see also:

Art Nouveau

2 Art Nouveau II: Scotland, Austria, and Germany

 

Germany

 

The German Art Nouveau movement, called Jugendstil, represents another example of artists' desire to cast off the eclectic historicist styles that had dominated the nineteenth century. Artists in Germany became aware of the French and British movements through publications such as Das Moderne Plakflt ("The Modern Poster"), a bound volume of fifty-two lithographic reprints of key artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, and the Beggarstaffs. While Das Moderne Plakatwas printed in Dresden in 1897 by Gerhard Kuhtmann, German artists also circulated copies of the French series Les Afftches Hlustrees and Les Maitres de I'Affiche between 1886 and 1900.

Beginning in 1894, a series of new magazines helped to gal­vanize a group of young German designers to pursue the new styles that were sweeping across Europe. The issue of national identity played a large part in the public discussion of the new art in Germany, as more conservative artists and intellectuals objected to the international, and especially French, aesthetic innovations that underlay Art Nouveau. As was the case in other countries, An Nouveau in Germany represented something of a clash of generations. This conflict is indicated by the term Jugendstil, which means "Youth Style" and was also the name of one of the new German art periodicals founded by progressive young artists.

Pan and Jugend Magazines

The first periodical to promote Art Nouveau in Germany as part of an international phenomenon was Pan, launched in Berlin in 1895. Its founders included the 27-year-old art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935), who in later decades would become one of the most esteemed historians of modern art in Europe. The title of the journal is suggestive of the international tastes of its editors, as the Greek god Pan, half-man and half-goat, was a familiar reference to followers of the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements in France and England. Pan was associated with creativity, music, and poetry, as well as Dionysian sexuality and visionary nightmares, and therefore encompassed many of the favorite themes of Art Nouveau. Over its five-year run, Pan published a wide range of Art Nouveau graphics from France, including works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Theodore Steinlen, and the painter Maurice Denis (1870-1943).

A poster by Josef Sattler (1867-1931) advertising the journal shows the god emerging from an ambiguous watery environment with his characteristic mischievous grin (fig. 2,28). At the same time, the stamens of a waterlily spell out "Pan" in a curvilinear fashion, uniting text and image in the fashion of many French posters. This Jugendstil image is rife with Japonisme, as both the orange and blue palette, with its juxtaposition of complementary colors, and the flat space made up of two-dimensional planes attest to the Japanese influence. Meier-Graefe, who was serving as both art director and financial manager of the journal, was forced to leave soon after the first issue was published, as the conserva­tive patrons who had financed the venture objected to his French-in fleeted taste. Meier-Graefe was singled out for criticism partly because of anti-Semitic feelings. After his dismissal, the co-founder Otto Bierbaum (1865-1910) continued at Pan and managed to fend off the attempts by his wealthy backers to make the journal beholden to German national identity. It is important to remember that national identity was a prominent issue in Europe at this time, not just in Germany (a useful parallel exists in the French Symbolists' embrace of Richard Wagner, which upset French people who wanted to shut out German aesthetics). Also, the young editors of Pan wanted to revive the high standards of German arts and crafts just like their patrons, but they disagreed over the issue of espousing an international trend, as opposed to building a strictly homegrown tradition. Meier-Graefe continued to spread the gospel of Art Nouveau in Berlin, where he founded the influential journal Dekprative Kunst in 1898, and in Paris, where he opened a gallery called La Maison Moderne in 1899.

The use of the term Jugendstil as a German synonym for Art Nouveau began with a periodical called Jugend: Hiustrierte Wocbenscbrifi fur Kunst und Leben ("Youth: Illustrated Weekly for Art and Life"), first published in January 1896. The publisher of Jugend, Georg Hirth (1841-1916), was committed to modern graphics from the very start. He hired over seventy illustrators to work for the journal, producing a wide variety of Art Nouveau graphics. He employed the Munich-based illustrator Fritz Erler (1868-1940) to create over fifty covers for Jugend, including one for the eleventh issue, published in 1898 (fig. 2.29). Hirth wanted each cover to reference the theme of youth indicated by the journal's title. Here, Erler has drawn a sinuous figure of a warrior with a sword looking outward toward some confrontation, emblematic of the aggressive persona of young men. Somewhat paradoxically, Erler usually chose to represent "youth" through medieval refer­ences, drawing on the longstanding admiration for that period both in Germany in particular and more broadly in Europe in the nineteenth century. The black figure is complemented by the bold red lettering in a planar scheme again replete with traces of the Beggarstaffs and Japonisme.

