Art Nouveau

(1890-1914 AD)
The New Art

1. Introduction
O Art Nouveau is a short-lived European

phenomenon that is part of the Art and Craft

Movement that dominated England (around
1860-1915), western Europe and USA well into
the 1920s.
O It took its name from Samuel Bing's gallery,
Maison de l'Art Nouveau, in Paris. In Central
and Eastern Europe it is also known as
Jugendstil or 'youth style'. One of its main
influences was Japanese art, especially the
woodcuts of Hokusai.
O Also known as the New Art/Style, Art Nouveau
was first expressed in fabrics and graphic
design; and the style spread to architecture in
the 1890s.

Background Industrial
Revolution
O The Industrial Revolution, which began in

England about 1760, led to radical changes

at every level of civilization throughout the
world. The growth of heavy industry brought
a flood of new building materials such as
cast iron, steel, and glass with which
architects and engineers devised
structures yet undreamed of in function,
size, and form.

Background Industrial
Revolution
O Art Nouveau was in many ways a response

to the Industrial Revolution. It represented

the beginning of modernism in design,
occurring at the dusk of the industrial
revolution - a time when mass-produced
consumer goods began to fill the
marketplace, and designers, architects, and
artists began to understand that the
handcrafted work of centuries past could be
lost.

Background Industrial
Revolution
O While reclaiming this craft tradition, art

nouveau designers simultaneously rejected

traditional styles in favor of new, organic
forms that emphasized humanitys
connection to nature.

3. Art Nouveau Decoration

Art Nouveau is characterized by
asymmetrical shapes or nongeometric curves and swirls, and the
facades of Art Nouveau buildings are
usually decorated with floral designs,
human figures and faces.

A good example is the Elizabetes iela

10b, in Riga

Art Nouveau Decoration

This detail of a door decoration from a
building constructed in the early 20th
century in Milan, Italy, illustrates the
stylistic themes associated with art
nouveau. The handcrafted intricacy of the
work reflects the reaction of art nouveau
artists against the rise of machine-made
designs. The soft features of the human
face and the robust pattern of leaves
illustrate the importance of naturalistic
representation. Depictions of flora were
so integral to the movement that in Italy
art nouveau was also known as stile
floreale (floral style).

Art Nouveau Decoration

O Art Nouveau reached its peak during the 1890s,

emphasizing on handcrafting as opposed to machine

manufacturing - the use of new materials, and the
rejection of earlier styles. In general, sinuous, curving
lines also characterize art nouveau, although rightangled forms are also typical, especially as the style
was practiced in Scotland and in Austria.
O Art nouveau embraced all forms of art and design:
architecture, furniture, glassware, graphic design,
jewellery, painting, pottery, metalwork, and textiles.
This was a sharp contrast to the traditional
separation of art into the distinct categories of fine
art (painting and sculpture) and applied arts
(ceramics, furniture, and other practical objects).

Art Nouveau Decoration

O Milan has a number of buildings in the art

nouveau style, including the Balzarini house

on Via Pisacane. The ironwork of the balcony
railings provides an excellent example of the
flowing lines and floral motifs favoured by
art nouveau designers. In Italy, the style was
known as the Liberty style after a
department store in London, England, that
had popularized it.

Art Nouveau
O Art Nouveau was a concerted attempt to create an

international style based on decoration. It was developed by a

brilliant and energetic generation of artists and designers,
who sought to fashion an art form appropriate to the modern
age - balancing modernity and handcraft through use of
naturalistic forms.

There was emphasis on expressive power

of form, color and on aspiration to refine
and elevate the material dimension thus
erasing separation between fine and
applied art, designer and craftsman, art
and daily life.
There was willingness to experiment with
materials, transforming traditional ones
like wrought iron into new uses & shapes;
integration of ornament and structure.

4. Art Nouveau in other arts

O Painting and graphic arts

Two-dimensional Art Nouveau pieces were

painted, drawn, and printed in popular forms
such as advertisements, posters, labels,
magazines, and the like. Japanese woodblock prints, with their curved lines, patterned
surfaces, contrasting voids, and flatness of
visual plane, also inspired Art Nouveau. Some
line and curve patterns became graphic
clichs that were later found in works of
artists from many parts of the world.
O Sculpture >>

Art Nouveau in other arts

O

Glass

Glass art was a medium in which the style found tremendous expression
for example, the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany in New York, Charles
Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, and mile Gall and the Daum brothers in
Nancy, France.
O Ceramics
Art Nouveau ceramics were influenced by the work of Japan. The
development of high temperature (grand feu) porcelain with crystallized
and matte glazes, with or without other
decoration, is typical of these works. It was a
period where lost techniques were
rediscovered, such as the oxblood glaze, and
entirely new methods were developed.

Art Nouveau in other arts

Objets d'art and other examples
Jewellery of the Art Nouveau period revitalized the jeweler's art, with nature as the
principal source of inspiration, complemented by new levels of virtuosity in
enameling and the introduction of new materials, such as opals and semi-precious
stones. The widespread interest in Japanese art and the more specialized
enthusiasm for Japanese metalworking skills fostered new themes and approaches
to ornament.
O For the previous two centuries, the emphasis in fine jeweler had been on
gemstones, in particular on the diamond, and the jeweler or goldsmith had been
concerned principally with providing settings for their advantage. With Art Nouveau,
a different type of jeweler emerged, motivated by the artist-designer rather than the
jeweler as setter of precious stones.
O The jewelers of Paris and Brussels defined Art Nouveau in jeweler, and in these
cities it achieved the most renown. Contemporary French critics were united in
acknowledging that jeweler was undergoing a radical transformation.
O The jewelers were keen to establish the new style in a noble tradition, and for this
they used the Renaissance, with its works of sculpted and enameled gold, and its
acceptance of jewelers as artists rather than craftsmen. In most of the enameled
work of the period, precious stones receded. Diamonds were usually subsidiary,
used alongside less familiar materials such as molded glass, horn and ivory.
O

5. Beliefs and Principles

O Art Nouveau is based on the principles of: originality,

organic integrity, symbolic employment of ornament.

