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Beardsley
The Dancer's Reward
see also:
Aubrey
Beardsley
Beardsley's
Vision:
Salome
Arturian
Legend
Lysistrata
True History
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The New Style
The new artistic language was based on an emphasis on "line-force'',
which, according to the Belgian painter and architect Henri van
de Velde, held the energy of the person that produced it. Part
of its appeal was the desire to fulfil a fundamental theoretical
principle of Modernism: the application of the same aesthetic
criteria to all aspects of industrial production. From construction
to cabinet-making, from ceramics to fashion, and from graphic design
to wrought-iron work, the functional was combined with the
decorative so that useful items could also be beautiful. The middle
classes of modern society, rapidly gaining in economic status, now
looked for artistic quality in the industrial products that they
purchased. In the field of painting, they favoured organic and
naturalistic themes, which were expressed through a new relationship
between line and surface. Linear and curvilinear arabesques and
cool, transparent colours made up compositions based on undulating
rhythms in asymmetrical patterns. The thickness of "whiplash" and "dynamographic"
lines was dependent on how much energy they were intended to hold.
Characterized as Art Nouveau, this clearly
distinguishable style influenced the many artistic movements
emerging from Post-Impressionist art, such as the
Nabis
and the
Symbolists,
in the last decade of the century. In central Europe, among the
members of the Secession, its influence resulted in works full of
emotional expression, not just basic descriptive graphics. Henri
van de Velde, English artist
Walter Crane,
the Germans
Otto Eckmann and Hermann Obrist, and, above all,
Gustav Klimt
and
Edvard Munch how decoration in art could have both
sociological and existential meanings. Noted architects, painters,
and sculptors, who had united in breakaway Secession groups,applied
themselves to the design of household objects and furniture in the
pursuit of a "global art1'. This would produce an overall harmony,
in which there was "a reciprocal assimilation of an interior
affinity" among all forms. Horta and van de Velde
in Belgium, Guimard in France,
Mackintosh in Scotland, Gaudi in Spain,
Wagner, Olbrich, and Hoffmann in Austria, and
Basile in Italy all used new techniques and materials in a
modern, international language. The style was recognizable
everywhere, even when it paid respect to local indigenous features,
which ranged from
Gothic to
Rococo, from Celtic
art to Moorish art.
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see also:
Gustav Klimt
see also:
Alphonse Mucha
"Master of Art Nouveau" |
Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907-08.
The image of the
maiden loved by Jove is elliptical in
construction and composed of a
mosaic of colours and interlaced
arabesques. Reminiscent of Byzantine artificiality,
they remove any sense
of depth and produce an effect of
symbolic abstraction.
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see also:
Wegener
Gerda
see also:
Louis Icart
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A SWEET
ART
In the first quarter of the 20th century, the influence of the
new modern art styles reached even the smallest areas of artistic
enterprise, including that of pastry-making. During the Second
Empire and then in the belle epoque, pastry-making reached a
particularly high level of artistry - the Sachertorte, a miraculous
confection invented in Vienna and exclusive to the hotel of the same
name, is still enjoyed today. The Modern style, and later
Art Deco,
had a particular influence on the decoration of pastries,
determining its overall style, range of colours, and ornamental
details. The art of pastry-making lives on in many European
countries, and the finished products are as visually pleasing and
appetizing as those that delighted gourmets a century ago. To many
devotees, the perfectly-made tart, cake, or pastry is considered
more delicate and ephemeral than any piece of pottery, its aesthetic
appearance at least as important as its taste.
Modern Art
painting, sculpture, architecture, and
graphic arts characteristic of the 20thcentury and of the
later part of the 19th century. Modern art embraces a wide
variety of movements, theories, and attitudes whose
modernism resides particularly in a tendency to reject
traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions
in an effort to create an art more in keeping with changed
social, economic, and intellectual conditions.
The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly
demarcated, but there is general agreement that it started
in 19th-century France. The paintings of Gustave Courbet,
Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening
rejection of the prevailing academic tradition and a quest
for a more naturalistic representation of the visual world.
