PRESTELMUNICH LONDON NEW YORK

NORBERT WOLF

PRESTELMUNICH LONDON NEW YORK

NORBERT WOLF

12 INTRODUCTION

14 I THE NEW STYLE: AN APPROACH 18 ART LUXURY—LUXURY ART

20 THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

23 A NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHT

25 LUXURY FASHION AND REFORM DRESS

30 “MOBILIZING INWARDNESS” OR THE

BREAK WITH THE STATUS QUO

32 SELF-PROMOTION: THE ART MAGAZINES

36 II PROBLEMS OF STYLE

40 VISIONS OF UNITY AND SPIRITUALIZATIONS

41 YOUTH—AWAKENING

46 “SACRED SPRING”

59 TOTAL WORKS OF ART

62 A CONSCIOUSNESS OF STYLE

64 “RINASCI”

68 III THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF STYLE

70 THE CULT OF BEAUTY

71 THE BEAUTY OF WOMEN

78 THE MAGIC OF JEWELRY

84 SYNESTHESIA

85 BUILT SYMPHONIES

87 PAINTED MUSIC AND DANCED ARABESQUES

98 ORNAMENTS AND LINES

99 POLARIZATIONS

106 JAPONISM

110 IV PRELUDES

114 THE ENGLISH PATH

115 FROM BLAKE TO BEARDSLEY

120 FROM RUSKIN TO THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

121 WILLIAM MORRIS, THE PRE-RAPHAELITES,

AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

126 THE FRENCH PROPHETS

127 TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

128 GAUGUIN AND THE NABIS

132 IN THE ORBIT OF SYMBOLISM

136 V EVERYWHERE AN

AWAKENING: THE GREAT

CENTERS OF ART NOUVEAU

140 GREAT BRITAIN

141 GLASGOW AND MACKINTOSH

148 FRANCE

149 PARIS

149 La Maison Bing

150 Guimard

153 Mucha

154 GALLÉ AND THE ÉCOLE DE NANCY

160 BELGIUM

161 HENRY VAN DE VELDE: THE HOUSE IN UCCLE

162 VICTOR HORTA

166 THE NETHERLANDS

168 SPAIN

169 ANTONI GAUDÍ

172 GERMANY

173 BERLIN AND WORPSWEDE

177 MUNICH

179 THE ARTISTS OF THE DARMSTADT MATHILDENHÖHE

180 Joseph Maria Olbrich

182 Peter Behrens

183 HAGEN, WEIMAR AND VAN DE VELDE

188 AUSTRIA

189 THE WIENER WERKSTÄTTE

190 Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser

194 THE UNITED STATES

195 NEW YORK AND TIFFANY

197 CHICAGO AND SULLIVAN

200 VI IMAGE SYSTEMS 204 FRANZ VON STUCK

214 GUSTAV KLIMT

224 FERDINAND HODLER

232 EDVARD MUNCH

238 VII ART NOUVEAU AND THE AVANTGARDE

240 THE PARADIGM OF ARCHITECTURE

241 VIENNA: BETWEEN RINGSTRASSE

AND “WHITE CITY”

241 Otto Wagner

246 Adolf Loos

252 THE CASTING OUT OF ORNAMENT

256 THE PARADIGM OF PAINTING

257 František Kupka

257 Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter

262 Piet Mondrian and De Stijl

266 VIII CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTS 268 BETWEEN REALITY AND UTOPIA

272 THE SEMANTICS OF DESIGN

276 THE REVIVAL OF ART NOUVEAU

282 APPENDICES

290 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

295 INDEX OF NAMES

12 INTRODUCTION

14 I THE NEW STYLE: AN APPROACH 18 ART LUXURY—LUXURY ART

20 THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

23 A NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHT

25 LUXURY FASHION AND REFORM DRESS

30 “MOBILIZING INWARDNESS” OR THE

BREAK WITH THE STATUS QUO

32 SELF-PROMOTION: THE ART MAGAZINES

36 II PROBLEMS OF STYLE

40 VISIONS OF UNITY AND SPIRITUALIZATIONS

41 YOUTH—AWAKENING

46 “SACRED SPRING”

59 TOTAL WORKS OF ART

62 A CONSCIOUSNESS OF STYLE

64 “RINASCI”

