Article ART DECO
ART DECO is an architectural and decorative-arts style, popular
from 1910 to 1940, that is characterized by highly stylized
natural and geometric forms and ornaments, usually strongly
symmetrical. Outstanding American examples of ART DECO are the
CHRYSLER BUILDING and RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL in New York City.
Some of the century's most significant artists, such as Pablo
PICASSO, Fernand LEGER, Sonia Delaunay, and Wassily KANDINSKY,
produced work in the style, as did designers of furnishings,
textiles, jewelry, and advertising.
ART DECO themes were often classical motifs reduced to
geometric stylizations. Edgar Brandt decorated wrought-iron
screens with symmetrical fountains; Emil Ruhlman inlaid ebony
cabinets with ivory to depict floral arrangements of
geometrical precision; Rene LALIQUE etched scenes, such as a
gracefully striding female with a wolfhound or a gazelle, into
crystal or frosted glass; and Jean Puiforcat and Daum depicted
abstract geometric forms.
The term ART DECO, coined in the 1960s when interest in the
style revived, was derived from L'Exposition Internationale des
Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. This Paris exhibition
of 1925 came midway in ART DECO's development and was a
definitive display of the style. At this time ART DECO was
also known as "ART Moderne" or "Modernistic"; later it was
called "Jazz Pattern," or "Skyscraper Modern."
The INTERNATIONAL STYLE in architecture developed at the same
time, and after 1925 it considerably influenced the final phase
of ART DECO. Along with CUBIST painting and the German BAUHAUS
school, the work of LE CORBUSIER and other International Style
architects effected a change from the earlier, more decorative
phase of ART DECO toward a simpler, bolder approach typical of
the 1930s.
ART DECO emerged as a reaction to ART NOUVEAU. Its two
forerunners were Charles Rennie MACKINTOSH of Scotland and
Josef HOFFMANN of Vienna. These men were reformers of the
excesses of the ART Nouveau style, and their works in 1900 were
an indication of what was to appear in the next decades.
Hoffman's austere Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905-11), with
its mosaic murals by Gustave KLIMT, was surprisingly advanced
for its time, and it marked the transition from ART Nouveau to
ART DECO. In 1903 Hoffman founded the WIENER WERKSTATTE, a
workshop that produced some of the earliest ART DECO designs.
These concepts were introduced in Paris in 1910 with an
exhibition of decorative arts from Munich and Vienna at the
Louvre. On display was a new style based on a simplification
of the early 19th-century neoclassical BIEDERMEIER style and of
peasant ART, or FOLK ART, quite the antithesis of ART Nouveau.
Another significant event in Paris in 1910 was the presentation
by the BALLETS RUSSES DE SERGE DIAGHILEV of Scheherazade. Leon
BAKST had concocted oriental sets and costumes in dazzling,
barbaric colors; this brought a demand in the fashion world
for exoticism, soon answered by the couturier Paul POIRET. In
1912, Poiret created his own design school, the Atelier
Martine, to further his ART DECO ideas. By the 1920s the
effects of cubist painting were seen in advertising and product
designs. Coco CHANEL used cubist colors and forms in creating
women's fashions, which she adorned with ART DECO jewelry.
African sculpture and ancient Egyptian and Southwest American
Indian arts all had their influence on ART DECO in this decade,
as did Archaic Greek ART. With the influence of the Bauhaus
and the International Style after 1925, ART DECO arrived at a
final development that reflected the industrial age, thus
achieving a reconciliation of the arts and machine production
that had troubled artists and designers since the Industrial
Revolution began. E. M. PLUNKETT
Biblio. Bibliography: Arwas, Victor, ART DECO (1985), ART DECO
Sculpture (1985), and Glass: ART Nouveau to ART DECO (1987);
Battersby, Martin, ART DECO Fashion (1974; repr. 1984);
Duncan, Alistair, American ART DECO (1986) and, as ed., The
Encyclopedia of ART DECO: An Illustrated Guide to a Decorative
Style from 1920 to 1939 (1988); Hillier, Bevis, The World of
ART Deo (1971; repr. 1981); Lesieutre, Alain, The Spirit and
Splendour of ART DECO (1974); Lucie-Smith, Edward, ART DECO
Painting (1990); Menten, Theodore, The ART DECO Style (1972).
