting. While
insurmountable obstacles kept them [the cultural
pioneers; N. W.] for the time being away from the
design of practical life , in art the adaptation
to the new feeling for life met with the weakest
resistance. For this reason, it was there that the
profound transformation from old to new human
being rst manifested itself.8
Clearly then, the amount of avant-garde
power one attributes to the new styleand
which kind of poweris a function of what one
discursively subsumes under it or expects from
it. Henry Wilsons design for the Ladbroke Grove
Free Library in London in 189091 has been
described by several architectural historians as
the earliest example of the new styleof Art Nouveauin Europe, an assessment rejected by Tim
Benton, however, for it is based solely on a small
number of supercial decorative elements.9 In the
eld of painting, long before Kandinsky, experiments conducted with ornamental abstraction in
the style of Henry van de Veldes image Abstract
Plants (Abstrakte Pflanzenkomposition) of 1893 (g.
right) had been considered incunabula of the new
style. While researchers generally date its beginnings to the 1890s, the chronology of its closing
stages presents signicant problems.

led to organic or zoomorphic growths as in

the work of Antoni Gaud (compare pp. 52/53
and 168ff.). The playfully amboyant version,
Easton believed, invited parody, thus prompting its imminent demise. Easton thus concurs
with those authors who place the death of Art
Nouveau in the rst decade of the twentieth
century. Following upon oral Art Nouveau, a
movement emerged that was liberated from
the stream of ornament, and was practiced by
artists such as Henry van de Velde, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Josef Hoffmann.10 But with
this, Easton claims, Art Nouveau had reached
its conclusion, for now began a radically ornament-free and technical design, which, via Otto
Wagner, Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, and others,
led to the German Bauhaus or, in the US, to the
Functionalist building style of Louis Henry Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.11
A minority of scholars sees the formal contrast just described as arising genetically from Art
Nouveau, as two sides of one and the same coin,
so to speak, and sees this matrix as remaining
in effect at least into the years of the First World
War. Later chapters will attempt to show why I
share this view.

17

Laird M. Easton postulates three formal premises of Art Nouveau. These consist, rst, in the
rejection of the spatial illusionism that was an
essential formal tool of the academic art of the
nineteenth century; second, in ornament as a
replacement for naturalistic representational
elements: with the help of complex rhythms,
the ornamental principle is suffused by symmetrically arranged and frieze-like sequences,
even in the case of subject matter with an
unavoidably object-like quality; and third, in
the dictates of the line, which, in extreme cases,

HENRY VAN DE VELDE

ABSTRACT PLANTS, 1893
MIXED MEDIA
RIJKSMUSEUM KRLLER-MLLER, OTTERLO
CARLO BUGATTI
CHAIR, TABLE, AND
THRONE CHAIR, c. 1900
PAINTED WOOD, EMBOSSED BRASS
FITTINGS, AND METAL INLAYS
CHAIR HEIGHT: 86.5 CM, TABLE HEIGHT:
76.5 CM, THRONE CHAIR HEIGHT: 154.5 CM
SOTHEBYS, LONDON

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ART LUXURY
LUXURY ART

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In his opening address at the Turin exhibition in