 

Blackletter

The flowing text that spells out "Jugend" at the top of the image represents an important compromise between Jugendstil aesthetics and the traditional German script called "blackletter." Blackletter is a catch-all term for scripted lettering rooted in the Middle Ages "in which the darkness of the characters overpowers the whiteness of the page," according to historian Peter Bain. Blackletter charac­ters strongly resemble the letters formed by the blunt-edged quill pen used to write manuscripts. Because of its roots in the medieval period, blackletter is often called "gothic." By the 1890s, much of German printing relied on the variant of blackletter named "fraktur," and this term is sometimes used casually as a synonym for blackletter.

Blackletter is highly ornamental, featuring exaggerated calli­graphic flourishes and strong modeling of the stems of the letters. Compared to roman faces, blackletter's narrowly proportioned letters, its stylized ligatures to connect letters, and its small spaces between words and between lines of text, may appear illegible and even unreadable to persons unfamiliar with it. In truth, this is absolutely not the case. Recent studies have shown that readers familiar with blackletter read at the same speed as readers of roman typefaces, while the design of the letters helps to facilitate readability in terms of the specific orthography of the German language (in which, for example, the first letter of every noun is capitalized). The conflicts that arise in Germany during the twentieth century over the use of blackletter versus roman type reappear in several later chapters.

It is very important not to confuse the characteristics of the ornamental, yet highly functional, blackletter script, which was in everyday use in Germany through to the middle of the twentieth century, with the sometimes illegible, unreadable letters of many decorative typefaces. Erler's heading, "Jugend," is typical of German Art Nouveau in that it combines elements of blackletter with curvilinear, decorative elements of modern handdrawn lettering. These elements can be hard to separate from one another for someone only familiar with roman lettering. However, blackletter generally has spikier, more angular modeling, as opposed to the elongated undulating elements that are dominant in Art Nouveau. Obviously, the synthesizing of new styles had a signifi­cant political component because by the twentieth century blackletter had become an important signifier of German national identity, so an artist who merged its forms with script that was recognizably influenced by Germany's European rival, France, was sure to offend traditional Germans.

Another excellent example of how young artists sought to merge national tradition and Jugendstil aesthetics in typography comes by way of the designer Otto Eckmann (1865-1902). Eckmann was a versatile artist from Hamburg who had academic training in both the fine and applied arts. Knowledgeable regard­ing everything from French Symbolist aesthetics to Japanese woodcuts, he focused his work after 1894 on decorative graphics. He produced a large number of illustrations, as well as ornamen­tal borders, headings, and the like, for journals including Pan and Jugend. In 1900, he collaborated with the famous type specialist Karl Klingspor (1868-1950) to create Eckmann, an elegant type­face whose styling borrows elements from both the blackletter and Art Nouveau traditions (fig. 2.30). While the undulating, swelling shapes of the letters bespeak Otto Eckmann's interest in Art Nouveau, the "open bowls," or incomplete boundaries that circumscribe white space in a letter such as the lower-case "g," reference a calligraphic root in blackletter. The curvilinear Art Nouveau style was taken to an extreme in Otto Weisert's typeface called Bocklin (1904; fig. 2.31), named after an influential German Jugendstil painter. The letters of Bocklin (note the capitals "A" and "B") have the same stylized curves as the hair of a figure drawn by the French poster artist Alphonse Mucha.
 

