From Arts and Crafts to Art Nouveau

The artisan-artist

With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on

William Morris

William Morris: design for Trellis wallpaper, 1862 ·· Charles Rennie Mackintosh: dining room for the “House for an Art Lover”, 1901

The secular and somewhat elitist separation between Fine Arts and Decorative Arts, present in European art since the Renaissance, finally began to be questioned in the second half of the 19th century. In 1859, William Morris (1834- 1896), well acquainted with the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin (1819-1900), commissioned the architect Philip Webb (1831-1915) to build the Red House, a neo-Gothic style building where two years later Morris founded the Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, a workshop of artists who sought to recover the craft methods of the Gothic period. The workshop, sometimes known as “the Firm” produced a large body of work, including murals, stained glass, carvings, tapestries and furniture. Morris, whose social commitment was clear even before he joined the Socialist League in 1884, advocated art accessible to all, inside and outside their homes, beauty that could be appreciated during everyday life. “I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few,” he wrote in 1877.

The exhibition of the works of Morris and his workshop at the London International Exhibition of 1862 attracted the attention of the public and critics, and could be considered the starting point of the Arts and Crafts movement, which -after a series of individual efforts, most notably that of the architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942)- would flourish definitively with the formation, in 1887, of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, and with the formation of the so-called Glasgow School. Within the latter, the most important figure was Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), who from a very young age broke the boundaries between artist and craftsman, working as a painter, architect and furniture designer. Also worthy of note are the Glasgow Girls, a group of women who studied at the Glasgow School of Arts, among them the sisters Margaret (1864-1933) and Frances MacDonald (1873-1921).

With the Glasgow School, Morris’s desire to eliminate the separation between Fine Arts and Decorative Arts can be considered fulfilled. Thus arose the British “Modern Style”, which incorporated the taste for craftsmanship of the Arts and Crafts movement along with the painting of figures such as Bessie MacNicol (1869-1904). The exhibition of the works of the artists of the Modern Style would have a great influence on the artists of the Viennese Secession, which will be discussed later.

Victor Horta: Staircase of the Hôtel Tassel, 1893 ·· Hector Guimard: Entrance to the Porte Dauphine metro station in Paris, 1900-1903.

Art Nouveau in France and Belgium

In 1892, a young architect named Victor Horta (1861-1947) designed in Brussels the Hôtel Tassel, completed the following year, in which the architect broke with the classical typology of residential buildings used in Belgium and France until then. In the Hôtel Tassel, as in other later buildings by Horta (Hôtel Van Eetvelde or the now destroyed Maison du Peuple), the central space of the building is a luminous common area, which illuminates an interior in which the decoration of sinuous lines is omnipresent. In Horta’s works, hitherto “overlooked” elements such as railings and doorknobs are treated as works of art in the service of the inhabitant.

In 1895, the art dealer Siegfried Bing (1838-1905) opened the Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris, a gallery where the term “eclectic” took on a new dimension. In it, paintings by Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec were exhibited alongside jewelry and stained glass by the American Louis Comfort Tiffany, of whom we will speak later. It could be said that, just as the London International Exhibition of 1862 signified the acceptance of Arts & Crafts in the United Kingdom, the Paris International Exhibition of 1900 was the great triumph of Art Nouveau in France and Belgium. The nouveau style became the norm, and the Paris of the Belle Époque was transformed into an open-air museum. Hector Guimard (1867-1942) turns kiosks and subway entrances into works of art. Posters and decorations by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) adorned stores and galleries. Beyond Paris, we should mention the so-called École de Nancy and -outside France and Belgium, but with clear influences of the nouveau style– the Dutch Nieuwe Kunst.

Louis Comfort Tiffany: Angel of the Resurrection. Stained glass, 1904. Indianapolis Museum of Art ·· Antoni Gaudí: Casa Batlló, Barcelona. 1904-1906

Art Nouveau in the United States.

The great figure of Art Nouveau in the United States was Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). Born into a wealthy family of jewelers, Tiffany was able to study art with such distinguished masters as George Inness in New York and Leon Bailly in Paris. Influenced by Morris’s Arts and Crafts, he established his own stained glass studio in 1885, which he would expand over the years. “What began as formal interpretations of nature grew into a love of lush naturalism, and as his artistic career progressed, he became increasingly preoccupied by illusionistic depictions of landscapes and flowers. His was not an intellectual approach to art; rather it was a sensory one, providing feasts of color, light, and texture” (Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen: “Louis Comfort Tiffany at the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, 1998). In addition to Tiffany, the two main figures of American Art Nouveau were the designer John La Farge (1835-1910) and the architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924).

Gaudí and Catalan Modernisme

The fascinating figure of Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) dominated all of Catalan Modernisme, which developed alongside Franco-Belgian Art Nouveau, and which manifested itself above all in architecture. A man of deep religious convictions, for Gaudí nature (divine creation) was his only teacher, and from its observation arise the organic forms present in his works, from residential (Casa Batlló, Casa Milà), urban (Park Güell) or religious projects (Temple of the Sagrada Familia). After Gaudí, we can highlight the figures of the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1849-1923) and the painter and designer Ramón Casas (1866-1932).

Nordic modernism: the Jūgendstil

In northern Europe (Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic Region), Art Nouveau is commonly known as Jūgendstil (“Young Style”), a name taken from an influential art magazine founded in 1896 by the critic Georg Hirth (1841-1916), who was also an important figure in the so-called Munich Secession, a group of artists that would notably influence the later Berlin Secession and the more famous Vienna Secession. In Scandinavia, Art Nouveau is represented by the works of the Finnish architects and designers Lars Sonck (1870-1956) and Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950). Riga, capital of Latvia, was an important modernist center, having the architect Konstantīns Pēkšēns (1859-1928) as its most important figure.

Josef Hoffmann: Stoclet Palace, Brussels, 1905-1911. Photograph by PtrQs, C.C. license 4.0 ·· Gustav Klimt: “The Kiss,” 1907-08. Vienna, Belvedere.

“To every age its art, to every art its freedom”: the Vienna Secession

One of the most multifaceted and important modernist groups was the so-called Viennese Secession or Vienna Secession, founded in 1897. Unlike the German Secessions, which were clearly framed within the Nouveau-inspired Jūgendstil, the Vienna Secession “developed its own unique ‘Secession style’ centred around symmetry and repetition rather than natural forms. The dominant form was the square and the recurring motifs were the grid and checkerboard” (Roberto Rosenman: “Vienna Secession”, 1898-1905). This “taste for order” can be seen in the two great architectural works of the Vienna Secession: the Secession Pavilion by Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867-1908) and, above all, the Stoclet Palace by Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956).

But, unlike in other modernist centers, the most prominent figure of the Vienna Secession was neither an architect nor a designer, but a painter. Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), an academically trained artist, developed a personal, clearly symbolist-inspired style that reached its peak in the first decade of the 20th century, in his so-called “Golden Period”, with works such as “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and “The Kiss“, both painted in 1907-1908. Klimt’s style would decisively influence Egon Schiele (1890-1918), who by the end of his short life had already evolved towards expressionist painting.

G. Fernández · theartwolf.com