1902, which presented the most complete exhibition of Art Nouveau worldwide, the Italian minister of education and cultural affairs Nunzio Nasi
acclaimed the new style as an art that would be
democratic, in order to elevate the aesthetic taste
of the masses to a previously unknown height,
and at the same time to create new jobs.12 The
emotionalism of his choice of words scarcely
conceals the mercantile essence of the statement,
which also makes clear why in Italy the new style
was generally referred to as lo Stile Liberty after
the Art Nouveau department store Liberty in
London. Arthur Lasenby Liberty, a cunning entrepreneur, opened his department store in Londons
West End in 1875; there, in addition to goods
imported from the Near and Far East, he sold a
collection of Orientalizing fabrics and wallpapers.
Among the designers was the Christopher Dresser
mentioned above. Liberty products were soon
available worldwide: textiles, embroidery, carpets,
furniture and fashion, silver, tin, and decorative
objects. The Liberty style availed itself of no
single design norm, but rather a design strategy
aimed at exquisite products with a restrainedly
modernist appearance.
The interpretation of Art Nouveau in Walter
Benjamins Arcades Project stands in only apparent contradiction to the commodities fetishism
of the stile Liberty. Benjamin worked on this
philosophy of the history of the nineteenth century from 1927 until his death in 1940; it was never
completed. Art Nouveau makes its appearance
in this work as a paradigmatic conict phenomenon of modernity: The transguration of the
solitary soul seems to be its goal. Individuality is
its theory... It represents the nal attempted foray
of an art besieged in its ivory tower by technology. It mobilizes all the reserves of inwardness.
They nd their expression in the mediumistic
language of lines, in the blossom as the symbol of
naked, vegetative nature, opposing a technologically armed environment [...].13 In Art Nouveau,
for Benjamin, established art carried out a futile
rearguard action, a nal attempt to ennoble the

true substrata of modernity: technology and commerce. And this at a time when, in addition to
its technological achievements, it was precisely
this commercial character of modernity that was
becoming increasingly irrefutableseen against
this background the decorative-fantastical ourishes on the Villa Ruggeri in Pesaro (gs opposite
and bottom), for example, completed in 1902,
parallel to the Turin exhibition, are indeed akin to
atavistic mannerisms.
Benjamin inserted the sentence about Art
Nouveau into the expos, or exposition, to the
Arcades Project, which he entitled Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Like the art of Art
Nouveau, he saw the arcadeswhich had been
built in the French metropolis in the decades after
1822 but by the time of his writing had already
disappeared or become nostalgic enclaves in the
cityscapeas quintessential forms of the Modern.
Nineteenth-century tourists travel guides
to Paris extolled these passagewayscovered
by iron and glass constructions and paneled in
marble, cutting through entire quarters of the
cityas shopping centers of industrial luxury and
as objects of longing for sophisticated consumer
desire. On both sides of these passageways and
connecting corridors, which are both house
and street,14 one elegant store followed the
next under muted light from above. The arcades
developed their greatest radiance, of course, in
the evening, in articial light: rst gas then later
electric. At night, what was fascinating was the
fabric of the brilliance of the light, the brilliance
of the commodities, and the mass of people in
motion. A labyrinth of brightly colored, glittering
arcades like a collection of rainbow bridges in an
ocean of light. A completely fairy-tale world.15
Like the boulevards, the arcades, too, developed
into places of pleasure and strolling. In the person of the neur, intelligence takes to the market,
intending to look at it, and in reality, nevertheless, to nd a buyer. In this intermediary state it
appears as a Bohemian.16
Admittedly, neither the arcades with their
offerings of luxury goods, nor the strolling, nor

19

GIUSEPPE BREGA
VILLINO RUGGERI, 190207
PESARO

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the articial light are products of Art Nouveau.

The phenomena arose somewhat earlier and
as they culminated in the late nineteenth century, they characterized the cultural cocktail of
the Belle poque and the n de sicle in all their
nuances of taste. But Art Nouveau (at least a
good part of it) readily embraced these options.
The Galerie Bing can be cited as a representative
example.17
Frequently described in the literature as an
impresario of Art Nouveau, Siegfried Bing, a
native of Hamburg who became a French citizen in 1876, was an expert in East Asian art. On
December 26, 1895in the bustling Paris street
Rue de Provence, rather than an arcadehe
opened a gallery and art dealership under the
business name La Maison Bing, LArt Nouveau.
And with this he created the French catchphrase
for those works of art that distanced themselves
from the established taste of the salons and the
bourgeoisie. Bing functioned not least as the Parisian representative for Louis Comfort Tiffany, who
in turn represented Bings business interests in
New York. Surrounded by noble design, in Bings
gallery the well-heeled public open to the avantgarde could buy modern bronzes and images by
the Nabis (see p. 128ff.) as well as ceramics, jewelry, textiles, and glass from the product line of his
American business partner, and, in keeping with
sophisticated contemporary taste, there was also
an abundant offering of Japanese antiquities.

THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

Art Nouveau artists, at least the representatives
of the applied arts, generally had no fear of contact with commerce and modern trade. The role
played by the design of advertising media in the
entire Stilkunst or style art of around 1900 is
sufcient evidence of this.
Advertising kiosks had been in existence since
1855. They demanded striking advertising posters
rather than the provisional bills formerly posted
on house walls and street corners. Improved

printing techniques offered new design possibilities. Color lithography (chromolithography),

patented in 1837, captured the market with the
emergence of the lithographic printing press
beginning in 1852, and in 1891 Henri de ToulouseLautrec hazarded the step from the graphic arts
to advertising art with his earliest poster Moulin
Rouge. La Goulue (g. opposite), revolutionizing
poster design in the process and anticipating
many aspects of Art Nouveau. The artistically
rened poster pitched anything and everything:
bicycles, medications, nightclubs. Moreover, it
was hoped that courting the visitors expected at
the 1900 Paris worlds fair would boost sales of the
products on display. And the presence of the new
style was already obligatory at that same exposition universelle; Samuel Bing designed a pavilion
that housed a large model home consisting of six
furnished and decorated rooms.
Under the inuence of Toulouse-Lautrec and
Jules Chret (on the latter, see p. 95), the artistic
poster also made its appearance in England in
1894. During this year, for example, Dudley Hardy
designed the poster for the operetta A Gaiety Girl for
the Prince of Wales Theatre. But it was the Brothers
Beggarstaff (a self-ironic reference to their limited
income)the Scotsman James Pryde and the London painter and woodcut artist Sir William Nicholsonwho brought the Art Nouveau poster to its
high point in England. The two had trained in Paris
and worked together until 1899.18
Unsurprisingly, the art of the poster prospered
not only in Paris and London but in all the large
European cities, such as Berlin, where, starting in
1901, to mention one nal name, Lucian Bernhard
(actually Emil Kahn) emerged as the creator of
the modern Sachplakat, or object poster.19
Aesthetically sophisticated advertising was not
infrequently reproduced in the art magazines of
the time and thus additionally ennobled. Henry
van de Velde, for example, was commissioned
by Eberhard von Bodenhausen to design all the
advertising materials (until 1900) for the recently
founded Tropon plant, a foodstuffs rm in
Cologne Mhlheim. This included a poster (incidentally the only one van de Velde ever made),

20

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
POSTER, MOULIN ROUGE. LA GOULUE, 1891
COLOR LITHOGRAPH, 84 X 122 CM
PRIVATE COLLECTION

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brochures, labels, and folding boxes. Bodenhausens friend, Harry Graf Kessler, together with
Julius Meier-Graefe, took on the job of printed
propaganda. The poster of 1898 (g. opposite)
received special attention. Its abstract ornamentation, typographical tension between dynamism
and geometry, and the symbiosis of artistic aspiration and industrial promotion, of individual
expression and matter-of-fact information, was
seen as positively revolutionary.20 Because of its
artistic value, the poster was published in reduced
size as a color lithograph in Pan, the most luxurious German art magazine of the time; but it also
appeared in the periodicals Dekorative Kunst
and, in October of 1898, in L Art Dcoratif. Van de
Veldes poster was unanimously acclaimed a highpoint in the history of the medium.
Visual motifs from the Munich painter Franz
von Stuck were frequently quoted in the German
advertising of the early nineteenth century. The
industrial product Odol, a tooth and mouth care
product produced by the Lingner rm, copiously
instrumentalized Stucks mythical worlds for its
advertisements in the magazine Die Jugend.21 The
fact that this was so easily possible, according to a
biting remark by Meier-Graefe, was due to the fact
that Stucks sphinxes looked like waitresses at the
Munich Hofbrauhaus.22 A certain awkwardness
inherent within Stucks combinations of naturalistic and symbolic elements cannot be disregarded.