These painters' Postimpressionist successors can be viewed
as more clearly modern in their repudiation of traditional
techniques and subject matter and their expression of a more
subjective personal vision. From about the 1890s on, a
succession of varied movements and styles arose that are the
core of modern art and that represent one of the high
points of Western visual culture. These
modern movements include Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism,
Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Suprematism,
Constructivism, Metaphysical painting, De Stijl, Dada,
Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art,
Op art, Minimal art, and Neo-Expressionism. Despite the
enormous variety seen in these movements, most of them are
characteristically modern in their investigation of the
potentials inherent within the painting medium itself for
expressing a spiritual response to the changed conditions of
life in the 20th century. These conditions include
acceleratedtechnological change, the expansion of scientific
knowledge and understanding, the seeming irrelevance of some
traditional sources of value and belief, and an expanding
awareness of non-Western cultures.
An important trend throughout the 20th
century has been that of abstract, or nonobjective,
art—i.e., art in which little or no attempt is made to
objectively reproduce or depict the appearances or forms of
objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical
world. It should also be noted that the development of
photography and of allied photomechanical techniques of
reproduction has had an obscure but certainly important
influence on the development of modern art, because these
mechanical techniques freed (or deprived) manually executed
drawing and painting of their hitherto crucial role as the
only means of accurately depicting the visible world.
Modern architecture arose out of the
rejection of revivals, classicism, eclecticism, and indeed
all adaptations of past styles to the building types of
industrializing late 19th- and 20th-century society. It also
arose out of efforts to create architectural forms and
styles that would utilize and reflect the newly available
building technologies of structural iron and steel,
reinforced concrete, and glass. Until the spread of
Postmodernism, modern architecture also implied the
rejection of the applied ornament and decoration
characteristic of premodern Western buildings. The thrust of
modern architecture has been a rigorous concentration on
buildings whose rhythmical arrangement of masses and shapes
states a geometric theme in light and shade. This
development has been closely tied to the new building types
demanded by an industrialized society, such as office
buildings housing corporate management or government
administration. Among the most important trends and
movements of modern architecture are the Chicago School,
Functionalism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, De Stijl,
the Bauhaus, the International Style, the New Brutalism, and
Postmodernism.
(Encyclopaedia
Britannica)
Art Deco
also called Style Moderne, movement in the decorative arts
and architecture that originated in the 1920s and developed
into a major style in western Europe and the United States
during the 1930s. Its name was derived from the Exposition
Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes,
held in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited.
Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion.
Its products included both individually crafted luxury items
and mass-produced wares, but, in either case, the intention
was to create a sleek and antitraditional elegance that
symbolized wealth and sophistication.
The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean
shapes, often with a “streamlined” look; ornament that is
geometric or stylized from representational forms; and
unusually varied, often expensive materials, which
frequently include man-made substances (plastics, especially
bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to
natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and
rock crystal). Though Art Deco objects were rarely
mass-produced, the characteristic features of the style
reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and
for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects
(e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and
unvaried repetition of elements).
(Encyclopaedia
Britannica)
see also:
Pin-Up Art
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Otto
Eckmann(b Hamburg, 19 Nov 1865; d
Badenweiler, 11 June 1902).
German designer, illustrator and painter. He trained as a
businessman before entering the Kunst- und Gewerbeschule in
Hamburg. He studied at the Kunst- und Gewerbeschule in
Nuremberg and from 1885 attended the Akademie der Bildenden
Künste in Munich. His early paintings are naturalistic
landscapes but around 1890 he shifted towards Symbolism
(e.g. the Four Ages of Life, 1893–4; untraced). In
1894 he decided to devote himself to the decorative arts.
Encouraged by Justus Brinckmann, a collector and museum
director, and Friedrich Deneken (later Director of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld), Eckmann studied the
Japanese woodcut collection at the Museum für Kunst und
Gewerbe, Hamburg. Using traditional Japanese techniques, he
began producing his own woodcut designs in 1895. Three
Swans on Dark Water (1895; Hamburg, Mus. Kst & Gew.)
reflects a general preoccupation with late 19th-century
music, art and literature with swans as symbolic images, and
they were a frequent motif in many of his subsequent works.
Eckmann’s woodcuts, as well as ornamental borders,
vignettes, bookplates and other graphic designs, were
illustrated in such periodicals as Deutsche Kunst und
Dekoration, Jugend and Pan. In 1899–1900
he collaborated with Karl Klingspor at Rudhardsche
Schriftgiesserei, Offenbach, to develop a new typeface named
Eckmann.
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Otto Eckmann
The Coming of Spring, tapestry, 1896
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Hermann
Obrist
(b Kilchberg, Switzerland, 23 May 1862; d
Munich, 26 Feb 1927).
Swiss artist, craftsman and teacher. After studying science
and medicine at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
(1885–7), he travelled in England and Scotland in 1887.
