ABSTRACT
In confronting a plethora of meaningless historicist styles, Art Nouveau attempted to establish a newform-language capable of universal application. Art Nouveau employed abstraction in its endeavour to create imagery that was distanced from immediacy and the real. Art Nouveau embodied escape into the domestic interior and the world of the self, but it also desired escape from a self that had been constituted through a redundant past history. Art Nouveau practitioners were struggling with issues which affected, not only the means of the production of their creations, and the technical methods for their execution, but also the objective outcomes of their ostensibly ‘subjective’ innovations. One crucial result of this was that Mackintosh could not be meaningfully related to either the group of Art Nouveau designers centred on the Glasgow School of Art, or the group of architects who shared certain ideals and who employed a similar form-language in their work; or the European Art Nouveau movements.
