Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Art Nouveau


 
Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of the natural world, Art Nouveau or Jugendstil is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that was most popular during 1890–1910. It influenced art and architecture especially in the applied arts, graphic work, and illustration.
 
 

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

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