Art Nouveau

Though circumscribed in time, art nouveau was a sprawling, diverse movement affecting all the arts, both ideologically and formally. The essay here focuses on its theoretical foundations as they were originally articulated and realized in architecture in France and Belgium at the end of the 19th century. Art nouveau architecture was first and foremost a revolutionary design approach demanding an unequivocal rejection of historicism in the quest for a new architecture suitable to the modern age. At a time when eclecticism was the norm throughout Europe, proponents of art nouveau defied the academic system, demanding the abandonment of historical prototypes as a model for contemporary design, a system that had prevailed since the Renaissance; it thus broke through the barrier, paving the way for modernism. As with any artistic trend, there were considerable differences among practitioners, reflecting national and regional identities as well as individual skills and tastes, but generally their work can be characterized by forms inspired not by those of history or tradition, but by the natural world. The conviction, as architect and theorist Frantz Jourdain stated it in 1889 on the occasion of the Paris Exposition Universelle, was “à des besoins nouveaux, les formes nouvelles”—new forms for new needs. Instead of derived forms, especially those in the classical language based on a monarchial or aristocratic past, one should use forms inspired by the beauty of nature that everyone, regardless of class or education, can understand. Consistent with this democratic ideal and the embrace of un art pour tous was the acceptance of the realities of a modern industrial society: industrial materials and processes, mass production, and standardization. While revolutionary in its spirit, art nouveau had roots in a wide range of 19th century artistic trends: Viollet-le-Duc’s structural rationalism; the innovative architectural use of iron and glass; new modern building types such as exhibition halls and department stores; William Morris and the arts & crafts movement with its aim of an aesthetically harmonious total work of art; Japanese art with its asymmetry, long sinuous lines, flat planes of color, and non-Western sense of space; the poster with its energetic, writhing lines and flat fields of bold clashing color; its targeted audience of people of all classes especially the working class; and an aim to bring art to the people—not just in the private home but in the public street. Catalyzing the movement in architecture in the early 1890s, surely, was the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, marking the triumph of the engineer with the unprecedented use of glass, iron, and steel, and jolting traditionally trained architects, such as Victor Horta in Brussels, out of their stymied state into exploring a wholly new sense of space, light, and color. From Belgium and France, art nouveau spread quickly throughout Europe and other parts of the world, changing its aims and priorities as it did so to adjust to different economic and political situations, and acquiring different names. Infused initially with the spirit and energy of the Belle Époque and marked by its joie de vivre, optimism, and progressive outlook, the movement waned as the decade progressed, done in as much as anything by conservative forces both political and artistic that gained momentum as national tensions mounted. With war clouds gathering, sensibilities retreated to traditional historical certainties and to the security and safety of the past in the face of increasingly unsettled times.