Ch. 1 - ART NOUVEAU

The origins

Art nouveau (new art) is a European style that was developed in the late 19th century and came to an end with the First World War. It had a vast influence on architecture and the decorative arts throughout Europe and the United States.
The style came into being as a reaction to the decline in taste that the new industrial processes of production had caused with their passive imitation of historical styles. The reason for the wide and rapid spread of art nouveau can be found in the climate of cultural renewal that accompanied the expansion of industrialization and the consequent increase in the economic strength and power of the bourgeoisie. Journals, exhibitions, lectures, and above all the great universal exhibitions encouraged the circulation of technical innovations and individual artistic experiments, creating the basis for the formation of an essentially unitary style, despite the different local accents. According to the most immediate characteristics with which it appeared, the movement took on different names in different countries. In the United States, it kept the name of ART NOUVEAU, from the name of the gallery opened in Paris by Bing (a well-known connoisseur and popularizer of Japanese art and crafts) who had immediately been successful in France. In England it was called MODERN STYLE; in Austria, SEZESSION STIL referred to the avant-garde group of artists who founded the Wiener Sezession in 1897; in Scotland the GLASGOW SCHOOL; in Belgium LIGNE BELGE or MOUVEMENT BELGE; in Germani JUGENDSTIL from “Jugend” (youth), a magazine founded in Munich in 1896. Jugendstil represented the climax of the “phytomorphic” trend in European modernism with the creation of graphic stylistic features. In Spain it took the name of modernismo and became asserted at an early stage and with original characteristics, under in Catalonia; the beginnings of the movement can be situated between 1880 and 1885 with A. Gaudì.

The Liberty style in Italy

In Italy, art nouveau was called floral, but also and more commonly Liberty, suggested by the emporium that Arthur Liberty had opened in London in 1875 and which sold furniture and furnishings inspired by this new taste (and on the advice of W. Morris, founder of the ARTS & CRAFTS movement). The furniture and decorative objects imported to Italy from “Liberty” were so successful that they came to symbolize the new stylistic trend for Italians. The word FLORAL had already been used and continued to be used but the term, LIBERTY was preferred; the Italians of course knew that Liberty also means “freedom” but not everybody knew that there existed a store called Liberty & Co.
And, either because an exotic name in Italy is always popular or because the name Liberty referred to the concept of something new and expressive freedom that the new style brought with it, the term was accepted, preferred, and had the batter of the name Floral. The Art Nouveau fashion reached its zenith with the international exhibition held in Turin in 1902 where it was characterized by objects, furniture, graphics, and decorations, but also by architecture.

Characteristics

Art Nouveau born as an ornamental style, developed in the context of the more generalized Symbolist climate. The period of greatest vitality of this artistic language can be situated between 1880 and 1910, appearing without previous warning as a protection against academism.
In the name of Art for Art’s sake, the definition deriving from literary Symbolism and Aestheticism, it will tend to invest the whole of life and transform it according to the standards of an ideal that considers art as a total experience, with an ethic, cultural character capable as such of transcending life itself and tending to sublimate it.
This style came to represent a real phenomenon of fashion with the industrial bourgeoisie.

In contrast with the eclectic historicism and stylistic imitation which also characterized the products of nineteenth-century industry, new figurative characteristics and elements appeared:

• Inspiration was taken directly from NATURE with hypomorphic and zoomorphic themes: water-lilies, lilies, roses, petals, leaves, all the metamorphic characters, animals, and insects (e.g. squirrel, peacock, fly, butterfly, snake, lobster, etc.) often creating new organism as if to compete with Mother Nature herself.
• From this derives an accentuated LINEARISM (double, curved, waving, enveloping, coiling, and zig-zagging lines with a definite stroke).
• ORIENTALISM (iconographic elements, taken especially from Japanese art).
• The ASYMMETRICAL style.
• The GOTHIC REVIVAL; Art Nouveau “uses” the concept of revival not historically but rationally, using it as a collage, transforming everything and absorbing it into a question of style.
• DANCE, in the musical and rhythmic sense of movement, is one of the most frequent expressions in the iconography of Art Nouveau. Lois Fuller, who danced with scarves, inspired many artists (Van de Velde, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bradley, Larche, Rodin, and several others). It is the beginning of female emancipation in a society that is still permeated by Puritanism.
• TWO-DIMENSIONALITY
• Experimentation of the expressive potential of materials: IRON, CEMENT, and GLASS.

Showing the aspiration to integrate art into society, but remaining essentially linked to a concept of artistic production leaning towards craftsmanship and aesthetics, the alliance between art and industry becomes a slogan, that supports the Utopian ideal of being able to bring beauty into daily life and within the reach of all.
More than in painting, it is in the field of architecture, interior decoration, and applied arts that Art Nouveau obtained its most innovative results. The strong point of modernistic aesthetics was the concept of design UNITY, which in architecture means continuity between the interior and the exterior, stylistics coherence between structure, decoration, and furnishing, and in applied arts new qualities and a new dignity of everyday objects, in contrast with the commercial vulgarity produced by the Industrial revolution. Against the decline of taste induced in applied arts by the new processes of production, W. Morris and the Arts and crafts movement in England had the aim of re-evaluating crafts and the individual work of art as opposed to mass production by industrialization.

The major representatives in Italy: 

• D’Aronco, E. Basile and G. Sommaruga (in architecture);
• Dudovich, A. Martini, D. Combellotti and A. De Carolis (in posters), G. Chini (in ceramics);
• Mazzucotelli (in wrought iron);
• Quarti, E. Basile and Cometti (in furniture).

The End of Liberty

In the first year of the twentieth century, the international avant-garde was oriented more towards a modernism of an abstract geometric and functional type. Whilst an impatient reaction to Art Nouveau is maturing almost everywhere, which should be understood more as a reaction to the “Jugendstil” trend, and the less prepared circles fell back on academic reminiscences, the more intelligent and capable forces in the modernist area carried on the simplification and progressive schematization of formal ideas; that is, not denying the progress made by Art Nouveau, but channeling it into directions other than those of the last decade of the 19th century.
The general public had only just had time to marvel at and be shocked by the audacity of this new style when it already felt authorized to mock it as old stuff. Art Nouveau survived wearily in this last period, until the eve of the First  World War.