O To some extent, it reconciled the antagonism between
the machine-made & hand-made that raged during the
19th century.
O It was spread by international exhibitions like the
expositions in Paris in 1900 & Turin in 1902 where most
pavilions praised the ascendency of Art Nouveau. It also
had rectilinear forms which retained nature as the basic
source of inspiration but focused on the geometric
substructure underlying organic forms .

Influence of Art Nouveau on

Modern Architecture
O Though neo-classicism can be said to be the

start of the intellectual revolution, it was more of

an anti-reaction towards the excessive
ornamentation of baroque and rococo styles.
O Classical architectural models were adapted or
referenced in a range of architectural forms,
including churches, arches, temple, house,
terraces, garden monuments and interior
designs.
O Rather than coming up with something original
the neo-classicists went back to classical
architecture and derived eclectically from it.

Influence of Art Nouveau on

Modern Architecture
O Following the rapid commercialization of art nouveau in the

decade 190010, designers reacted in two fundamentally

different manners. While a decorative school of designers
turned to new sources for decor and produced Art Deco, the
other, a radical approach, swept away all decorative detail as
degenerate/corrupt and looked to a sleekly machined. Out of
that reaction evolved Bauhaus styles and International
Modernism.
O Although the stylistic elements of art nouveau evolved into the
simpler, streamlined forms of modernism, the fundamental art
nouveau concept of a thoroughly integrated environment
remains an important part of contemporary design.

6. Architects and their works

O Samuel Bing

O Victor Horta
O Hectar Guimard
O C.R Mackintosh

O Antoni Gaudi (in Spain)

Samuel Bing
Siegfried Bing (February 26, 1838 September 6, 1905),
often referenced mistakenly as "Samuel Bing", was a
German art dealer who lived in Paris as an adult, and who
helped introduce Japanese art and artworks to the West
and was a factor in the development of the Art Nouveau
style during the late nineteenth century.
During December 1895 he opened his famous gallery,
the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, which showed works of
artists of what would become known as the Art Nouveau
style. Henry van de Velde designed the interior of the
gallery, while Louis Comfort Tiffany supplied stained
glass. Bing's gallery featured entire rooms designed in
the Art Nouveau style by his in-house designers.

Samuel Bing
The Maison de l'Art Nouveau

Victor Horta
Victor Horta (1861-1947), Belgian architect, one of
the pioneers and leading practitioners of art nouveau
architecture.
He supervised the interior decorationeven the
furniture designof all his buildings, and his
characteristic flowing whiplash lines, inspired by
vegetation motifs, were prominent in his wall
decorations, doors, and staircases, as shown:

Victor Horta

Hectar Guimard
Hector Guimard (Lyon, March 10, 1867 New York,
May 20, 1942) was an architect, who is now the
best-known representative of the French Art
Nouveau style of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
Guimard's reputation has risen since the 1960s, as
many art historians have praised his architectural
and decorative work,
Guimard attended the cole nationale suprieure des arts dcoratifs in Paris
from 1882 to 1885, where he became acquainted with the theories of
Eugne Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. These rationalist ideas provided the basis
for the principles of Art Nouveau. Some say that Guimard became devoted to
this style when he visited the Htel Tassel in Brussels, designed by Victor
Horta, however of a very different style.
In 1898, he designed the Castel Branger,which displays a tension between
a medieval sense of geometrical volume, and the organic "whiplash" lines[2]
Guimard saw in Brussels.

Hectar Guimard

C.R Mackintosh
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928),
Scottish architect and designer, whose
chaste, functional style exerted a strong
influence on 20th-century architecture and
interior design.

C.R Mackintosh

Antoni Gaudi
O In Spain, the Arts and Craft

movement was explored by

Antoni Gaudi through regional
identity by use of native
materials to produce a unique
architectural style. It faded by
1914 to be overtaken by the
International Style.

Antoni Gaudi
O Born June 25, 1852, in Reus, Catalonia, Antoni Gaud i

Cornet was the son of a coppersmith. He attended the

School of Architecture in Barcelona (1874-1878), the city
where he spent his life. As a student he was already
involved in several building projects. His earliest major
assignment was the Casa Vicens (1878-1880), a private
home in Barcelona. This and other work brought him the
patronage of an industrialist, Eusebio Gell, for whom he
carried out many important commissions, including the
Palacio Gell (1885-1889), distinguished by parabolic
arches and rich ironwork, and the bizarre Park Gell
(1900-1914), with its stone trees, reptilian fountains, and
mosaics of broken ceramic pieces set in concrete.

Antoni Gaudi
Antoni Gaud (1852-1926), Catalan architect, one of
the most creative practitioners of his art in modern
times. His style is often described as a blend of neoGothic and art nouveau, but it also has surrealist
and cubist elements.
His notable works include the La Sagrada familia
and the Cassa Milla Hotel in Spain.

Antoni Gaudi

End
This presentation is courtesy of:
O Microsoft Encarta 2009
O http://www.nga.gov/feature/nouveau/nouveau.shtm
O http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/c19th/artnouveau.htm
O http://thearchiblog.wordpress.com/