Architect Victor Horta's Tassel House stairway in Brussels
Art Nouveau is considered a "total" art style, embracing architecture,
graphic art, interior design, and most of the decorative arts including
jewellery, furniture, textiles, household silver and other utensils and
lighting, as well as the fine arts. According to the philosophy of the
style, art should be a way of life. For many well-off Europeans, it was
possible to live in an art nouveau-inspired house with art nouveau
furniture, silverware, fabrics, ceramics including tableware, jewellery,
cigarette cases, etc.
Rene Lalique
Sinuous lines and "whiplash" curves
were derived, in part, from botanical studies and illustrations of
deep-sea organisms such as those by German biologist Ernst Heinrich
Haeckel.
The unfolding of Art Nouveau's flowing line may be
understood as a metaphor for the freedom and release sought by its
practitioners and admirers from the weight of artistic tradition and
critical expectations.
Although Art Nouveau was replaced by
20th-century Modernist styles, it is now considered as an important
transition between the eclectic historic revival styles of the
19th-century and Modernism.
As an art style, Art Nouveau has
affinities with the Pre-Raphaelites and the Symbolist styles, and
artists like Aubrey Beardsley, Alphonse Mucha, Edward Burne-Jones,
Gustav Klimt and Jan Toorop could be classed in more than one of these
styles. Unlike Symbolist painting, however, Art Nouveau has a
distinctive appearance; and, unlike the artisan-oriented Arts and Crafts
Movement, Art Nouveau artists readily used new materials, machined
surfaces, and abstraction in the service of pure design.
Alfonse Mucha
Art
Nouveau did not negate machines, as the Arts and Crafts Movement did.
For sculpture, the principal materials employed were glass and wrought
iron, resulting in sculptural qualities even in architecture
Louis Comfort Tiffany
Art Nouveau architecture made use of many technological innovations of
the late 19th century, especially the use of exposed iron and large,
irregularly shaped pieces of glass for architecture. By the start of
World War I, however, the stylised nature of Art Nouveau design—which
was expensive to produce—began to be disused in favour of more
streamlined, rectilinear modernism, which was cheaper and thought to be
more faithful to the plainer industrial aesthetic that became Art Deco.
Additionally, the
new style was an outgrowth of two nineteenth-century English
developments for which design reform (a reaction to prevailing art
education, industrialized mass production, and the debasement of
historic styles) was a leitmotif—the Arts and Crafts movement and the
Aesthetic movement. The former emphasized a return to hand craftsmanship
and traditional techniques. The latter promoted a similar credo of "art
for art's sake" that provided the foundation for non-narrative
paintings, for instance, Whistler's Nocturnes. It further drew upon
elements of Japanese art ("japonisme"), which flooded Western markets,
mainly in the form of prints, after trading rights were established with
Japan in the 1860s.
Rene Lalique
Deeply influenced by the socially aware
teachings of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, Art
Nouveau designers endeavored to achieve the synthesis of art and craft,
and further, the creation of the spiritually uplifting Gesamtkunstwerk
("total work of art") encompassing a variety of media. The successful
unification of the fine and applied arts was achieved in many such
complete designed environments.
Art Nouveau style was
particularly associated with France, where it was called variously Style
Jules Verne, Le Style Métro (after Hector Guimard's iron and glass
subway entrances), Art belle époque, and Art fin de siècle .
As in France, the "new art" was called by different names in the
various style centers where it developed throughout Europe. In Belgium,
it was called Style nouille or Style coup de fouet.
In Germany, it was Jugendstil or "young style," after the popular journal Die Jugend.
In Germany
In Italy, it was named Arte nuova, Stile floreale, or La Stile Liberty
after the London firm of Liberty & Co., which supplied Oriental
ceramics and textiles to aesthetically aware Londoners in the 1870s.
Other style centers included Austria and Hungary, where Art Nouveau was called the Sezessionstil.
In Russia, Saint Petersburg and Moscow were the two centers of production for Stil' modern.
"Tiffany Style" in the United States was named for the legendary Favrile glass designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Tiffany
Although international in scope, Art Nouveau was a short-lived
movement whose brief incandescence was a precursor of modernism, which
emphasized function over form and the elimination of superfluous
ornament. Although a reaction to historic revivalism, it brought
Victorian excesses to a dramatic fin-de-siècle crescendo.
-metmuseum.org & wiki
No comments:
Post a Comment