Simplicissimus Magazine
 

The same year that Jugend was founded in Berlin, 1896, Munich saw the introduction of a satirical magazine called Simplicissimus, which would commission some of the most striking images to appear in Germany that decade. Simplicissimus was cofounded by the artist Thomas Theodor Heine (1867-1948) and the publisher Albert Langen (1869-1909). Heine's first publicity poster for the journal set a tone, combining art and political satire, that would serve as its editorial direction for years (Jig. 2.33). In the poster, a young woman typical of Art Nouveau graphics, representing both youth and art, is being abducted by a devil, in a clever play on the well-known mythological story of Hades and Persephone. (Persephone was a young maiden who was kidnapped by the god of the underworld, Hades.) In the poster, the devilish Hades represents satire, which in the journal is mixed with art in equal measure. Art and satire are intertwined, as the young woman writes out the name of the magazine while the devilish figure is too engrossed in its pages to notice her hand on his tail. The bold use of black and red supports a planar design that is indebted to Jules Cheret's dancing women and Toulouse-Lautrec's daring imagery, as well as the Japanese tradition of flat, decorative simplicity.

   A second poster by Heine, published in 1897, became the most enduring image associated with Simplicissimus, and was revived several times in different ways to promote the journal (fig. 2.32). It features a startlingly red bulldog that has broken its chain, and stands confrontationally in an ambiguous field of black. The sturdy bulldog is neatly complemented by the restrained heading at the top, which stays away from the curvilin­ear exuberance typical of Art Nouveau. The strength of Heine's balanced use of the blank space between dog and title is particu­larly notable. This dog served to capture the spirit of sharp, biting commentary that made Simplicissimus one of the most famous magazines in Germany. In 1898, Heine was in fact imprisoned for six months because of his work for Simplicissimus; the charge was "lesemajesty," indicating that he had offended Germany's imperial government.
 

Thomas Theodor Heine.

Thomas Theodor Heine.

Thomas Theodor Heine.

Hermann Obrist

The textile designs of Swiss-born Hermann Obrist (1863-1927), a central figure in the Jugendstil'm Munich, have strong linear elements that were often translated into graphic design. In the 1880s, Obrist traveled extensively through England and Scotland, where he was greatly impressed by the high quality of the crafts produced by members of the Arts and Crafts movement. Following his return to Germany, he enrolled in the Kunstgewerbeschule at Karlsruhe and devoted himself to the decorative arts. In 1894 he moved to Munich, an important center of the "new art" that claimed to have more artists per capita than any other city in Germany.

In 1896, Obrist produced a solo exhibition of textiles based on his designs that were actually crafted by Berthe Ruchet. The fact that Obrist would not embroider the works himself points to a continuing hierarchical view of the crafts as inferior to the fine arts, despite so many designers' claims to the contrary. In past ages such as the Renaissance, artists such as Raphael employed other craft workers to execute their tapestry designs, because learning the necessary skills would have been considered beneath them. That hierarchy often had a gender component, as a male artist such as Obrist considered the execution of needlework to be a manual craft suited to women. While his embrace of the decorative arts made it acceptable for him to design textiles, Obrist would not be comfortable completing the work himself. In contrast, male artists felt that the execution of an oil painting was sufficiently esteemed as a fine art that they would have no such qualms.

    One of Obrist's wool and silk embroideries, called Whiplash, became a core part of Jugendstil aesthetics (fig. 2.34). The sinuous curve in this design projects a pent-up energy like the lash of a whip in the pregnant moment when it is suspended in space, about to explode with a mighty crack. The "whiplash" curve is the best expression of Obrist's pursuit of organic abstraction, whereby he molded natural forms so that they became more powerful and expressive. There is clearly a strong undercurrent of Symbolism in Obrist's work, as he often wrote and spoke about the spiritual implications of abstract forms.

    In 1902, Obrist, along with the self-taught German artist Wilhelm von Debschitz (1871-1948), founded a private art school named the Munich Teaching and Experimental Studios for Applied and Free Art. This school allowed Obrist to implement some of his ideas about progressive teaching methods while also serving as a forum for his views on the significance of expressive, organic abstraction as an artistic approach. The Munich Studios functioned mainly as an "arts and crafts" school, and Obrist continued to work towards collapsing the hierarchy between design work and the fine arts. He also had a significant impact on a number of artists in Munich, most famously the Russian expatriate painter Wasily Kandinsky.

