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How Is the Style of Art Nouveau Best Described?

"Fine art is a line around your thoughts."

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Gustav Klimt Signature

"Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic."

"Something impractical cannot be beautiful."

"I discard the blossom and foliage, just keep the stalk."

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Victor Horta Signature

"I believe that everything in Nature aspires to the top of strength, well-being, and happiness; and everything that deviates from this I call immoral."

"Those who expect for the laws of Nature equally a support for their new works collaborate with the creator."

"Our roots are in the depths of the woods-on the banks of streams and among the mosses."

"At that place are no directly lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must take no direct lines or sharp corners."

Summary of Art Nouveau

Generating enthusiasts in the decorative and graphic arts and architecture throughout Europe and beyond, Art Nouveau appeared in a broad diversity of strands, and, consequently, it is known by various names, such as the Glasgow Style, or, in the High german-speaking world, Jugendstil. Art Nouveau was aimed at modernizing pattern, seeking to escape the eclectic historical styles that had previously been popular. Artists drew inspiration from both organic and geometric forms, evolving elegant designs that united flowing, natural forms resembling the stems and blossoms of plants. The emphasis on linear contours took precedence over color, which was unremarkably represented with hues such equally muted greens, browns, yellows, and dejection. The movement was committed to abolishing the traditional hierarchy of the arts, which viewed the so-called liberal arts, such as painting and sculpture, equally superior to arts and crafts-based decorative arts. The fashion went out of fashion for the about part long earlier the First World War, paving the mode for the evolution of Art Deco in the 1920s, but information technology experienced a popular revival in the 1960s, and it is now seen equally an important predecessor - if not an integral component - of modernism.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

  • The desire to abandon the historical styles of the 19thursday century was an important impetus behind Art Nouveau and one that establishes the move'south modernism. Industrial product was, at that indicate, widespread, and yet the decorative arts were increasingly dominated by poorly-fabricated objects imitating earlier periods. The practitioners of Art Nouveau sought to revive good workmanship, raise the status of arts and crafts, and produce genuinely modern design that reflected the utility of the items they were creating.
  • The academic organization, which dominated art education from the 17th to the 19th century, underpinned the widespread belief that media such equally painting and sculpture were superior to crafts such as article of furniture design and ironwork. The consequence, many believed, was the fail of good craftsmanship. Art Nouveau artists sought to overturn that belief, aspiring instead to "full works of the arts," the famous Gesamtkunstwerk, that inspired buildings and interiors in which every chemical element worked harmoniously inside a related visual vocabulary. In the process, Art Nouveau helped to narrow the gap between the fine and the practical arts, though information technology is debatable whether this gap has ever been completely closed.
  • Many Art Nouveau practitioners felt that before design had been excessively ornamental, and in wishing to avoid what they perceived equally frivolous decoration, they evolved a belief that the function of an object should dictate its course. In practise this was a somewhat flexible ethos, yet it would be an important role of the fashion's legacy to subsequently modernist movements, most famously the Bauhaus.

Overview of Art Nouveau

Detail of <i>The Kiss</i> (1907-08) by Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt famously said, "Plenty of censorship…I refuse every form of support from the state, I'll exercise without all of it," – considering he was attacked for his work's swirling erotic forms, he went on pioneer his Gilt Period – ane of the highlights of Fine art Nouveau.

Key Artists

  • Gustav Klimt Biography, Art & Analysis

    Austrian painter Gustav Klimt was the most renowned advocator of Art Nouveau in Vienna, and is remembered as 1 of the greatest decorative painters of the twentieth century. He as well produced i of the century's most significant bodies of erotic art.

  • Hector Guimard Biography, Art & Analysis

    Guimard was a leading figure in the Art Nouveau movement and the buildings that he designed exemplified the aims of the motion with their organic curves, unity of decorative arts, and natural elements. He made his greatest mark in Paris where in 1900 he designed the entrances to most of the city's metro stations.

  • Victor Horta Biography, Art & Analysis

    Synonymous with Fine art Nouveau, Horta was ane of the greatest innovators and pioneers of the movement, designing flamboyant, lush, and organic houses, buildings, and offices. His works are marked by their curvilinear botanic forms, nearly of which tin can still be seen in the city of Brussels.

  • Charles Rennie Mackintosh Biography, Art & Analysis

    Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, sculptor and decorative artistwho is best known as the Great britain's greatest proponent of Fine art Nouveau and founder of the Glasgow Style.

  • Aubrey Beardsley Biography, Art & Analysis

    Aubrey Beardsley was a nineteenth-century English illustrator and author. In black ink he created highly erotic, grotesque, and decadant drawings, much in the way of Japanese woodcuts. Beardsley's piece of work was office of the Artful movement, and was highly influential to the subsequent Art Nouveau motion of the early-twentieth century.