But more worthy of consideration in our context

is a statement concerning posters and advertising
made by Karl Hauer in 1907 in the Fackel, edited
by Karl Kraus: I am very inclined to see the
artistic poster as far more pernicious and sinister
than the non-artistic one. For the ne arts ... are
being usurped by the manufacturers need for
advertising. The ne artists, of whom there are
far too many today and who all want to live, earn
faster and better by designing advertising materials than by creating mature works of art. The
baron of industry today pays better and more easily than court, church, noble, or art dealer. So, the
painter draws up posters, advertising sheets, and
picture postcards 23
Whereas Benjamin reproached the visual arts
for playing the sorcerers apprentice who tries to
instrumentalize the broom of modern means of
production but is unable to do so, Hauer conversely
saw the danger that the modern world of commodities and advertising could degrade genuine artistic
value into trivial commercialized formulas..

23

THE NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHT

In its symbiosis with electric lighting, one of Art
Nouveaus Promethian central concernsthe aestheticization of innovative technologiesyielded
an exemplary result.

HENRY VAN DE VELDE

POSTER, TROPON, 1898
COLOR LITHOGRAPH ON PAPER
CALMANN & KING, LONDON
LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY
TIFFANY STUDIOS TEN-LIGHT
LILY TABLE LAMP, c. 1900
PRIVATE COLLECTION

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After Edisons crucial improvements to the electric

incandescent bulb in 1879, the rst central electric stations in London and New York went into
operation in 1882.24 The new light of the light bulb
demanded new lighting xtures. Art Nouveau was
ready to assist, above all the Tiffany company (g. p.
23). But as solitary objects in collections and museumswhich is how these lamps are usually experiencedthey are robbed of their original context
and thus their intended effect. Their aimtypical
of the timeof reforming the aura of an interior
by means of light and the transparency of glass as
a material, and of setting luminous accents within
that interior, has been taken from them.
Louis Bell, the author of the rst, in the words
of Schivelbusch, light-dramaturgical treatise (The
Art of Illumination, 1902), explained that for aesthetic reasons it could be appropriate to soften the
lighting to a gentle yellow glow by decorating the
lampshades accordingly. In the 1890s Tiffany implemented this principle to perfection by means of specic colorations and calculated irregularities in the
material structure. By pushing the masses together
before cooling, these fabulously colored glass
uxeswhich shimmer in all the colors of the spectrum and give the most delicate nuances of color
obtain a wavy and irregular surface so that they
permit the light to penetrate to different degrees,
and soon denser and lighter places appear in the
mass. Other effects are obtained by striking pieces
out of large blocks of glass; their irregular fracture
sites generate various plays of light. (Zeitschrift fr
Beleuchtungswesen, 1898, no. 1, p. 9).25
Tiffany glass was also used for windows, to
mute the daylight penetrating intrusively from the
street into the private sphere, in a manner similar
to muting the raw electric light. An additional
goal was lling the aesthetically unsatisfying emptiness of the window with the help of colored light,
in order to let the interior function as a whole,
harmonized within itself.
When Tiffany sent his window The Four Seasons to the worlds fair in Paris in 1900, the Europeans immediately admired these opalescent,
lead-mounted faeries on the border between
banal exterior world and auratic inner world. Crit-

ics extolled the glass landscape scenes in the highest tones. The window met with the same hymnic
resonance at the Pan-American Exhibition in
Buffalo in 1901 and the International Applied Arts
exhibition in Turin in 1902. Tiffany later disassembled the window into four parts and in 1905 had
it built into his country estate Laurelton Hall on
Long Island. Today the segments are part of the
holdings of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum
(gs opposite and bottom).