 

2.34 Hermann Obrist, Whiplash, 1895

Henri Van de Velde
 

Despite the movement's strong nationalist tradition, one of the most successful Jugendstil designers in Germany in the 1890s, Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), was Belgian. Van de Velde began his artistic career as a painter, winning some praise as a Symbolist-inspired member of the Belgian group called Les XX ("The Twenty"). Like many Art Nouveau artists, Van de Velde focused on the decorative arts after a short time spent as a fine artist. Of course, the decorative arts were enjoying a new elevated status and social significance at the time because of the influence of Arts and Crafts theorists. Van de Velde first joined the Art Nouveau movement by way of Paris, where in 1895 he designed three rooms for Siegfried Bing's new gallery L'Art Nouveau. Under the tutelage of Bing and Meier-Graefe, who was now living in Paris, Van de Velde embraced the concept of a new art that would represent a synthesis of international, mainly European and Asian, aesthetics. At L'Art Nouveau, Bing commis­sioned a series of model rooms that were designed to show how interior decoration could serve to beautify the everyday world. The model dining room that Van de Velde designed for Bing's gallery with the help of the progressive French painter Paul Ranson (1868-1909) demonstrated his awareness of the funda­mental tenets of Art Nouveau: that all elements of a work must be executed in a unified style, and that decoration was not something applied separately to interiors as an ornament, but rather was the manifestation of sound aesthetic principles. This holistic approach to decoration is visible in all the different objects that Van de Velde designed for the dining room, from ceramic tiles to drawer handles to furniture.

    In 1897, Van de Velde's Bing rooms were exhibited at the Arts and Crafts exhibition in Dresden. That exhibition cemented Van de Velde's reputation in Germany, where he was soon receiving commissions for a variety of design projects from patrons in Munich and Berlin. The candelabrum that he created in 1898 is a wonderful example of the spread of Obrist's whiplash curve as a fundamental design principle (fig. 2.35). The flamboyant arms of the candelabrum, derived from natural forms, exude the dynamic energy of a whip about to strike. "Line is a force," Van de Velde stated, when asked to summarize his aesthetic.

    While he on occasion paid lip service to their views, Van de Velde did not share the same commitment to raising the standards of everyday, mass-produced objects through communal work­shops professed by Arts and Crafts designers. Instead, he often asserted that his individual talent was paramount, and was best used in the creation of handcrafted objects for the carriage trade. Perhaps because of these beliefs, Van de Velde created only one design for a mass-produced poster during his career. In 1898, he produced an advertisement for the Tropon food company, a European manufacturer of food concentrates based in Cologne. The poster was among the first to be used in different versions in multiple European countries, with the slogan at the bottom translated into the appropriate language (fig. 2.36). Here, the familiar plant forms of Art Nouveau actually represent the cracked shells of eggs, the key ingredient in Tropon's signature product, powdered egg whites. While the eggs are still recognizable, the poster comes daringly close to pure graphic abstraction. Van de Velde's curvilinear design maintains the powerful energy of the whiplash, which contrasts with the gentler, less muscular curves seen in other Art Nouveau works such as Guimard's Metro stations.

There is a strong contrast between the decorative flourishes of the eggs or the sinewy letters of the slogan "the most concentrated food" on the one hand, and the rather staid lettering at the top of the poster on the other. Although the letters of the firm's name, "Tropon," feature elongated descenders in the "R" and "P," it is otherwise remarkable for its clean rectilinear design. This brings up two issues that influenced the possible use of Jugendstil and its ilk for advertising purposes, and which have substantial implications for the field of graphic design in general. First, does the decreased legibility of the lettering have an impact on the effectiveness of the poster? It is likely that the patrons at Tropon thought so, and instructed Van de Velde to draw their corporate name in a simplified fashion. This question of legibility repeatedly challenged graphic designers throughout the twentieth century. Second, is the investment in an "artistic" poster by a named designer worth the cost: will it be proportionally more effective than an advertisement that does not use a progressive style by a celebrated designer?