Do Not Miss

  • Jugendstil Biography, Art & Analysis

    Rising to prominence in Germany in the late nineteenth century, Jugendstil, which means "youth manner" in German, influenced the visual arts (particularly graphic blueprint and typography), decorative arts, and architecture.

  • The Vienna Secession Biography, Art & Analysis

    The Vienna Secession was a grouping of Austrian painters, sculptors and architects, who in 1897 resigned from the main Clan of Austrian Artists with the mission of bringing modern European art to culturally-insulated Austria. Among the Secession's founding members were Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich.

  • Art Deco Biography, Art & Analysis

    Art Deco was an eclectic style that flourished in the 1920s and '30s and influenced art, architecture and pattern. It blended a love of modernity - expressed through geometric shapes and streamlined forms - with references to the classical by and to exotic locations.

  • The Wiener Werkstätte Biography, Art & Analysis

    The Wiener Werkstätte was an early-twentieth-century production company of artists, founded in Vienna in 1903, by builder Josef Hoffmann. Information technology adult largely in response to the Vienna Secession, inspiring others to found a company that catered to artists working in all diversity of media, from jewelry and ceramics to metalworks and furniture making. The Wiener Werkstätte was quite successful, opening branches into Karlsbad, Zurich, Berlin and New York, but eventually had to shut downward due to financial constraints.


Important Art and Artists of Art Nouveau

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo: Cover design for Wren's City Churches (1883)

Cover design for Wren'south Metropolis Churches (1883)

Artist: Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo

Mackmurdo's woodcut is an instance of the influence of English design, especially the Arts and Crafts movement, on Art Nouveau. The woodcut every bit a genre points to the handcrafted, unique quality of the work and the simplicity of Mackmurdo'southward use of positive and negative infinite both contribute to this association. Meanwhile, Mackmurdo's abstract-cum-naturalistic forms and the trademark whiplash curves are characteristic of the visual sense of free movement and energy that would eventually ascertain Fine art Nouveau. The emphasis on the floral and vegetal imagery adorning the cover which refuses any existent consonance with the professed subject field affair of the book also highlights its purposefully decorative quality, hinting at how Mackmurdo's work is of an experimental nature rather than a definitive, mature case of Fine art Nouveau. The woodcut proves far more than valuable than the bodily content, which consists of a rambling, loose description of the architecture of the Baroque London churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge (1891)

La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge (1891)

Creative person: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec is one of Art Nouveau'due south almost important graphic artists who were responsible for raising the poster from the realm of ad ephemera to loftier art during the 1890s (the aforementioned decade that saw the establishment of artistic magazines solely defended to this medium). Lautrec and his young man graphic artists understood that they were innovative, though the stylistic characterization "Fine art Nouveau" was probably never applied to them until later on Lautrec's expiry in 1901.

La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge takes the flourish and messiness of a French can-can dancer'south dress and breaks information technology downward to a few simple, rhythmic lines, thereby suggesting the sense of movement and space. The flattening of forms to mere outlines with the flat infill of color recalls Art Nouveau's debt to Japanese prints besides as the lighting in such nightclubs that naturally would return the surface details of figures and other objects indistinct. Besides, the repetitive red lettering of the cabaret's name suggests the pulsating energy of the performances for which dancers similar La Goulue (stage name of Louise Weber, one of Lautrec'southward friends) took eye stage.

Aubrey Beardsley: The Peacock Skirt (1894)

The Peacock Brim (1894)

Artist: Aubrey Beardsley

Beardsley'south The Peacock Skirt is an illustration made for Oscar Wilde'due south 1892 play Salome, based on the Biblical narrative centered on Salome's order to decollate and serve on a platter the head of John the Baptist. (Salome was a pop discipline for many other Art Nouveau artists, including Victor Prouvé.) Beardsley's Salome is comparatively tame in comparison with some of the illustrator'due south more erotic and nearly pornographic works. It is a fine example of how many artists influenced by Art Nouveau laid great emphasis on line, often abstracting their figures to produce the fashionable sinuous curves so feature of the mode. One might also accept information technology as an instance of how the formal vocabulary of the manner could be used with exuberant backlog, a quality that would later attract criticism. The influence of Japonese prints on Fine art Nouveau is as well evident in Beardsley's work in its flattened rendition of course. But this illustration might besides exist taken as an case of the contemporaneous Aesthetic motion, and in that respect it demonstrates how Art Nouveau overlapped and interacted with various other flow styles.

Useful Resources on Art Nouveau

Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Peter Clericuzio

"Art Nouveau Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written past Justin Wolf
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Peter Clericuzio
Bachelor from:
First published on 21 Jan 2012. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/art-nouveau/

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