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Art Nouveau
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The Art Nouveau was consciously and hopefully launched in the 1890's as a concrete expression of "social conscience". It was to combat the lingering romantic tradition of the nineteenth century and reflect in all the arts the new "realistic" attitude toward man and his relation to the society in which he found himself on the eve of the twentieth century.
New material advances in engineering and construction from the industrial world were to be incorporated and combined with the individualistic and imaginative techniques which persisted in the arts. Scientific romanticism was the basic theory: a wedding of the clean, unbroken lines of the machine with a linear esthetic derived from nature was the goal.
The need was great for an art that was truly "modern". The last half of the nineteenth century was characterized by social and esthetic upheavals; economists and philosophers had advanced ideological foundations for the Industrial Revolution, and Darwin, in Origin of Species, seemed to give scientific sanction to the concept of the inevitability of progress; the pure sciences were producing rapid advances in physics and chemistry; and such substitutes as Materialism and Mechanical Universalism were replacing blind faith in religion as a determining factor in human behavior. The times were changing fast and the rate of change was becoming noticeably accelerated.
No previous era rivaled the years from 1850 to 1900 in the jolting rapidity of change or in the extension and diffusion of culture. Knowledge became detailed and specialized; natural resources were sought out and exploited; man himself, living a longer, more comfortable life, saw Utopia just around the corner.
Describing the period in A Political and Cultural History of Modern Europe, C. J. H. Hayes sums it up: "Fundamentally, . . . . a significant change occurs. Novel modes of thought and action came to prevail and what continues of the old is modified and adapted to a new situation and a new environment. There is a wider spread and a faster speeding-up of machine industry, attended by intensive competition of individual industrialists, which in the previous era had nourished liberalism. There is consequently a weakening of liberalism and an intensification of nationalism, a decline of international free trade and a revival of mercantilism, a special stimulus to overseas imperialism and to an unprecedented Europeanization of the whole world, and a confusing of the dream of universal peace with a nightmare of mounting national armament, military and naval.
"There is also an absorption of intellectuals, and a great interest of the masses in the pursuit of natural sciences, especially in practical and applied aspects. There is an accompanying shift of emphasis in philosophy from the spiritual and the free to the material and fatalistic, in the social sciences from the historical to the statistical, and in popular movements from the individualistic or cooperative to the socialistic and combative. There is a growing faith that, as machines multiply, creature-comforts must inevitably increase and automatically make the world a fit and fine habitation for human beings. And in this era of machinery and materialism, traditional religion is extraordinarily troubled, while art and culture testify to the outmoding of romanticism and the rise of a new fashion, which is concerned with factual data, and which, as over against 'romanticism', is called 'realism'".
Art forms which served an earlier age could no longer cope with the problems of daily living in such a world. They had to change, either retreat into disenchantment and "art for art's sake," or adapt themselves to the new environment and attempt to serve the new master.
It is necessary, in order to understand the Art Nouveau as a manifestation of such change, to examine the many diversities the new movement sought to synthesize and to seek out not only the esthetic bases which William Morris, as a precursor, and Henry Van de Velde, as the conscious founder of the movement, had available, but also the socio-economic factors which conditioned their theories and principles and directed the course of the Art Nouveau as it was developed by their followers.
Even as the Romantic Movement had reacted against the eighteenth century's strict pattern of manners, and against scepticism in the realm of thought, so the force of realism, incited and sustained by the Industrial Revolution, evolved to oppose the outmoded tenets of romanticism. In the crush of population in western Europe and in the breathless race for markets and profits, there was neither time nor inclination to refine the many innovations which flooded producer and consumer alike. The ideal of quantity, mass production, and the passing of the craftsman, placed the responsibility for the design and appearance of all products in the hands of manufacturers who were unprepared to accept such responsibility.
Trained designers had not yet entered industry; artists held themselves aloof from it; workmen had no interest in esthetic problems. Employers maintained in their theories that the unthwarted development of energy as applied to industry was the only natural and healthy way of progress, and Liberalism remained unchecked both in industry and in philosophy. The attitude implied complete freedom for the manufacturer to satisfy the ever-increasing demands with mass-produced products of shoddy and hideous design, and the consumer, devoid of tradition or education in the matter of machine-made products, was fair game for exploitation. A public was created whose taste was reduced to the level of drab standardization.
The cornerstone supporting this theory and its application to the industrial world was, of course, Darwin Origin of Species, published in 1859. Here the industrial system found its Bible; here was set forth the dual doctrines of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Commercialism, even in its worst aspects, now seemed to have the scientific sanction of inevitability and the support of the new concept of the infallibility of fact and observation.
Success in the pure sciences brought the application of the scientific method to other spheres. Philosophy was transformed into a theoretical science and such philosophers as Auguste Comte came to believe in a purely mechanized universe and carried the idea of scientific discovery to its logical extreme by means of a statistical sociology known as Positivism.
All the arts seemed to be in the process of becoming sciences. Methods of construction underwent revolutionary changes which made possible startling innovations in architecture and design and stimulated the very esthetic which became a most important aspect in the evolution of certain aspects of the Art Nouveau.
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Expositions and Salons. The Showcase
Any style as self-consciously conceived as the Art Nouveau must be equally self-consciously launched; that is to say, it must be advertised in the most attractive manner possible and as frequently as possible, in order to achieve a success equal to that of an organic style which has developed, without conscious awareness, over a long period of time. The best medium of presentation for such a prefabricated style is the exposition, the inevitable proving ground for all avant-garde movements. Fortunately for the Art Nouveau group, the vogue of international expositions reached its culmination during this period.
Hand in hand with the exposition came the important role of the critic, whose tastes, discriminations and evaluations were published in newspapers as well as in the devotedly serious magazines. Such magazines were established almost without exception, and after 1860 became the most important single factor in developing public taste.
In the case of the Art Nouveau, exhibitions of its products were held in Belgium at the salon of Les Vingt in 1884 and at the Salon de la Libre Esthétique in 1894. In France, the Revue des Arts Décoratifs showed for the first time, in 1893, a dresser by Emile Gallé and, in 1895, furniture by Jean Dampt and Auguste Delaherche.
By 1895, the movement was called the Style Nouveau and a formal Arts and Crafts group was established in Paris, with Alexandre Charpentier, Jean Dampt, Charles Plumet, Henri Nocq and Felix Aubert among its members. Their works were exhibited at 22 Rue de Provence opened in 1896, the display rooms of Samuel Bing. But not until the inauguration of the house of the Art Nouveau Bing at the Paris Exposition of 1900, did the movement gain complete recognition, although the term had been in use since 1898.
Number 22 Rue de Provence, by Bonnier, served not only as the headquarters for the Art Nouveau designers, but was also completely redesigned and furnished in that style. On the exterior, "a frieze painted in sgraffito style on the upper part of the façade immediatelyso unded the note. A paned portal . . . . with hollow glass bricks set in metal frames indicated the somewhat rustic but unusual entrance into the Art Nouveau rooms. The interior is completely new; brackets and supports in wrought iron, rectilinear railings with superimposed palmettes cut out of tin, and similar lambrequins serving as shades for the electric bulbs. It is new, simple, and refined in taste, a bit archaic, perhaps even Egyptian in detail". Thus runs a contemporary description.
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