art nouveau.
Explanation:
BRITANNICA
Art Nouveau
ARTISTIC STYLE
WRITTEN BY: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Alternative Titles: Modernismo, Modernista, Sezessionstil, Stile Floreale, Stile Liberty
Art Nouveau, ornamental style of art that flourished between about 1890 and 1910 throughout Europe and the United States. Art Nouveau is characterized by its use of a long, sinuous, organic line and was employed most often in architecture, interior design, jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration. It was a deliberate attempt to create a new style, free of the imitative historicism that dominated much of 19th-century art and design. About this time the term Art Nouveau was coined, in Belgium by the periodical L’Art Moderne to describe the work of the artist group Les Vingt and in Paris by S. Bing, who named his gallery L’Art Nouveau. The style was called Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Stile Floreale (or Stile Liberty) in Italy, and Modernismo (or Modernista) in Spain.
staircase in the Hôtel Tassel
staircase in the Hôtel Tassel
Staircase in the Hôtel Tassel, Brussels, designed by Victor Horta in the Art Nouveau style, 1892–93.
Ch..Bastin / J.Evrard/DeA Picture Library
Art Nouveau
QUICK FACTS
DATE
c. 1890 - c. 1910
RELATED ARTISTS
Louis Sullivan
Antoni Gaudí
Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov
Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova
Louis Comfort Tiffany
Émile Gallé
Aubrey Beardsley
Max Beckmann
Yelena Genrikhovna Guro
Walter Crane
In England the style’s immediate precursors were the Aestheticism of the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who depended heavily on the expressive quality of organic line, and the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris, who established the importance of a vital style in the applied arts. On the European continent, Art Nouveau was influenced by experiments with expressive line by the painters Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The movement was also partly inspired by a vogue for the linear patterns of Japanese prints (ukiyo-e).
Beardsley, Aubrey: illustration for Le Morte Darthur
Beardsley, Aubrey: illustration for Le Morte Darthur
Art Nouveau illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for an 1893 edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur.
Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage-Images
Kedleston Hall
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Western architecture: Art Nouveau
Although known as Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Modernista in Spain, and Stile Liberty…
The distinguishing ornamental characteristic of Art Nouveau is its undulating asymmetrical line, often taking the form of flower stalks and buds, vine tendrils, insect wings, and other delicate and sinuous natural objects; the line may be elegant and graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and whiplike force. In the graphic arts the line subordinates all other pictorial elements—form, texture, space, and colour—to its own decorative effect. In architecture and the other plastic arts, the whole of the three-dimensional form becomes engulfed in the organic, linear rhythm, creating a fusion between structure and ornament. Architecture particularly shows this synthesis of ornament and structure; a liberal combination of materials—ironwork, glass, ceramic, and brickwork—was employed, for example, in the creation of unified interiors in which columns and beams became thick vines with spreading tendrils and windows became both openings for light and air and membranous outgrowths of the organic whole. This approach was directly opposed to the traditional architectural values of reason and clarity of structure.