68 III THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF STYLE

70 THE CULT OF BEAUTY

71 THE BEAUTY OF WOMEN

78 THE MAGIC OF JEWELRY

84 SYNESTHESIA

85 BUILT SYMPHONIES

87 PAINTED MUSIC AND DANCED ARABESQUES

98 ORNAMENTS AND LINES

99 POLARIZATIONS

106 JAPONISM

110 IV PRELUDES

114 THE ENGLISH PATH

115 FROM BLAKE TO BEARDSLEY

120 FROM RUSKIN TO THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

121 WILLIAM MORRIS, THE PRE-RAPHAELITES,

AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

126 THE FRENCH PROPHETS

127 TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

128 GAUGUIN AND THE NABIS

132 IN THE ORBIT OF SYMBOLISM

136 V EVERYWHERE AN

AWAKENING: THE GREAT

CENTERS OF ART NOUVEAU

140 GREAT BRITAIN

141 GLASGOW AND MACKINTOSH

148 FRANCE

149 PARIS

149 La Maison Bing

150 Guimard

153 Mucha

154 GALLÉ AND THE ÉCOLE DE NANCY

160 BELGIUM

161 HENRY VAN DE VELDE: THE HOUSE IN UCCLE

162 VICTOR HORTA

166 THE NETHERLANDS

168 SPAIN

169 ANTONI GAUDÍ

172 GERMANY

173 BERLIN AND WORPSWEDE

177 MUNICH

179 THE ARTISTS OF THE DARMSTADT MATHILDENHÖHE

180 Joseph Maria Olbrich

182 Peter Behrens

183 HAGEN, WEIMAR AND VAN DE VELDE

188 AUSTRIA

189 THE WIENER WERKSTÄTTE

190 Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser

194 THE UNITED STATES

195 NEW YORK AND TIFFANY

197 CHICAGO AND SULLIVAN

200 VI IMAGE SYSTEMS 204 FRANZ VON STUCK

214 GUSTAV KLIMT

224 FERDINAND HODLER

232 EDVARD MUNCH

238 VII ART NOUVEAU AND THE AVANTGARDE

240 THE PARADIGM OF ARCHITECTURE

241 VIENNA: BETWEEN RINGSTRASSE

AND “WHITE CITY”

241 Otto Wagner

246 Adolf Loos

252 THE CASTING OUT OF ORNAMENT

256 THE PARADIGM OF PAINTING

257 František Kupka

257 Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter

262 Piet Mondrian and De Stijl

266 VIII CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTS 268 BETWEEN REALITY AND UTOPIA

272 THE SEMANTICS OF DESIGN

276 THE REVIVAL OF ART NOUVEAU

282 APPENDICES

290 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

295 INDEX OF NAMES

13

12

Art Nouveau cannot be presumed to have the same degree of art historical and cultural histori-cal signifi cance as, for example, Impressionism or Expressionism. For this reason I will approach its origins and historical development as carefully as possible, that is to say as impartially as possible.

CHAPTER I concerns phenomena linked with the style’s “self-promotion.” Did it react to the modern world of consumerism with what Walter Benjamin called a “mobilization of inwardness” or did it place priority on an attempt to avoid being clois-tered off from the world and rather to oppose the contemporary industrialized world?

CHAPTER II seeks to clarify a problem rooted in the contemporary terms “Art Nouveau,” “Jugendstil,”

“Modern Style,” and so on: whether the self-image expressed in these gives us the right, from the per-spective of art historical scholarship, to similarly speak of a “style.” I believe that a comparison with the paradigm of Renaissance style permits impor-tant conclusions to be drawn, which additionally illuminate Art Nouveau’s penchant for the Gesamt-kunstwerk, or “total” work of art.

The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk also creates a transition to the idea of the “physiognomy” of style, discussed in CHAPTER III, whose most impor-tant features lie in the all-encompassing cult of beauty (which proves itself obsolete in the further course of the twentieth century), in the striving for synesthetic harmony, and in the immense signifi -cance of ornament and decoration.

In order to classify these qualities within the his-torical development, CHAPTER IV introduces those nineteenth-century artistic movements that led

to Art Nouveau or that closely touched upon it, in particular Symbolism.

CHAPTER V is devoted to the main centers of the style and their artistic exponents, with the excep-tion of four outstanding painters for whom I reserve a special chapter, which follows.

CHAPTER VI examines the works and impact of Franz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, and Edvard Munch. It also returns to the question raised previously of whether the art form of paint-ing must be excluded from Art Nouveau; whether, that is, Art Nouveau is realized only in the crafts and in architecture.

CHAPTER VII deals with the relationship between Art Nouveau and the Functionalism of the early twentieth century, which sought to allow art to be absorbed into everyday usefulness and thus to dispense with “superfl uous” decoration. The apologists for an ornament-free art categorically condemned Art Nouveau as a cosmetic aesthetic of repression, as a fundamental self-delusion and cultural illusion; was this condemnation based upon appropriate premises?

CHAPTER VIII returns to this problem in a resumptive look back at the history of Art Nouveau and in light of its revival, which began a couple of decades ago (“metaphor of a utopian hope”—see below).

