Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau spread across Europe and the United States in the 1890s as designers rebelled against the historical pastiches dominating Victorian decorative arts, seeking instead a wholly modern style rooted in the flowing lines of plants, vines, and the female form. The movement drew on Britain's Arts and Crafts ideals, the vogue for Japanese woodblock prints, and Siegfried Bing's Paris gallery L'Art Nouveau, which opened in 1895 and lent the international style its name. Architects Victor Horta in Brussels and Hector Guimard in Paris translated the aesthetic into cast iron and glass, most famously in Guimard's organic Paris Métro entrances of 1900, while Antoni Gaudí pursued an even more sculptural version in Barcelona. Alphonse Mucha's languid theater posters, Gustav Klimt's gold-leafed paintings for the Vienna Secession, and Louis Comfort Tiffany's leaded-glass lamps carried the style into graphics, painting, and luxury craft, each region adopting its own name — Jugendstil in Germany, Modernisme in Catalonia, Stile Liberty in Italy. Art Nouveau aspired to erase the hierarchy between fine and applied arts, treating an entire interior, building, or object as a unified Gesamtkunstwerk. Its reliance on intensive handcraft, however, made the promised democratization of beauty difficult to achieve, and by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the style had been eclipsed by starker, more geometric approaches — the Wiener Werkstätte, the German Werkbund, and eventually Art Deco. Rediscovered in a landmark 1970 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Art Nouveau is now recognized as a crucial bridge between nineteenth-century historicism and twentieth-century modernism.