Art Nouveau Mucha

Art Nouveau: Nature as Ornament

Art Nouveau was a pan-European decorative arts and design movement that flourished approximately 1890-1910, representing a deliberate rejection of historicism (the Victorian habit of recycling historical styles) in favor of a new, organic visual language drawn from nature. It appeared simultaneously across Europe under different names: Jugendstil (Youth Style) in Germany and Austria, Stile Liberty in Italy, Modernisme in Catalonia, Sezessionstil in Vienna.

Core Philosophy

Art Nouveau sought to dissolve the boundary between fine art and applied art - to make everyday objects (posters, furniture, jewelry, architecture, book covers) as beautiful as paintings or sculpture. It drew on natural forms - plants, insects, water, the female body - and abstracted them into sinuous, asymmetric, endlessly curving line. The movement reacted against the geometric regularity of industrial production by embracing the organic irregularity of living things.

Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) is Art Nouveau's most globally recognized practitioner. His 1895 poster for Sarah Bernhardt's play Gismonda launched his career and established the movement's commercial poster vocabulary: the full-length female figure, botanical halo, integrated typography, and muted champagne-and-sage palette. See the dedicated entry for Alphonse Mucha Art Nouveau Poster for full detail on his work.

Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) represented the Austrian strain of Art Nouveau. His The Kiss (1907-08, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere) and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, Neue Galerie New York) incorporate Byzantine gold-leaf mosaic, Japanese decorative flatness, and symbolist eroticism into painting. The Vienna Secession group (founded 1897) with its Ver Sacrum journal and the famous Secession Building (Josef Maria Olbrich, 1897) was the movement's institutional home in Austria.

Architecture

Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) expressed Art Nouveau principles in architecture: the Casa Batlló (1904-1906) and Sagrada Família (begun 1882) in Barcelona use undulating facades, bone-like structural elements, and mosaic surfaces derived from natural forms. Hector Guimard's cast-iron Paris Métro entrances (1900-1913) are the movement's most reproduced architectural objects.

Illustration and Decorative Arts

In Britain, Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) developed a distinctive black-and-white Art Nouveau illustration style - spare, perverse, and highly influential - for Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1894) and The Yellow Book journal (1894-1897). In the United States, Louis Comfort Tiffany adapted Art Nouveau to stained glass and decorative objects.