Two positions, which I single out from the litera-ture, offer extremely contrasting perspectives on Art Nouveau, which ventured the attempt—a late one in terms of cultural history—of combining intrinsically artistic forms, but also fashion, dance, the culture of eating, and an environment suit-

able for children, into a style of life and of binding these to an ideal.

The fi rst sees the new movement, which began toward the end of the nineteenth century, in terms of cultural psychology, and locates its guiding image in Narcissistic self-love: “Man is never less immedi-ate than when he seeks to bring forth the immediate expression of himself. The idea of Jugendstil [as con-temporary Germans termed Art Nouveau] was to surround people, in fact the era in its entirety … with nothing but refl ections of their own inner selves … Narcissus died because he lost himself in his own refl ection.”1 According to this view, Art Nou-veau’s “autism,” its aesthetic self-refl ection in a mass society, necessarily led to its swift conclusion.

The second interpretation, which could title itself “How Modernism Learned to Walk,” locates the failure of Art Nouveau not in its Narcissism, but rather in the opposing attempt, namely in its effort “to bring about a reconciliation of conven-tional expectations about art with the phenomena of the technological age,” and especially with the driving impulses of technocratic motion. “The fact that something like this was possibly a self-con-tradiction can be suspected, but it became certain fi rst through Jugendstil. This was surely painful; its continuing popularity can therefore only be interpreted as the irrational desire to repeatedly delay this moment of realization. For this reason Jugendstil will … probably live on forever as the metaphor of a utopian hope.”2

Obviously, the organizational structure of this book necessarily ignores a whole array of points: in par-ticular technological aspects and questions of pro-duction technology have been set aside, for example in the case of decorative glass and furniture, just as has a listing of factory, workshops, and so on. Nor is

there any intention to list designers, artists, and their works anywhere near completely.3

The present book thus investigates fundamental aspects. It raises, not least, the question of whether one must presuppose an “inborn” failure on the part of Art Nouveau, or whether this assumption is not the result of an overly narrow avant-garde view, into whose coordinates “art nouveau” does not quite fi t.

These objectives simultaneously declare what the book does not aim to achieve: It is not one of that large group of publications that organize the development of Art Nouveau chronologically or in terms of art as a whole. Only chapter VII follows this model, with the intention of making it possible to glean synoptic information of undoubted signifi -cance. But all the other chapters examine the fun-damental problems with which Art Nouveau saw itself confronted in the historical and socio-cultural context of the epochal threshold around 1900.

In order to keep the bibliography within bounds, I have limited myself to important works that are relatively easily accessible to the reader. I also sought to set limits to the footnotes by generally citing only quotations or particularly important sources of ideas from the literature. As a rule I have avoided listing again in the footnotes publications already in the bibliography that clearly deal with concrete artists, factual matters, and so on. This limitation should not lead the reader to falsely pre-sume that my investigations are not indebted to all the publications mentioned.

In addition I would like to thank Stefanie Penck of Prestel Verlag, who supported this project from the very beginning; Anita Dahlinger for her astute and thorough image research; and not least Eckhard Hollmann, whose editorial supervision of the text was performed with reliable and seasoned diligence.

INTRODUCTION

13

12

Art Nouveau cannot be presumed to have the same degree of art historical and cultural histori-cal signifi cance as, for example, Impressionism or Expressionism. For this reason I will approach its origins and historical development as carefully as possible, that is to say as impartially as possible.

CHAPTER I concerns phenomena linked with the style’s “self-promotion.” Did it react to the modern world of consumerism with what Walter Benjamin called a “mobilization of inwardness” or did it place priority on an attempt to avoid being clois-tered off from the world and rather to oppose the contemporary industrialized world?

CHAPTER II seeks to clarify a problem rooted in the contemporary terms “Art Nouveau,” “Jugendstil,”

“Modern Style,” and so on: whether the self-image expressed in these gives us the right, from the per-spective of art historical scholarship, to similarly speak of a “style.” I believe that a comparison with the paradigm of Renaissance style permits impor-tant conclusions to be drawn, which additionally illuminate Art Nouveau’s penchant for the Gesamt-kunstwerk, or “total” work of art.

The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk also creates a transition to the idea of the “physiognomy” of style, discussed in CHAPTER III, whose most impor-tant features lie in the all-encompassing cult of beauty (which proves itself obsolete in the further course of the twentieth century), in the striving for synesthetic harmony, and in the immense signifi -cance of ornament and decoration.

In order to classify these qualities within the his-torical development, CHAPTER IV introduces those nineteenth-century artistic movements that led

to Art Nouveau or that closely touched upon it, in particular Symbolism.

