Art Nouveau movement

• of the, it’s impact was evident across urban centres throughout Europe and North America. Permeating art, craft, design and architecture, it could be recognised in buildings and advertisements, inside homes and outside street cafés. 
• •It was particularly prevalent in graphic design, in fact its ubiquity at the time was partly due to the fact that many artists of the time were using easily reproducible means of making work, such as graphic art. 
• •Despite only lasting a short period of time in the late 19th/early 20th century, it experienced a popular revival in the 1960s and today its motifs are returned to again and again in visual communications. 
• •It is regarded as an important predecessor of Modernism. 
• •Manifesting itself in an aesthetic foregrounding curves, ‘feminine’ motifs and, even, deformations, it reflected a return to an interest in nature and individuality. The English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley was one perhaps one the most controversial Art Nouveau figure due to his combination of the erotic and macabre. He created a number of posters in his brief career that employed graceful and rhythmic lines. Beardsley's highly decorative prints, were both decadent and simple, and represent the most direct link we can identify between Art Nouveau and Japanese influences. 

Ethos 

• Art Nouveau was, in part, a response to the radical changes caused by the rapid urban growth and technological advances that followed the Industrial Revolution . By the late nineteenth century the impact of industrialisation, its presumed benefits, and the growing focus on scientific and empirical knowledge and understanding was rejected by some. 
• •These developments lead to contemporary life appearing to become ‘standardised’, an a resulting sense of alienation; a loss of people's sense of ‘self’ lead to artists seeking new forms of expression. 
• •For some, this led to an emphasis on subjectivity or ‘interiority’, and a search for spirituality. 
• •It was also a somewhat anti-historicist aesthetic. While it looked back to previous themes and motifs to some degree, Art Nouveau was aimed at modernising design, seeking to escape the eclectic and idiosyncratic historical styles of the Victorian era which had been popular. It was also committed to abolishing the traditional hierarchy of the arts, which viewed so-called liberal arts, such as painting and sculpture, as superior to craft-based decorative arts. It also showed a concern that manufacturing processes were producing poorly made objects which imitated earlier periods. The practitioners of Art Nouveau, then, sought to revive good workmanship, raise the status of craft, and produce genuinely modern design. 

Alphonse Mucha – women in Art Nouveau 

• Archetypal Art Nouveau imagery. 
• Commodification of women making as ultimate symbol of the modern consumer world. 
• •Posters which sold a lifestyle dream, just as lifestyle became an issue for a growing metropolitan middle class with a disposable income. 
• •Many designers used women to sell products. The perfect male body emerged in many images of the period, most often when the subject-matter demanded a 'serious' approach. Traditional gender divides were reinforced through the symbolic use of male and female imagery. Women's capacities were traditionally perceived as being for pleasure and instinct, with men's for action and intellect. Designers often used the male body to promote industry and technology, while the female body was used for product and entertainment. 
• Many Art Nouveau decorative arts objects manipulated the female body to create different and often playful symbolic narratives. 

Art Nouveau through the ages 

Little Nemo, cartoon by Winsor McCay Experimented with the form of the comics page, its use of colour, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, perspective, architectural and other detail. The familiar Art Nouveau-influenced style McCay outlined his characters in heavy blacks and used ornate architecture and curves. 

The Vienna Secession 

• 1897, Vienna. A group of visual artists, decorators, sculptors, architects and designers who first banded together in to promote their own work and oranise exhibitions that resisted the conservatism that still prevailed in so many of Europe's traditional art academies. Their first president was Gustav Klimt. See http://www.klimt.com/ 
• •How it began: Two principle institutions dominated the Visual Arts in the years prior to the secession: the Academy of fine arts and the Kunstlerhaus – a private exhibiting society founded in 1861 which became Vienna’s main exhibition hall often under the presidency of conservative bureaucrats. Any ‘established’ artist at the time needed to belong to the Kunstlerhaus and each year their work was either selected or rejected for public exhibition (juried selection). A group of artists in the Kunstlerhaus began to meet regularly at cafes to exchange ideas and discuss the work of new artists outside of the confines of the institution. Eventually these meetings would result in the forming of two informal art societies. 
• •Ethos: This group took a pluralist approach to the arts and brought together different ideas and disciplines, which collectively formed what they referred to as ‘Gesamkunstwerk’ (the ‘total work of art’). Similarly to broader Art Nouveau ideologies the Secessionists rejected 19th century manufacturing techniques and favoured quality handmade objects, believing that a return to the handmade could rescue society from what it saw as the ‘moral decay’ caused by industrialisation. 
• •The the secession developed its own unique ‘Secession style’ centred around symmetry and repetition - rather than using only natural and curved forms more common in Art Nouveau. One of the dominant forms was the square, and recurring motifs included the grid and checkerboard. 
• •Japanese design was quickly incorporated by the Secessionists for its restrained use of decoration, it’s preference for natural materials over artifice, the preference for hand-made over machine-made, and its balance of negative and positive space. 
• •Criticisms: Although the movement foregrounded the doctrine of ‘form following function’, some designers tended to be lavish in their use of decoration, and the style began to be criticsed for being overly elaborate. In a sense, as the style matured, it was regarded by some as reverting to the very habits it had reacted against, and some argued that it had simply swapped the old for the superficially new. 

• Secession House built by Architect Josef Olbrich – one of the three architects in the group. 
• •Olbirch saw the need for a versatile exhibition place that could accommodate the group’s vision of ‘Gesamkunstwerk’; where all disciplines of the arts could be exhibited simultaneously. He incorporated moveable interior partitions and columns which meant that each exhibition could have it’s own unique layout. Secession House had enough and floor space so that sculpture, painting and other art forms could be combined within one exhibition. 
• •Ver Sacrum, ‘Sacred Spring’ in Latin was the official magazine of the Vienna Secession from 1898 to 1903. It pioneered new techniques in graphic design such as the use of modular grid system and custom designed typography. This and its unique square format would be a great influence on the Dutch graphic design in the 1920s. 
• •The Wiener Werkstätte was founded in 1903 by Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, both of whom had been key members of the Vienna secession. The primary goal of the company was to bring good design and craft into all areas of life within the fields of ceramics, fashion, silver, furniture, and the graphic arts. Encouraged its patrons to look beyond the material value of objects and to embrace geometric symmetry over surface ornament. Architectural principles dictated the company’s early designs.