LUXURY FASHION
AND REFORM DRESS
Fashion, tooand this meant primarily womens
fashioncaptured the attention of Art Nouveau
artists around 1900. Henry van de Velde, a trailblazer in so many areas, thought about the question of how the clothing of the inhabitants could
be matched to the interiors he had designed. In
his autobiography, he retroactively (and also
euphemistically) appraised his programmatic
speech of August 1900 about an ideal (meaning timeless) clothing as the rst fundamental
encounter between qualied representatives
of the industrial arts and an artist. The speech,
entitled Zur knstlerischen Hebung der Frauentracht (On the Artistic Improvement of Womens
Costume), was delivered during an exhibition
of modern womens dresses created after artists
designs; the director of the new local museum,
Friedrich Deneken, had organized the exhibition on the occasion of the German Dressmakers
Show in the Krefeld Stadthalle. On display there
were reform dresses that van de Velde, together
with colleagues, had designed after English and
Scandinavian models.
The reform dress, rst advocated by doctors
in the 1880s and then later by the feminist movement as well, functioned as a foil to French haute
couture, which around 1900 still dictated the
body-deforming silhouette of wasp waist and protruding bustle. The reform dress countered this
style with a loosely falling cut and dispensed with
the lace-up corset; the decoration of the haute

25

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY

SPRING, FROM THE STAINED-GLASS
WINDOW THE FOUR SEASONS, c. 1899/1900
THE CHARLES HOSMER MORSE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART,
WINTER PARK, FLORIDA

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couture dress, with its rufes, sequins, and bows

la Paris, contrasted with the reform dresss subdued decorative style drawn from Art Nouveau
ornament. The reform dress sought to encourage
the womans natural freedom of movement as
well as bring her outt into harmony with the aesthetic appearance of the environment.26
Aside from the fact that the textile industry
which depended on changes in fashionwas not
exactly enthusiastic about the timeless dress,
it was for other reasons that the reform dress
never caught on in Germany. Even if the product
originally had a certain appeallike the dress
designed around 1900 by Hugo Hppener, known
as Fidus, for his wife (g. bottom left)27its German plainness, if not to say lack of imagination, was soon made use of polemically against
the erotic renement of Parisian haute couture.
Nationalist groups that entered the fray compared
the free fall of the sturdy fabric to the uid garb
worn by the high Gothic sculpture of Uta in the
donors choir of Naumburg Cathedral. Not the
thrill, the tyranny of the frou-frou must form the
basis of womens clothing, but chaste simplicity.28
Not in terms of beauty, but certainly in terms of the
fashions commercial usefulness, the productions
of the Wiener Werksttte (see p. 189) must also be
regarded as a dead end: Eduard Josef WimmerWisgrill (g. bottom right) founded the fashion

workshop from which Vienna now exerted a lasting

inuence on Paris, especially the fashion creations
of Paul Poiret. In 1917 Otto Lendecke, who had
trained with Poiret, launched the fashion magazine Die Damenwelt. Although a mere ve issues
appeared, these became an exquisite testimony to
the Viennese fashion of the time. Even Gustav Klimt
took part in designing the title pages. The style of
dress, after designs by more than eighty artists, was
distinguished by a forced individuality; the designs,
whether hand-printed or produced by machine,
sparkled with an incredible richness of invention; all
the fabrics were produced in their own workshops.29
Only the dresses from the atelier of a designer
like Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo could compete, if
not in the range of products then certainly in the
exquisiteness of their appearance.
Fortuny came from a renowned family of Spanish artists; his parents moved to Venice in 1889. He
received his artistic training in Paris with Giovanni
Boldini, among others . He was a painter, photographer, inventor, and passionate devotee of Richard
Wagner as well as an exclusive fashion designer.
From 1899 his atelier was in Venice, in the Palazzo
Pesaro degli Orfei (today the Museo Fortuny). He
rst garnered international attention for his stage
sets, complete with elaborate projection effects,
which he developed for a production of Tristan
and Isolde at the Scala in Milan in 1900.30 Beginning
around 1907, however, his fame rested above all

26

HUGO HPPENER, KNOWN AS FIDUS

REFORM DRESS, c. 1900
WHITE LINEN, BLACK EMBROIDERY
COLLECTION HALLERISCHES FAMILIENARCHIV,
BERLIN
EDUARD JOSEF WIMMER-WISGRILL
HOUSECOAT MADE FROM A SILK
BY DAGOBERT PECHE, c. 1920/21
MAK-AUSTRIAN MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS/
CONTEMPORARY ART