CHAPTER V is devoted to the main centers of the style and their artistic exponents, with the excep-tion of four outstanding painters for whom I reserve a special chapter, which follows.

CHAPTER VI examines the works and impact of Franz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, and Edvard Munch. It also returns to the question raised previously of whether the art form of paint-ing must be excluded from Art Nouveau; whether, that is, Art Nouveau is realized only in the crafts and in architecture.

CHAPTER VII deals with the relationship between Art Nouveau and the Functionalism of the early twentieth century, which sought to allow art to be absorbed into everyday usefulness and thus to dispense with “superfl uous” decoration. The apologists for an ornament-free art categorically condemned Art Nouveau as a cosmetic aesthetic of repression, as a fundamental self-delusion and cultural illusion; was this condemnation based upon appropriate premises?

CHAPTER VIII returns to this problem in a resumptive look back at the history of Art Nouveau and in light of its revival, which began a couple of decades ago (“metaphor of a utopian hope”—see below).

Two positions, which I single out from the litera-ture, offer extremely contrasting perspectives on Art Nouveau, which ventured the attempt—a late one in terms of cultural history—of combining intrinsically artistic forms, but also fashion, dance, the culture of eating, and an environment suit-

able for children, into a style of life and of binding these to an ideal.

The fi rst sees the new movement, which began toward the end of the nineteenth century, in terms of cultural psychology, and locates its guiding image in Narcissistic self-love: “Man is never less immedi-ate than when he seeks to bring forth the immediate expression of himself. The idea of Jugendstil [as con-temporary Germans termed Art Nouveau] was to surround people, in fact the era in its entirety … with nothing but refl ections of their own inner selves … Narcissus died because he lost himself in his own refl ection.”1 According to this view, Art Nou-veau’s “autism,” its aesthetic self-refl ection in a mass society, necessarily led to its swift conclusion.

The second interpretation, which could title itself “How Modernism Learned to Walk,” locates the failure of Art Nouveau not in its Narcissism, but rather in the opposing attempt, namely in its effort “to bring about a reconciliation of conven-tional expectations about art with the phenomena of the technological age,” and especially with the driving impulses of technocratic motion. “The fact that something like this was possibly a self-con-tradiction can be suspected, but it became certain fi rst through Jugendstil. This was surely painful; its continuing popularity can therefore only be interpreted as the irrational desire to repeatedly delay this moment of realization. For this reason Jugendstil will … probably live on forever as the metaphor of a utopian hope.”2

Obviously, the organizational structure of this book necessarily ignores a whole array of points: in par-ticular technological aspects and questions of pro-duction technology have been set aside, for example in the case of decorative glass and furniture, just as has a listing of factory, workshops, and so on. Nor is

there any intention to list designers, artists, and their works anywhere near completely.3

The present book thus investigates fundamental aspects. It raises, not least, the question of whether one must presuppose an “inborn” failure on the part of Art Nouveau, or whether this assumption is not the result of an overly narrow avant-garde view, into whose coordinates “art nouveau” does not quite fi t.

These objectives simultaneously declare what the book does not aim to achieve: It is not one of that large group of publications that organize the development of Art Nouveau chronologically or in terms of art as a whole. Only chapter VII follows this model, with the intention of making it possible to glean synoptic information of undoubted signifi -cance. But all the other chapters examine the fun-damental problems with which Art Nouveau saw itself confronted in the historical and socio-cultural context of the epochal threshold around 1900.

In order to keep the bibliography within bounds, I have limited myself to important works that are relatively easily accessible to the reader. I also sought to set limits to the footnotes by generally citing only quotations or particularly important sources of ideas from the literature. As a rule I have avoided listing again in the footnotes publications already in the bibliography that clearly deal with concrete artists, factual matters, and so on. This limitation should not lead the reader to falsely pre-sume that my investigations are not indebted to all the publications mentioned.

In addition I would like to thank Stefanie Penck of Prestel Verlag, who supported this project from the very beginning; Anita Dahlinger for her astute and thorough image research; and not least Eckhard Hollmann, whose editorial supervision of the text was performed with reliable and seasoned diligence.

