ABSTRACT
The exhibition of Art Nouveau at the Museum of Modern Art has been a shock and a delight. It is assembled with remarkable intelligence and an unfailing taste. The quality of the objects and art works is uniformly high. The idealism of Art Nouveau is—though often, but not always, euphemistic and oblique—an erotic idealism. The atmosphere it seeks to sustain is the atmosphere of an erotic daydream in which a continuous, self-absorbing languor is not to be interrupted by the least suggestion of a climactic action. For Art Nouveau the natural fecundity of the botanical world becomes a treasury of visual artifice and oblique symbolism. The point is that Art Nouveau, in its original expression, was at best an exquisite, brilliant, but essentially moribund style which sacrificed a great measure of human and artistic vitality in order to perfect its very circumscribed vision.
