What Is Art Nouveau? Whiplash Lines, Iron Lilies and the Style of 1900
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For about fifteen years either side of 1900 the buildings, furniture, posters, jewellery and lettering of Europe's cities grew stems, tendrils and curling lines, and the entrances to the Paris Metro sprouted iron plants with glowing orange buds. Art Nouveau, the new art, was a deliberate attempt to make a style that owed nothing to the past and to apply it to every object a person touched, and it was the first movement to succeed at both; it was also over by 1914, dismissed as a fashion, and rediscovered fifty years later as the beginning of modern design.
Where it came from
The nineteenth century had revived every style in turn, Gothic, Greek, Renaissance, Egyptian, and its mass-produced furniture and buildings wore borrowed ornament that reformers found dishonest. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain called for honest materials, handwork and patterns drawn from nature; the Japanese prints that flooded Europe after 1860 showed a way of drawing with flat colour and flowing line; and the Symbolist painters and poets supplied a taste for the dreamlike and the sinuous. The name came from a shop, the Maison de l'Art Nouveau that Siegfried Bing opened in Paris in 1895 to sell the new work, and the style had a different name in every country: Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Vienna, Stile Liberty in Italy after the London shop, Modernisme in Barcelona.
What it looks like
The signature is the line: the whiplash curve, taken from a plant stem, a wave, a woman's hair, that bends back on itself with a snap and runs through a design from the door handle to the roofline. The style's habits:
- •Forms from nature: lilies, irises, thistles, dragonflies, peacocks and the female figure with loose hair, stylised rather than copied
- •Structure as ornament: Victor Horta's iron columns in Brussels that branch into tendrils where they meet the ceiling, so that the building's bones are its decoration
- •New materials used frankly: iron, glass, ceramic tile and, in Louis Comfort Tiffany's lamps, opalescent glass
- •Total design: the architect designing the building, the furniture, the carpets, the cutlery and the lettering as one thing, as Hector Guimard did for his Paris houses and Charles Rennie Mackintosh for the Glasgow tea rooms
- •The poster, made an art by Alphonse Mucha's Sarah Bernhardt of 1895 and the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec
The cities
Brussels began it, with Horta's Hotel Tassel of 1893, the first building in which the new line ran through the whole structure, and Paris made it famous, with Guimard's Metro entrances of 1900, of which 86 survive, and the Exposition Universelle of that year, which showed the style to fifty million visitors. Vienna's Secession, led by Gustav Klimt and the architects Otto Wagner and Joseph Maria Olbrich, made a stricter, more geometric version, and Glasgow's Mackintosh a stricter one still, with tall thin verticals and rose motifs that Vienna admired. Nancy in France built the style around its glassmakers, Emile Galle and the Daum brothers; Riga has the largest concentration of Art Nouveau buildings in Europe, some 800, by Mikhail Eisenstein among others; and Barcelona's Antoni Gaudi took the organic line into stone, tile and structure so far that his Sagrada Familia and Casa Batllo are a style of their own.
Why it ended
The style was expensive, since total design by hand does not scale, and its curves were hard to make by machine; it was quickly cheapened by imitators, so that by 1905 the critics who had welcomed it called it noodle style and the elite moved on. The Vienna Secession itself turned towards the rectangle, and the Werkbund in Germany, founded in 1907, argued for design that machines could make, which led to the Bauhaus and to Art Deco, whose geometry after 1920 was a direct rejection of the whiplash. The First World War closed the world in which a Metro entrance could be a cast-iron lily. The style's advocates had wanted a new art for a new century, and the century, when it came, wanted something plainer.
What it left
Art Nouveau was scorned for fifty years, and Guimard's Metro entrances were being scrapped as late as the 1960s, when a revival began that put Mucha's posters on student walls and Tiffany lamps in auction rooms. Its legacy is the idea, which it was the first to demonstrate, that a style could be invented rather than inherited, applied to everything from a city block to a spoon, and drawn from nature rather than from Greece; every movement since, including the ones that rejected it, has assumed those things. The stations, the tea rooms, the glass and the posters are now protected, and the iron lilies at the Metro's mouths, which were once thought vulgar, are what Paris looks like.
Telling it apart from Art Deco
The two styles are often confused because both are decorative, both touched everything from buildings to jewellery, and both sound French. They are nearly opposites. Art Nouveau, roughly 1890 to 1914, is about growth: curves that bend and flow, forms borrowed from plants, insects and flowing hair, asymmetry, and ornament that seems to have grown out of the structure. Art Deco, which flourished from the 1920s into the 1930s, is about the machine: straight lines, zigzags, sunbursts, stepped shapes, strong symmetry and a polished, streamlined look.
Materials and subjects give further clues. Art Nouveau favoured wrought iron, stained and opalescent glass, carved wood and hand-worked metal. Art Deco loved chrome, lacquer, glossy stone, new plastics such as Bakelite and the gleam of skyscrapers and ocean liners; the Chrysler Building in New York is a classic example. If a building's railings twist like vines and its windows melt into curves, you are probably looking at Art Nouveau. If its ornament looks crisp, geometric and faintly like a radio set or a speeding train, it is more likely Art Deco. Some designers worked across the change, so transitional pieces mix the two.
Science as a pattern book
Many Art Nouveau designers took their forms from the natural sciences as much as from the garden. Between 1899 and 1904 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel published Art Forms in Nature, a hundred detailed plates of jellyfish, sea anemones, diatoms and especially radiolarians, microscopic sea creatures with glassy skeletons of extraordinary symmetry. Haeckel drew them to illustrate his ideas about order in living things, but designers used the book as a source of motifs. The monumental gate that greeted visitors to the Paris Exposition of 1900 was designed by the architect Rene Binet on the model of a radiolarian, and Binet wrote to Haeckel to tell him so.
The whiplash line itself got its name from a piece of embroidery. In the mid-1890s the Swiss-born designer Hermann Obrist, working in Munich, had a wall hanging embroidered with the looping stems and roots of a cyclamen plant, and a critic writing about it compared the curves to the crack of a whip. The nickname stuck to the hanging and then to the signature curve of the whole style. In Nancy, Emile Galle, who had studied botany seriously and belonged to scientific societies, decorated his glass with flowers and insects observed with a naturalist's precision rather than a decorator's licence.
The poster that made Mucha famous
Art Nouveau reached many people first through posters rather than buildings. At the end of 1894 the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, then little known in Paris, was asked at short notice to design a poster for the actress Sarah Bernhardt's play Gismonda. His tall, narrow design, with the actress in a flowing robe framed by decorative curves and mosaic-like patterns, appeared on Paris streets at the start of 1895.
It caused a sensation, and Bernhardt gave Mucha a contract to design her posters, costumes and sets for years. His style of graceful women surrounded by flowers, swirling hair and ornate borders became so identified with the movement that in France people sometimes called it the Mucha style. Posters made modern design part of everyday city life.
The takeaway
Art Nouveau was the decorative style of about 1890 to 1914, born in Brussels and Paris from the Arts and Crafts reformers, Japanese prints and Symbolism, and defined by the whiplash curve of plant forms applied to whole buildings, furniture, glass, jewellery and posters as a single design. It flourished in Brussels, Paris, Vienna, Glasgow, Nancy, Riga and Barcelona, died of its own cost and imitation before the First World War, and was revived after 1960 as the first movement to invent a style rather than borrow one.