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Search #4: art
Article ART Nouveau
Text {ahr noo-voh'}
ART Nouveau, a French term meaning new ART, refers to a style
of ARCHITECTURE, of commercial and DECORATIVE ART, and, to some
extent, a style of PAINTING and SCULPTURE that was popular
about 1900. Although the style was then thought of as modern
and was given the title "new ART," it was adapted from older
styles and ART forms. Much was derived from the GOTHIC and
ROCOCO and from the arts of Java and Japan. The movement was
also inspired by Celtic manuscripts and the drawings of William
BLAKE. Persian pottery and ancient Roman glass also served as
models for some ART Nouveau craftsmen.
The style's patterns and motifs were taken primarily from
nature and were often carried out with unrestrained exuberance
of form, color, and especially line. The characteristic line,
a flowing curvilinear, was to give ART Nouveau the descriptive
nicknames "noodle," "whiplash," "tapeworm," and
"cigarette-smoke style."
A favorite ART Nouveau theme was a nymph with flowers in her
abundant streaming hair. She appeared on the posters of Alfons
MUCHA and among the opals and moonstones of Rene LALIQUE's
jewelry. Other favorites were peacocks, dragonflies, and
moths. In brilliant enamels and gold filigree, they were
worked into combs, brooches, and other adornments. Morning
glories glimmered through the stained glass of Louis Comfort
TIFFANY. Irises were inlaid in the marquetry cabinets of Louis
Majorelle (1859-1926). Cresting waves broke and seaweed
clustered around ART Nouveau vases. A dish might be an
unadorned lotus leaf. Other botanical forms were arranged in
abstract patterns and were symmetrically arrayed around mirror
or picture frames or repeated on fabrics and wallpapers or in
mural decorations.
ART Nouveau was a rich, voluptuous style that appealed to an
enlightened elite, to personalities such as Sarah BERNHARDT and
Loie FULLER, and to the nouveaux riches, whose tastes,
uninhibited by tradition, encouraged designers to stylistic
excesses. The style's patrons grew bored with it, however, and
it declined in fashion within a decade.
Yet not all ART Nouveau was frivolous and evanescent. Its
serious adherents viewed it as the answer to a serious problem
that had become apparent by the end of the 19th century: to
find a style suitable for the industrial age rather than, as
the academically trained architects of the Parisian ECOLE DES
BEAUX-ARTS were doing, applying past styles to contemporary
works.
In 1861 the English designer William MORRIS, concerned with
this problem, started the ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT in an effort
to improve the tastes of the Victorian public. He hoped to
overcome the banality of industrially produced decorative arts
by fostering a return to medieval craftsmanship. Although not
a solution to mass-produced articles, the movement did revive
an interest in craftsmanship that had been diminishing steadily
since the French Revolution.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was the parent of ART Nouveau, but
it persisted into the new period and after 1900 merged into the
mainstream of the newer style. This was also true of
SYMBOLISM, a Continental movement in poetry and painting that
appeared in the 1870s. Much of the enigmatic form and color of
ART Nouveau is related to the spirit of symbolism, as are such
motifs as Medusa heads, Pans, and woodland nymphs. The
atmosphere of decadent cynicism found in the drawings and
paintings of Aubrey BEARDSLEY, Henri de TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, and
Edvard MUNCH, as well as the otherworldly qualities found in
the works of Paul GAUGUIN, Odilon REDON, and Gustav KLIMT, were
derived from the symbolist poets, yet the rendering in color
and line related to ART Nouveau.
One other development that influenced ART Nouveau was the
Aesthetic Movement, an English decorative-arts style created by
followers of William Morris during the 1880s. The Aesthetic
Movement took its sources from medieval ART, as did its Arts
and Crafts Movement counterpart, but it adapted the newly
discovered arts of Japan as well. It survived for only a
decade, and much of the style was absorbed into ART Nouveau.
Some of the Morris-inspired fabrics and wallpapers of Walter
CRANE, Charles VOYSEY, and Arthur Macmurdo (1851-1942),
designed in 1882, could easily be taken for ART Nouveau circa
1895.
In fact, the British developments attracted interest on the
Continent. The Belgian architects Victor HORTA and Henri VAN
DE VELDE introduced the works of the English designers in a
Brussels exhibition in 1892. They were considered very
advanced and were called "Style Anglais." Also, in 1892, when
Horta designed a home in Brussels for a Professor Tassel, he
amalgamated these recent influences in a linear design, a
biomorphic whiplash, and thus created the first ART Nouveau
architecture. The French architect Hector GUIMARD was aware of
the work of Horta and Van de Velde, and in 1900, Guimard made
brilliant use of ART Nouveau in his design for the entrances to
the new Paris subway system, the Metro. For some time
thereafter the style was called "le Style Metro." A Metro gate
by Guimard is now in the sculpture garden of New York's MUSEUM
OF MODERN ART.