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on his designs for womens dresses, which, due to

their timeless elegance, their ne fabrics, and consequently their immense price, were intended exclusively to appeal to the sure sense of taste of women
clients from European and American high society.
The greatest success was enjoyed by his Delphos
gowns (g. right)made of precious silk, caressing the body in a free fall of ne pleats, and often
combined with a tunic or wrap, they drew, as the
reference to Delphi in their name implies, upon the
basic form of the ancient Greek chiton. Moreover
they were splendidly colored and printed with Oriental or Renaissance ornament in the style of artists
like William Morris (compare gs p. 122f.). Fortuny
essentially retained this typean overwhelmingly
beautiful reform dress, as it wereunchanged, so
that it is scarcely possible to date them.
These dresses and fabrics cannot without reservation be classied as Art Nouveau products, and
yet they are close to its ideal of beauty. They were
celebrated in writing by Gabriele DAnnunzio
and Marcel Proust, and worn by Isadora Duncan
and Ruth St. Denis (see p. 93 ff.) at several of their
dance performances. They remained cult objects
for decades and it was de rigueur for someone
like Peggy Guggenheim, like so many Hollywood
starlets interested in art, to have herself photographed in an outrageously expensive Delphos
robe from the Atelier Fortuny.

MARIANO FORTUNY Y MADRAZO

DELPHOS GOWN, c. 1920
SILK
KUNSTGEWERBEMUSEUM,
STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN
FOLLOWING PAGES:
WIENER WERKSTTTE
PAIR OF LADIES SHOES, c. 1914
COLORED SILK REP, LEATHER
HISTORISCHES MUSEUM DER STADT WIEN,
VIENNA

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MOBILIZING INWARDNESS
OR THE BREAK WITH THE
STATUS QUO
Today the term avant-garde generally functions as
a synonym for processes that radically broke down
or break down the status quo in art. In contrast to
this, Peter Brger reserves the term for the specic
early twentieth-century attitude that opposed the
autonomy of art and arts resulting lack of social
consequences, an attitude that sought to convert
art into life praxis. But the aspirations of the avantgarde movements of the time toward this goal
were ultimately unsuccessful; they were not able
to bring art into immediate contact with everyday
reality and to functionalize their works as social
works.31
Let us imagine once again, bearing the discourse
of the avant-garde in mind, one of those interiors
whose windows were lled with opalescent Tiffany glass. As mentioned above, the aura of the
ltered daylight, transformed into color, shut out
the banality of the external world. Walter Benjamin commented on this phenomenon as well. He
begins his reections with a consideration of the
living space of the mid-nineteenth century and
its contrast to the world of business: The private
man who accommodates reality in the ofce

demands from the interior that it sustain his illusions. The phantasmagoria of the interior arises
from this; to the private man it represents the
universe. Around the turn of the century, according to Benjamin, the culmination of the interior
reached its conclusion, that inward transguration
of the solitary soul mentioned above, a mobilization of inwardnessthe room turns out to be
a sanctuary of art and consequently a signier of
its inhabitant.32
Indeedas we should not forgetthe interior spaces enclosed by colored Art Nouveau
windows did obstruct any perspective upon the
outer world, the street, the square, the daily life
of the city. Due to their colorful lack of transparency the gaze rebounds inwards, into the
hermeticism of the interior, the place in which
inwardness is mobilized. This would thus
constitute evidence of Art Nouveaus failure to
produce an identity of art and life, evidence that
it succeeded merely in conjuring up an illusory
world of lart pour lartart for arts sakeand
of self-satised aesthetic articiality: for one nal
time in Western art. It would be conrmation
of the claim made by Benjamin in the Arcades
Project that, in Art Nouveau, high art futilely
slaves away at the essential conditions of a new
era. If we consider a further example in this
light, namely the above-ground Paris Mtro stations designed by Hector Guimard around 1900

30

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