Art Nouveau

AROUND 1890 a "new art" briefly flourished in the architecture, interior design, and decorative arts of Europe and America.
 

The term Art Nouveau comes from the shop of the same name opened at the corner of the rue de Provence and the rue Chauchat in 1895 by Siegfried Bing. He, along with a number of other dealers who had been selling Japanese works of art, championed the fresh, new mode that was sweeping Paris. The movement did not begin as a single entity, but as a number of styles that drew on the fluid lines and writhing curves of plants for visual inspiration, and aimed at raising what had previously been considered the "minor arts" to a high critical and theoretical status.

The style known as Art Nouveau in France and Belgium was related to the Arts and Crafts movement in England, to Jugendstil in Germany and Austria, Stile Liberty in Italy, and Modernismo in Spain.

These new styles embraced the principles of late nineteenth-century Symbolism and gave them an additional moral focus—making the spiritual concrete through a complete, organic synthesis of structural and decorative components in objects intended for everyday use. Functionality became inseparable from beauty. The social aim was to provide pleasing and uplifting surroundings at a price affordable to a broad segment of society rather than just the priviledged few.

Once popularized, the new style suffered from codification and indiscriminate use. As it quickly lost its freshness, it was known by pejorative names such as "the subway-entrance style" (from Hector Guimard's famous Paris Métro entrances). By 1910, it was considered old fashioned.

Posters relating to this topic:

• L'Artisan Moderne (1896)
• Jane Avril (1899)

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