There the Arts and Crafts Movement influenced his decision
to turn his attentions to the applied arts. Following brief
studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Karlsruhe and an
apprenticeship as a potter, his ceramics and furniture won
gold medals at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.
In 1890 he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, before
visiting Berlin and Florence, where he experimented in
marble sculpture and established an embroidery studio in
which his own designs could be carried out; he moved his
studio to Munich in 1894.
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Hermann Obrist
Design for a Memorial
1895 |
Hermann Obrist
A Study of Moving
1895 |
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________________
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see also:
Blaine Mahlon
*
Blaine Mahlon
"Nova Venus"
see also:
Norman Lindsay
"Love on Earth"
see also:
Franz von Bayros |
Art Nouveau
(Encyclopaedia
Britannica)
ornamental style of art that flourished between about 1890and
1910 throughout Europe and the United States. Art Nouveau is
characterized by its use of a long, sinuous, organic line and
was employed most often in architecture, interior design,
jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration. It was a
deliberate attempt to create a new style, free of the imitative
historicism that dominated much of 19th-century art and design.
Art Nouveau developed first in England and soon spread to the
European continent, where it was called Jugendstil in Germany,
Sezessionstil in Austria, Stile Floreale (or Stile Liberty) in
Italy, and Modernismo (or Modernista) in Spain. The term Art
Nouveau was coined by a gallery in Paris that exhibited much of
this work.
In England the style's immediate precursors were the
Aestheticism of the illustrator
Aubrey Beardsley,
who depended heavily on the expressive quality of organic line,
and the Arts and Crafts Movement of
William Morris, who
established the importance of a vital style in the applied arts.
On the European continent, Art Nouveau was also influenced by
experiments with expressive line by the painters Paul Gauguin
and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The movement was also
partly inspired by a vogue for the linear patterns of Japanese
prints (ukiyo-e).
The distinguishing ornamental characteristic of Art Nouveau is
its undulating, asymmetrical line, often taking the form of
flower stalks and buds, vine tendrils, insect wings, and other
delicate and sinuous natural objects; the line may be elegant
and graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and whiplike
force. In the graphic arts the line subordinates all other
pictorial elements—form, texture, space, and colour—to its own
decorative effect. In architecture and the other plastic arts,
the whole of the three-dimensional form becomes engulfed in the
organic, linear rhythm, creating a fusion between structure and
ornament. Architecture particularly shows this synthesis of
ornament and structure; a liberal combination of
materials—ironwork, glass, ceramic, and brickwork—was employed,
for example, in the creation of unified interiors in which
columns and beams became thick vines with spreading tendrils and
windows became both openings for light and air and membranous
outgrowths of the organic whole. This approach was directly
opposed to the traditional architectural values of reason and
clarity of structure.
There were a great number of artists and designers who worked in
the Art Nouveau style. Some of the more prominent were the
Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie
Mackintosh, who specialized in a predominantly geometric
line and particularly influenced the Austrian Sezessionstil; the
Belgian architects Henry van de Velde and Victor Horta,
whose extremely sinuous and delicate structures influenced the
French architect Hector Guimard, another important
figure; the American glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany;
the French furniture and ironwork designer Louis Majorelle;
the Czechoslovakian graphic designer-artist Alphonse Mucha;
the French glass and jewelry designer René Lalique; the American
architect Louis Henry Sullivan, who used plantlike Art
Nouveau ironwork to decorate his traditionally structured
buildings; and the Spanish architect and sculptor Antonio
Gaudí, perhaps the most original artist of the movement, who
went beyond dependence on line to transform buildings into
curving, bulbous, brightly coloured, organic constructions.
After 1910 Art Nouveau appeared old-fashioned and limited and
was generally abandoned as a distinct decorative style. It was
important, however, in moving toward the 20th-century aesthetic
of unity of design.
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Henri van de Velde
Poster for a Tropon food product, 1898
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Henri van de Velde
The work of Henri van de Velde (1863-1957), Belgian painter,
architect, theorist, and designer of furniture and objets d'art,
bore the same marks of dynamism and abstraction found in compatriot
Victor Horta's final works. He was the chief continental advocate of
the ideas of
William Morris, sharing the search for a clear style
with rational structures and similar concerns for the role of the
artist in society. Van de Velde strongly supported the need to match
art with industry, but his emphasis on the aesthetic value of this
marriage meant that he did not believe in mass production. His
contributions to the decorative arts - from door handles to complete
interior plans for houses - mainly featured ribbonlike, sinuous lines
bordering voids. The technique was dominated by a nervous charge
that produced a synthetic and dynamic interpretation of the
"whiplash" effect.
