ABSTRACT
The movement known as Art Nouveau appeared at the beginning of the 1890s and lasted until around the time of the First World War. Essentially it was of importance in Europe and North America and as a style it belonged not only in the sphere of working artists but also found champions in the world of commercialism. Jewellers and metalsmiths produced items, derived from the various influences behind the movement. Publishers availed themselves of its designs in advertising posters and in the illustrations with which they filled their books, while public institutions such as galleries and government offices used its images to help transmit information to the public. In retrospect, we can now appreciate that it was a movement which concerned itself, consciously, with the idea of the modern. Although we now see Art Nouveau as a style of its time, at that point it was a concerted attempt to alter the visual precepts of the age which spawned it. The Western world was moving, relentlessly, into the twentieth century, with its attendant expansionist ideas and commercial mass production. Art Nouveau, while happy to utilise the advances in production techniques in a variety of fields, nevertheless looked to the styles of other times and other places and, above all, to Nature herself to reawaken an interest in design and the essential poetry present in objects for everyday use in homes and public places. The art of previous European styles, such as the Gothic and the Baroque and the intricate patterns of Celtic design were called upon and reinterpreted to suit the new century, but styles from outside Europe were also invoked. Islamic art provided some inspiration but the art of Japan was a considerable influence in Art Nouveau’s emerging style.1 The resultant apparent simplicity of many of the movement’s images and objects obscures the fact that the decoration of these items derives from a variety of sources and design concepts, drawn from different historical periods and geographic locations. This complex and diverse style fitted well, therefore, into the age of its flowering, which was one of the coming together of different nations and the sharing of concepts in the hope of creating a more vibrant age. The people who were responsible for the development of Art Nouveau and who worked within its ideas and objectives believed that all the arts should work together and in their unified approach there would be a kind of poetry. They believed that if everyday
objects contained this poetry, then the lives of all those who were involved with the appreciation and use of these objects would find a corresponding poetry in their own existences. Perhaps, unknowingly, in this resolve the proponents of Art Nouveau were closer to the traditional view of life of the Japanese than they realised.