INTRODUCTION

ITHE NEW

STYLE: AN APPROACH

ITHE NEW

STYLE: AN APPROACH

Harry Graf Kessler, too, at the end of the nineteenth century, deemed the cooperation between “high” and “applied” art as a gain for the latter: Now, he enthusiastically stated, “for the fi rst time, the applied arts [participate] in the mystical radiance that has always transfi gured the great art, architecture, sculpture, and painting. While insurmountable obstacles kept them [the cultural pioneers; N. W.] for the time being away from the design of practical life …, in art the adaptation to the new feeling for life met with the weakest resistance. For this reason, it was there that the profound transformation from old to new human being fi rst manifested itself.”8

Clearly then, the amount of avant-garde power one attributes to the new style—and which kind of power—is a function of what one discursively subsumes under it or “expects” from it. Henry Wilson’s design for the Ladbroke Grove Free Library in London in 1890–91 has been described by several architectural historians as the earliest example of the new style—of Art Nou-veau—in Europe, an assessment rejected by Tim Benton, however, for it is based solely on a small number of superfi cial decorative elements.9 In the fi eld of painting, long before Kandinsky, experi-ments conducted with ornamental abstraction in the style of Henry van de Velde’s image Abstract Plants (Abstrakte Pß anzenkomposition) of 1893 (fi g. right) had been considered incunabula of the new style. While researchers generally date its begin-nings to the 1890s, the chronology of its closing stages presents signifi cant problems.

Laird M. Easton postulates three formal prem-ises of Art Nouveau. These consist, fi rst, in the rejection of the spatial illusionism that was an essential formal tool of the academic art of the nineteenth century; second, in ornament as a replacement for naturalistic representational elements: with the help of complex rhythms, the ornamental principle is suffused by sym-metrically arranged and frieze-like sequences, even in the case of subject matter with an unavoidably object-like quality; and third, in the dictates of the line, which, in extreme cases,

led to organic or zoomorphic “growths” as in the work of Antoni Gaudí (compare pp. 52/53 and 168ff.). The playfully fl amboyant version, Easton believed, invited parody, thus prompt-ing its imminent demise. Easton thus concurs with those authors who place the death of Art Nouveau in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. Following upon fl oral Art Nouveau, a movement emerged that was liberated from the stream of ornament, and was practiced by artists such as Henry van de Velde, Charles Ren-nie Mackintosh, and Josef Hoffmann.10 But with this, Easton claims, Art Nouveau had reached its conclusion, for now began a radically “orna-ment-free” and technical design, which, via Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, and others, led to the German Bauhaus or, in the US, to the Functionalist building style of Louis Henry Sul-livan and Frank Lloyd Wright.11

A minority of scholars sees the formal con-trast just described as arising genetically from Art Nouveau, as two sides of one and the same coin, so to speak, and sees this matrix as remaining in effect at least into the years of the First World War. Later chapters will attempt to show why I share this view.

17

16

PLANTS ARE ORGANIZED BEINGS, POSSESSED OF A POWER OF GROWTH. Christopher Dresser, 1859

WHAT IMPEDES THE ENGLISH IS THEIR INABILITY TO FREE THEMSELVES FROM THE FLOWER.Julius Meyer-Graefe, 1896

The English designer Christopher Dresser4 began teaching at the design school of London’s South Kensington Museum, today’s Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1859. That same year he published his book Unity in Variety. Deduced from the Veg-etable Kingdom in London. On the very fi rst page can be found the sentence quoted in the epigraph above, which ultimately relates all individual forms of vegetation back to essential

“lines of life.”It was just this clinging to plant-based orna-

ment by the English applied arts that became the subject of criticism by German art writer Julius Meier-Graefe on page 77 of volume 1, book 2 of the magazine Dekorative Kunst. To his mind, the dominance of the “fl ower” obstructed the forward-looking path of the “pure” line, freed from mimetic functions. What Meier-Graefe might have meant in 1896 by linear “emancipa-tion” can be seen in a dust jacket designed three years earlier by Henry van de Velde for a volume of Max Elskamp poems entitled Salutations, dont d’angéliques (fi g. bottom). A comparison of its decoration with that of a dust jacket designed by Aubrey Beardsley in 1893/94 for Le Morte d’ Arthur(fi g. bottom) makes it clear that, although van de Velde too draws upon natural models, the Belgian

artist sees the fl ow of line as the formal echo of a non-objective, poetical sentiment and as a result abstracts it much more severely.

Henry van de Velde was one of the most impor-tant representatives of a new style, one that understood itself as the beacon of a new cultural era. In 1902 it made its impressive collective appearance on the international stage: With its motto “Le Arti Decorative Internazionali Del Nuovo Secolo,” the great decorative arts show in Turin brought together products from America, Eng-land, Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Den-mark, Holland, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Hun-gary, and the host country Italy.5 The exponents represented all possible design options, ones that would have pleased someone like Meier-Graefe as well as ones that abandoned themselves unreserv-edly to a horror vacui of fl oral ornament. Self-cel-ebratory ostentation, which carried forward the bourgeois historicism and exoticism of the previ-ous years clothed in a new “stylistic dress”—and that not infrequently crossed the line into kitsch—encountered an unadorned formalism that even today is still considered “classically” modern.