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Henri van de Velde
Garden in Kalmhout
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Van De Velde
(born April 3, 1863, Antwerp, Belg.
-
died Oct. 25, 1957, Zürich, Switz.)
In full Henry Clemens Van De Velde Belgian architect and teacher who
ranks with his compatriot Victor Horta as an originator of the Art
Nouveau style, characterized by longsinuous lines derived from
naturalisticforms.
By designing furniture and interiors for the Paris art galleries of
Samuel Bing in 1896, van de Velde was responsible for bringing the Art
Nouveau style to Paris. Buthe was interested not so much in the style as
in the philosophy of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in
England. Van de Velde's most vital contributions to modern design were
made as a teacher in Germany, where his name became known through the
exhibition of furnished interiors at Dresden in 1897.
In 1902 he went to Weimar as artistic adviser to the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar.
There he reorganized the Kunstgewerbeschule (arts-and-crafts school) and
the academy of fine art and thus laid the foundations for Walter Gropius'
amalgamation of the two bodies into the Bauhaus in1919. Like the
progressive German designers at the time, van de Velde was connected
with the Deutscher Werkbund, and he designed the theatre for the
Werkbund Exposition in Cologne in 1914.
Despite official appointments in Belgium, van de Velde after 1918 made
no further contributions to architecture or design.A valuable extract
from his Memoirs (1891–1901) was published in the Architectural Review,
112:143–148 (September 1952).
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Henry van de Velde
Weimar Academy of Fine Arts
1907 |
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Henri van de Velde
Chaise
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Henri van de Velde
Banquette
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 Henri van de Velde
Candelabra
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Henri van de Velde
Ecritoire et fauteuil
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Henri van de Velde
Hotel "Otlet", 1894
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VAN DE VELDE AND THE "SPEAKING LINE"
Of all the Modernist architects, Henri van de Velde was the one who
best translated and put into practice the theories of Einfuhlung to
give meaning to his work. He based his designs on the principle that
every part must satisfy an aspect of the mind: one element would
induce tranquility, another excitement, another surprise, and
another relaxation. In a series of essays written between 1902 and
1903, van de Velde discussed the concept of the "speaking line",
which he claimed to be a feature distinguishing every historical
period and every civilization. He maintained that the slightest of
movements, the subtlest change in rhythm, and the smallest variation
in the timing or distance of emphasis were
all responses to specific moods or states of mind. He defined the
modern line as the malleable and elastic product flowing from a
primitive current of energy. This was such a tangible and impatient
force that it would not allow anything to get in between its points
of departure and its final objective.
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Interior of the Paris shop La Maison Moderne, designed for Julius Meier
Graefe, 1898
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Victor Horta
Hotel van Etvelde, Brussels
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Victor Horta
born Jan. 6, 1861, Ghent -
died Sept. 8, 1947, Brussels
an outstanding architect of the Art Nouveau style, who ranks with Henry
van de Velde and Paul Hankar as a pioneer of modern Belgian
architecture.
Trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, 1876–81, Horta
became a pupil of the Neoclassical architect Alphonse Balat. His first
independent building, the four-storied Hotel Tassel in Brussels
(1892–93), was among the first continental examples of Art Nouveau,
although it incorporated Neo-Gothic and Neo-Rococo stylistic elements.
An important feature was its octagonal hall with a staircase leading to
various levels. The curved line, characteristic of the Art Nouveau
style, was used on the facade and also in the interior. Other buildings
in Brussels in his rich, elegant style are Hotel Solvay (1895–1900),
notable for the plastic treatment of its facade, and Hotel Winssingers
(1895–96), as well as his own house on the rue Americaine (1898). His
chiefwork is the Maison du Peuple, Brussels (1896–99), which was the
first structure in Belgium to have a largely iron and glass facade. In
its auditorium the iron roof beams are both structural and decorative.
After 1900 Horta simplified his style, using decoration more sparingly
and eliminating exposed iron. In 1912 he became the director of the
academy and designed the Palais des Beaux-Arts (1922–28) in a simple and
severe classical style; his last major undertaking was the central
railway station in Brussels, begun just before World War II.
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Victor Horta
Tassel House, Brussels
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Victor Horta
Staircase of the Tassel House
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Victor Horta
Tassel House, Brussels
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