Van de Velde's continuing successes in Germany and personal relationships with wealthy patrons precipitated a move to Berlin in 1899, followed by another to the small German city of Weimar in 1902. In Weimar, Van de Velde was appointed the director of a new Kunstgewerbeschule by a powerful local aristocrat, Wilhelm Ernst, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar. The patronage of Jugendstil artists by ruling families such as Ernst's was especially important in Germany, where aristocrats had managed to preserve much of their authority over public life. In 1907, Van de Velde also became one of the founding members of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of designers, architects, and industrial firms based in Munich. The published goal of the Werkbund was based on Arts and Crafts principles learned in England by one of its founders, Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927): "the ennobling of commerce through the collaboration of art, industry, and craftsmanship." The Werkbund nearly split apart in its early years, as members debated the importance of standardized, functional designs, favored by industry, as opposed to the more elitist individual work of artists such as Van de Velde and Obrist.

During his time in Weimar, Van de Velde produced one of his most esteemed graphic works, an edition of Also Sprach Zarathustra (1908; f.2.37) by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Van de Velde had a personal connection to the philosopher, having befriended one of his siblings, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche (1846-1935), who had encouraged the artist's move to Weimar. Van de Velde's edition of Zarathustra represents the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of an, on a small scale. He attempted to harmonize every aspect of the book, including its ink, illustrations, and typography. The dense patterns on the cover surely must have been influenced by William Morris's designs for the Kelmscott Press, which tended toward similarly tightlypacked compositions. Furthermore, Van de Velde's aesthetic philosophy, emphasizing the powerful vision of an individual creator, was heavily influenced by Nietzsche's own writings on art. When the First World War began in 1914, Van de Velde's status as a foreigner in Germany, which had already complicated a commission he received for the Werkbund, caused him to be dismissed from his post at the Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule. He recommended that the German architect, and his Werkbund colleague, Walter Gropius (1883-1969), be appointed to replace him. Van de Velde left Germany in 1917, and spent the rest of his career in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

 

2.35 Henry van de Velde, Candelabra, 1899.
Silver. Brohan-Museum, Berlin.
 

2.36 Henry van de Velde, Tropon, 1899. Offset lithograph. Private Collection.
 

2.37 a, b Henry van de Velde, Also Spoke Zarathustra, 1908.
Book cover. By permission of The British Library, London.

Peter Behrens

The art colony established in 1899 at Darmstadt by the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Ernst Ludwig (1868-1937), sought to promote high standards for crafts made in the region. Led by the Viennese Secession architect Josef Olbrich, who designed most of the buildings at the colony's headquarters in Mathildenhohe Park, the artists at the Darmstadt colony were important promoters of Jugendstil. One of the more accomplished designers at the colony was a German architect named Peter Behrens (1868-1940), who had spent the 1890s living in Munich. There, he had pursued both the fine and applied arts while becoming a key player in the Munich Secession (1893), a group like the Viennese equivalent that was dedicated to the spread of new, non-academic styles in the fine arts. Behrens was also well acquainted with the circle of artists around the journal Pan, through which he became acquainted with Julius Meier-Graefe and Otto Eckmann. In 1897, as his interest in the applied arts strengthened, Behrens co-founded an Arts and Crafts group in Munich.

   Like so many designers of his generation, Behrens began work in the graphic arts through his love of painting, which he abandoned in the late 1890s in favor of graphic design. A color woodblock print from 1900, The Kiss (fig. 2.38), combines a softly curving illustration of two lovers' faces with a dense arabesque of hair that approaches pure abstraction. The combination of a sexual theme and a sensually curvilinear style demonstrates how completely Behrens had absorbed the fundamental teachings of Art Nouveau.