The new aesthetic, to which a different nomen-clature was applied in each country, is considered by some art historians to be the last unifi ed style since the Baroque; by others, however, it is seen as a “non-style,” since allegedly any common design criteria manifested themselves only in architecture and the applied arts, but not in painting or sculpture. Klaus-Jürgen Sembach wrote in 1990 that Art Nou-veau expressed itself only in the fi eld of the applied arts and that to transfer the stylistic term to painting was to obscure matters, since the spokesmen of the time no longer sought a “high art” but rather its abolition.6 This was diametrically opposed to the view of someone like Peter Behrens, who in 1900, phrased it as follows: “For this reason we will have a new style, our own style in everything we create. The style of an era does not refer to specifi c forms in some specifi c type of art. ... The style ... symbolizes the total feeling, the entire attitude to life of an era and manifests itself only in the universe of all the arts.”7

HENRY VAN DE VELDEABSTRACT PLANTS, 1893MIXED MEDIARIJKSMUSEUM KRÖLLER-MÜLLER, OTTERLO

CARLO BUGATTICHAIR, TABLE, AND “THRONE” CHAIR, c. 1900PAINTED WOOD, EMBOSSED BRASS FITTINGS, AND METAL INLAYSCHAIR HEIGHT: 86.5 CM, TABLE HEIGHT: 76.5 CM, “THRONE” CHAIR HEIGHT: 154.5 CMSOTHEBY’S, LONDON

HENRY VAN DE VELDEDUST JACKET FOR “SALUTATIONS, DONT D’ANGÉLIQUES,” BY MAX ELSKAMP, 1893LWL-LANDESMUSEUM FÜR KUNST UND KULTUR-GESCHICHTE, MÜNSTER

AUBREY BEARDSLEYCOVER FOR “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR,” 1893/94MUSEUM FÜR KUNST UND GEWERBE, HAMBURG

Harry Graf Kessler, too, at the end of the nineteenth century, deemed the cooperation between “high” and “applied” art as a gain for the latter: Now, he enthusiastically stated, “for the fi rst time, the applied arts [participate] in the mystical radiance that has always transfi gured the great art, architecture, sculpture, and painting. While insurmountable obstacles kept them [the cultural pioneers; N. W.] for the time being away from the design of practical life …, in art the adaptation to the new feeling for life met with the weakest resistance. For this reason, it was there that the profound transformation from old to new human being fi rst manifested itself.”8

Clearly then, the amount of avant-garde power one attributes to the new style—and which kind of power—is a function of what one discursively subsumes under it or “expects” from it. Henry Wilson’s design for the Ladbroke Grove Free Library in London in 1890–91 has been described by several architectural historians as the earliest example of the new style—of Art Nou-veau—in Europe, an assessment rejected by Tim Benton, however, for it is based solely on a small number of superfi cial decorative elements.9 In the fi eld of painting, long before Kandinsky, experi-ments conducted with ornamental abstraction in the style of Henry van de Velde’s image Abstract Plants (Abstrakte Pß anzenkomposition) of 1893 (fi g. right) had been considered incunabula of the new style. While researchers generally date its begin-nings to the 1890s, the chronology of its closing stages presents signifi cant problems.

Laird M. Easton postulates three formal prem-ises of Art Nouveau. These consist, fi rst, in the rejection of the spatial illusionism that was an essential formal tool of the academic art of the nineteenth century; second, in ornament as a replacement for naturalistic representational elements: with the help of complex rhythms, the ornamental principle is suffused by sym-metrically arranged and frieze-like sequences, even in the case of subject matter with an unavoidably object-like quality; and third, in the dictates of the line, which, in extreme cases,

led to organic or zoomorphic “growths” as in the work of Antoni Gaudí (compare pp. 52/53 and 168ff.). The playfully fl amboyant version, Easton believed, invited parody, thus prompt-ing its imminent demise. Easton thus concurs with those authors who place the death of Art Nouveau in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. Following upon fl oral Art Nouveau, a movement emerged that was liberated from the stream of ornament, and was practiced by artists such as Henry van de Velde, Charles Ren-nie Mackintosh, and Josef Hoffmann.10 But with this, Easton claims, Art Nouveau had reached its conclusion, for now began a radically “orna-ment-free” and technical design, which, via Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, and others, led to the German Bauhaus or, in the US, to the Functionalist building style of Louis Henry Sul-livan and Frank Lloyd Wright.11

A minority of scholars sees the formal con-trast just described as arising genetically from Art Nouveau, as two sides of one and the same coin, so to speak, and sees this matrix as remaining in effect at least into the years of the First World War. Later chapters will attempt to show why I share this view.