Architects in other parts of the world had been leaning in the
direction of ART Nouveau even before 1890. One was the
American architect Louis SULLIVAN, the teacher of Frank Lloyd
WRIGHT. Sullivan made use of ancient Celtic designs,
incorporating them in the decoration of his otherwise
functional buildings, such as the AUDITORIUM BUILDING (1889)
and the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store, both in Chicago.
In Barcelona the Spanish architect Antonio GAUDI was another
precursor of ART Nouveau. Employing medieval Spanish
traditions, Gaudi, like Sullivan, created a uniquely personal
style. He combined typical Spanish materials such as wrought
iron and colorful tile with cast concrete to create fantastic
structures in an unusual ART Nouveau idiom. Gaudi's plans and
structural models for the still uncompleted Church of the
Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family), begun in 1883, show his power
of invention as an engineer.
Emile GALLE, the French designer of glass and furniture, was
following William Morris's precepts before 1880. Inspired by
Chinese cameo glass, he created glassware that was to influence
Tiffany in the United States. Tiffany achieved an iridescent
glass by using unusual chemical techniques; to Americans his
name became synonymous with the new styles of 1900. During the
1890s Arthur Lasenby Liberty's (1843-1917) shops in London and
Paris were outlets for the modern style. Italians called ART
Nouveau "Stile Liberty" and "Stile Floreale." The Germans
referred to it as "Jugendstil," after the avant-garde ART
periodical Jugend (Youth). But the present-day label is
derived from Maison de l'ART nouveau, a shop opened by the
dealer Siegfried Bing (1838-1905) in 1896.
A rational architectural approach to the style was achieved by
Charles Rennie MACKINTOSH, a Scotsman. His work so impressed
Josef HOFFMANN and the Viennese SECESSION (or Sezession) group
that they adapted a similar modification of ART Nouveau, and in
doing so created a new style that many decades later became
known as ART DECO. Hoffmann's Palais Stoclet in Brussels
(1905) was a precursor of the French ART Deco style of 1925.
ART Nouveau was out of fashion before World War I had begun.
From the 1920s to the 1950s it was considered by critics a
moribund, even ugly, style. About 1960, however, a reappraisal
began. In reaction to the unimaginative glass-and-steel
rectangular architecture of the 1950s, critics began to turn
back to the style of 1900 with favorable reconsideration.
Numerous exhibitions were held, scholarly publications on ART
Nouveau began to appear, and prices for ART Nouveau objects
soared. ART Nouveau was incorporated in the rebellious
psychedelic style of the 1960s and finally achieved its place
as a significant style in the history of modern ART. E. M.
PLUNKETT
See Also See also: AMERICAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE; AUSTRIAN ART AND
ARCHITECTURE; ENGLISH ART AND ARCHITECTURE; FRENCH ART AND
ARCHITECTURE; GLASSWARE, DECORATIVE; JEWELRY; MODERN
ARCHITECTURE; SPANISH ART AND ARCHITECTURE; WIENER
WERKSTATTE.
Biblio. Bibliography: Amaya, Mario, ART Nouveau (1966); Barilli,
Renato, ART Nouveau (1969); Bing, Samuel, Artistic America,
Tiffany Glass, and ART Nouveau (1970); Bouillon, Jean-Paul,
ART Nouveau, 1870 to 1914 (1985); Champigneulle, Bernard, ART
Nouveau (1976); Grafton, C. B., Treasury of ART Nouveau
Design and Ornament (1982); Madsen, Stephen T., The Sources of
ART Nouveau (1959; repr. 1975); Pevsner, Nikolaus, The
Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (1968); Rheims,
Maurice, The Flowering of ART Nouveau (1966); Selz, Peter, and
Constantine, Mildred, eds., ART Nouveau (1959; repr. 1976);
Schmutzler, Robert, ART Nouveau (1962); Sterner, Gabriele, ART
Nouveau: An ART in Transition from Individualism to Mass
Society, trans, by F. G. and D. S. Peters (1982); Waddel,
Roberta, The ART Nouveau Style in Jewelry, Metalwork, Glass,
Ceramics, Textiles, Architecture and Furniture (1977); Warren,
Geoffrey, The All Color Book of ART Nouveau (1974); Weisberg,
Gabriel P., ART Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900 (1986).
Article Number
0017480-0
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