   The Darmstadt art colony was created as a gathering point for elite artists to pursue the medieval ideal of the workshop. There was a long history in rural, inexpensive areas of Europe, especially Germany, of artists' colonies in which artists could pool their resources while at the same time live amid nature for inspiration. Behrens produced a poster for the Darmstadt colony's first exhibi­tion, held in the summer of 1901 (fig. 2.39). The exhibition, also organized by Behrens, represented the first time that the members of the colony presented their work to the public. This poster shows the vertical format typical of Scottish and Viennese work. The rectangular shape of the frame is repeated by the centered box that circumscribes an allegorical figure. This stylized figure's elongated, curving grace is balanced by the stouter proportions of the oval globes above and below her. The symmetrical blue verti­cal bands are decorated at the top with the Grand Duke's coat of arms. The lettering at top and bottom reverses the color scheme of the image, integrating these two elements despite their clear separation in the overall geometric composition. The essence of this poster is its balance of Art Nouveau flourishes with the more simplified Scottish style.
 

Behrens and AEG

In 1903, Behrens was appointed the director of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dusseldorf, a move that coincided with his gradual shift from the organic, curvilinear Jugendstyl style to one marked by greater simplification and geometric forms. At the school, Behrens restructured the curriculum in order to place greater emphasis on design for industry. Three years after his appointment, Behrens was approached by Emil Rathenau (1838-1915), the founder of the electrical utility and industrial producer called Allegemein Elektricitats Gesellschaft (AEG). In 1881, Rathenau had bought the German rights to the electrical generation system invented by Thomas Edison (1847-1931), and in succeeding decades had developed his company into an industrial giant. Showing considerable foresight, Rathenau wanted his company to be at the vanguard of marketing as well as technology, so he hired Behrens to create a unified design style that would eventually encompass all of AEG's buildings, facilities, and graphic materials.

    One of Behrens's first tasks was to design a new building to house the production of electrical generation equipment at the company's headquarters in Berlin (fig. 2.40). This turbine building was constructed only of industrial materials—concrete, steel, and glass. Behrens used these to create a balance between classical tradition, seen in the dignified, monumental form of the building, and the new abstract styles. He eschewed almost all ornament for his creation, following the Art Nouveau credo that all beauty must be inherent in the form, not come from applied decorative elements. The shape of the building is exemplary of the reductive geometric style typical of post-1900 Jugendstil art. It is nearly impossible for the modern viewer to recognize how startling this type of bold, industrial architecture appeared at the time. It is also notable that three architect-designers who will play prominent roles in later chapters—Charles Edouard Jeanneret, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—all worked for Behrens during the time that he was developing the AEG style.

    The corporate logo that Behrens designed for AEG is visible on the flat plane at one end of the turbine building. This so-called "honeycomb" logotype features three hexagons containing the company's initials. The three geometric shapes are further contained within a larger hexagon. This repetition of form has its roots all the way back in Japonisme, but, eschewing all ornament, the device has here been transformed into a simple, declarative logo that speaks to the seriousness of purpose and power that an electrical company naturally wants to project. The lettering in the logo is derived from a typeface that Behrens created for AEG, the first time that a corporation had ever acquired its own copyrighted lettering. This face was called Behrens-Antiqua when it was released to the public by the Klingspor foundry some years later (fig. 2.41). As the title suggests, Behrens-Antiqua represents another of Behrens's syntheses of the old and the new, as he attempted to update roman lettering of the modern style with some geometric stylizations.

    Through his work for AEG creating mass-produced electrical appliances, Behrens became one of the first "industrial designers," a profession that had been acclaimed without many practical results since the onset of Morris's "Arts and Crafts" movement in the 1860s. His Electric Tea Kettle (1909; fig. 2.42) features the spartan elegance and geometric schemes typical of the Vienna Werkstatte, yet here applied for the first time to an inexpensive, industrially produced item. The octagonal body, reminiscent of the roof of AEG's turbine hall and its logo, and the rectilinear handle of the kettle are balanced by the dramatic curve of the spout. In this kettle, Behrens synthesized a style that combined modern abstract elements with a traditional Prussian classicism.

In 1910, Behrens designed a poster advertising AEG's newest product, a technologically advanced lamp (fig. 2.43). The orthogo­nal design is overlaid with an equilateral triangle that contains the lamp and an abstract pattern representing its brilliant output. The lines that make up the poster are a linear variant of the dots that represent light. The text boxes at top and bottom are reminders of past posters, but here the more typical allegorical figure has been replaced by a lamp.