17

16

PLANTS ARE ORGANIZED BEINGS, POSSESSED OF A POWER OF GROWTH. Christopher Dresser, 1859

WHAT IMPEDES THE ENGLISH IS THEIR INABILITY TO FREE THEMSELVES FROM THE FLOWER.Julius Meyer-Graefe, 1896

The English designer Christopher Dresser4 began teaching at the design school of London’s South Kensington Museum, today’s Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1859. That same year he published his book Unity in Variety. Deduced from the Veg-etable Kingdom in London. On the very fi rst page can be found the sentence quoted in the epigraph above, which ultimately relates all individual forms of vegetation back to essential

“lines of life.”It was just this clinging to plant-based orna-

ment by the English applied arts that became the subject of criticism by German art writer Julius Meier-Graefe on page 77 of volume 1, book 2 of the magazine Dekorative Kunst. To his mind, the dominance of the “fl ower” obstructed the forward-looking path of the “pure” line, freed from mimetic functions. What Meier-Graefe might have meant in 1896 by linear “emancipa-tion” can be seen in a dust jacket designed three years earlier by Henry van de Velde for a volume of Max Elskamp poems entitled Salutations, dont d’angéliques (fi g. bottom). A comparison of its decoration with that of a dust jacket designed by Aubrey Beardsley in 1893/94 for Le Morte d’ Arthur(fi g. bottom) makes it clear that, although van de Velde too draws upon natural models, the Belgian

artist sees the fl ow of line as the formal echo of a non-objective, poetical sentiment and as a result abstracts it much more severely.

Henry van de Velde was one of the most impor-tant representatives of a new style, one that understood itself as the beacon of a new cultural era. In 1902 it made its impressive collective appearance on the international stage: With its motto “Le Arti Decorative Internazionali Del Nuovo Secolo,” the great decorative arts show in Turin brought together products from America, Eng-land, Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Den-mark, Holland, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Hun-gary, and the host country Italy.5 The exponents represented all possible design options, ones that would have pleased someone like Meier-Graefe as well as ones that abandoned themselves unreserv-edly to a horror vacui of fl oral ornament. Self-cel-ebratory ostentation, which carried forward the bourgeois historicism and exoticism of the previ-ous years clothed in a new “stylistic dress”—and that not infrequently crossed the line into kitsch—encountered an unadorned formalism that even today is still considered “classically” modern.

The new aesthetic, to which a different nomen-clature was applied in each country, is considered by some art historians to be the last unifi ed style since the Baroque; by others, however, it is seen as a “non-style,” since allegedly any common design criteria manifested themselves only in architecture and the applied arts, but not in painting or sculpture. Klaus-Jürgen Sembach wrote in 1990 that Art Nou-veau expressed itself only in the fi eld of the applied arts and that to transfer the stylistic term to painting was to obscure matters, since the spokesmen of the time no longer sought a “high art” but rather its abolition.6 This was diametrically opposed to the view of someone like Peter Behrens, who in 1900, phrased it as follows: “For this reason we will have a new style, our own style in everything we create. The style of an era does not refer to specifi c forms in some specifi c type of art. ... The style ... symbolizes the total feeling, the entire attitude to life of an era and manifests itself only in the universe of all the arts.”7

HENRY VAN DE VELDEABSTRACT PLANTS, 1893MIXED MEDIARIJKSMUSEUM KRÖLLER-MÜLLER, OTTERLO

CARLO BUGATTICHAIR, TABLE, AND “THRONE” CHAIR, c. 1900PAINTED WOOD, EMBOSSED BRASS FITTINGS, AND METAL INLAYSCHAIR HEIGHT: 86.5 CM, TABLE HEIGHT: 76.5 CM, “THRONE” CHAIR HEIGHT: 154.5 CMSOTHEBY’S, LONDON

HENRY VAN DE VELDEDUST JACKET FOR “SALUTATIONS, DONT D’ANGÉLIQUES,” BY MAX ELSKAMP, 1893LWL-LANDESMUSEUM FÜR KUNST UND KULTUR-GESCHICHTE, MÜNSTER

AUBREY BEARDSLEYCOVER FOR “LE MORTE D’ARTHUR,” 1893/94MUSEUM FÜR KUNST UND GEWERBE, HAMBURG

19

In his opening address at the Turin exhibition in 1902, which presented the most complete exhibi-tion of Art Nouveau worldwide, the Italian minis-ter of education and cultural affairs Nunzio Nasi acclaimed the new style as an art that would be democratic, in order to elevate the aesthetic taste of the masses to a previously unknown height, and at the same time to create new jobs.12 The emotionalism of his choice of words scarcely conceals the mercantile essence of the statement, which also makes clear why in Italy the new style was generally referred to as “lo Stile Liberty” after the Art Nouveau department store Liberty in London. Arthur Lasenby Liberty, a cunning entre-preneur, opened his department store in London’s West End in 1875; there, in addition to goods imported from the Near and Far East, he sold a collection of Orientalizing fabrics and wallpapers. Among the designers was the Christopher Dresser mentioned above. Liberty products were soon available worldwide: textiles, embroidery, carpets, furniture and fashion, silver, tin, and decorative objects. “The Liberty style” availed itself of no single design norm, but rather a design strategy aimed at exquisite products with a restrainedly modernist appearance.