   At AEG, Behrens succeeded in creating a unified aesthetic to every aspect of the company's visual environment. This process represents the first sustained example of "corporate identity," a concept that would come to dominate the design professions, especially graphic design, after 1945. It is important to remember that Behrens had been introduced to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Munich as early as the 1890s, and it had also been a founding principle of the Darmstadt colony under Olbrich. At Darmstadt, Behrens himself had designed his own home and its furnishings in a manner consistent with the concept of the "total work of art." However, Behrens's work for AEG represents perhaps the most consistent application of the principles of the Gesamtkunstwerk- There is perhaps some irony in that the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk was developed amid the Symbolists' dream of a Utopian future, in which all the arts, and even all of humanity, would be unified in aesthetic radiance. However, its greatest deployment turns out to be a commercial project, the corporate identity of an electrical utility. This process of transformation is called "reification" by scholars, meaning that an abstract concept, in this case the Gesamtkunstwerk, is made into a concrete reality in such a way that an artistic vision ends up co-opted by commercial interests.

    Behrens also made an important contribution to German typography, especially through the three typefaces he designed, Behrens-Antiqua (discussed above), Behrens-Fraktur, and Behrens-Schrift (fig. 2.44). Behrens-Fraktur is a decorative typeface that combines blackletter with the curvilinear elegance of French Art Nouveau. Behrens-Schrift, which was actually the first typeface designed by Behrens, is a composite of btackletter script modified by roman type's greater clarity. It features calligraphic strokes that have been rationalized in order to create better legibility and readability. Behrens stated that he had hoped to create a typeface that grew organically out of the German blackletter tradition, but would be simultaneously informed by "the new spiritual and material matter of the epoch." Cleverly, Behrens designed a type that balanced German national aspirations with broader appeal, and Behrens-Schrift was widely adopted by the government for use in international forums, such as the 1904 world's fair held in the United States.

As a leading member of the Dcutcher Werkbund—as was AEG—Behrens intended to feature his work at the 1914 exhibition held in Cologne. However, he ran up against the conservative taste of his patrons when he designed a poster advertising the exhibition that was deemed to be too daring for such a staid, international show (fig. 2.45). Like his Darmstadt poster, this one features an allegorical figure of leadership in the arts. Here, in a clear sign of Behrens's embrace of classicism, the figure reproduces the grand Roman imperial motif of a mounted rider. Both the rider and horse are simplified to fit into an abstract geometric scheme (note the right angle formed by the horse's head and mane), replicating the box that contains them. The subdued text is separate from the image, and is notable only for its muscular "T," which is compressed by neighboring letters on both sides—an example of spacing between letters done for decorative effect. The bar of the "T" stands out in such a way that it reproduces the right angle of the figure's torch-bearing arm, integrating text and image. The rejection of Behrens's poster is representative of the desire by the industrialists who supported the Werkbund to rid the organization of its more daring styles and their practitioners. The art historian Mark Jazombeck has asserted that the Werkbund after 1910 sought to create a national identity that would conform to the rather conservative tastes of the German bourgeoisie.

   As discussed in the next chapter, by 1910 Art Nouveau was in decline. Its demise was ensured by the social changes wrought during the First World War (1914-18). Art Nouveau had really become a widespread style only in the graphic arts, because many of the best works in other media, while intended for mass production, were exorbitantly expensive to produce and therefore unsuited to mass manufacture. Art Nouveau would be rediscovered by collectors in the middle of the twentieth century, with exhibitions held in Zurich in 1952, London in 1952, and New York in 1960.

 

2.40 Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, Assembly Hall, Berlin, 1908-09.

2.41 Peter Behrens, Behrens-Antiqua Typeface, 1908.

2.42 Peter Behrens, Electric Tea Kettle, 1909.

2.43 Peter Behrens, AEG Lamp, 1910

2.44 Peter Behrens, Behrens-Schrift Typeface, 1901.

2.45 Peter Behrens, Deutscher Werkbund, 1914.
Poster for the Exhibition "Deutscher Werkbund."
V&A Picture Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London