The interpretation of Art Nouveau in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project stands in only appar-ent contradiction to the “commodities fetishism” of the “stile Liberty.” Benjamin worked on this philosophy of the history of the nineteenth cen-tury from 1927 until his death in 1940; it was never completed. Art Nouveau makes its appearance in this work as a paradigmatic confl ict phenom-enon of modernity: “The transfi guration of the solitary soul seems to be its goal. Individuality is its theory... It represents the fi nal attempted foray of an art besieged in its ivory tower by technol-ogy. It mobilizes all the reserves of inwardness. They fi nd their expression in the mediumistic language of lines, in the blossom as the symbol of naked, vegetative nature, opposing a technologi-cally armed environment [...].”13 In Art Nouveau, for Benjamin, established art carried out a futile rearguard action, a fi nal attempt to ennoble the

true substrata of modernity: technology and com-merce. And this at a time when, in addition to its technological achievements, it was precisely this commercial character of modernity that was becoming increasingly irrefutable—seen against this background the decorative-fantastical fl our-ishes on the Villa Ruggeri in Pesaro (fi gs opposite and bottom), for example, completed in 1902, parallel to the Turin exhibition, are indeed akin to atavistic mannerisms.

Benjamin inserted the sentence about Art Nouveau into the “exposé,” or exposition, to the Arcades Project, which he entitled “Paris, the Capi-tal of the Nineteenth Century.” Like the art of Art Nouveau, he saw the arcades—which had been built in the French metropolis in the decades after 1822 but by the time of his writing had already disappeared or become nostalgic enclaves in the cityscape—as “quintessential forms” of the Mod-ern.

Nineteenth-century tourists’ travel guides to Paris extolled these passageways—covered by iron and glass constructions and paneled in marble, cutting through entire quarters of the city—as shopping centers of industrial luxury and as objects of longing for sophisticated consumer desire. On both sides of these passageways and connecting corridors, which “are both house and street,”14 one elegant store followed the next under muted light from above. The arcades developed their greatest “radiance,” of course, in the evening, in artifi cial light: fi rst gas then later electric. At night, what “was fascinating was the fabric of the brilliance of the light, the brilliance of the commodities, and the mass of people in motion. ‘A labyrinth of brightly colored, glittering arcades like a collection of rainbow bridges in an ocean of light. A completely fairy-tale world.’”15

Like the boulevards, the arcades, too, developed into places of pleasure and strolling. “In the per-son of the fl âneur, intelligence takes to the market, intending to look at it, and in reality, neverthe-less, to fi nd a buyer. In this intermediary state … it appears as a Bohemian.”16

Admittedly, neither the arcades with their offerings of luxury goods, nor the strolling, nor

ART LUXURYLUXURY ART

GIUSEPPE BREGAVILLINO RUGGERI, 1902–07PESARO

19

In his opening address at the Turin exhibition in 1902, which presented the most complete exhibi-tion of Art Nouveau worldwide, the Italian minis-ter of education and cultural affairs Nunzio Nasi acclaimed the new style as an art that would be democratic, in order to elevate the aesthetic taste of the masses to a previously unknown height, and at the same time to create new jobs.12 The emotionalism of his choice of words scarcely conceals the mercantile essence of the statement, which also makes clear why in Italy the new style was generally referred to as “lo Stile Liberty” after the Art Nouveau department store Liberty in London. Arthur Lasenby Liberty, a cunning entre-preneur, opened his department store in London’s West End in 1875; there, in addition to goods imported from the Near and Far East, he sold a collection of Orientalizing fabrics and wallpapers. Among the designers was the Christopher Dresser mentioned above. Liberty products were soon available worldwide: textiles, embroidery, carpets, furniture and fashion, silver, tin, and decorative objects. “The Liberty style” availed itself of no single design norm, but rather a design strategy aimed at exquisite products with a restrainedly modernist appearance.

The interpretation of Art Nouveau in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project stands in only appar-ent contradiction to the “commodities fetishism” of the “stile Liberty.” Benjamin worked on this philosophy of the history of the nineteenth cen-tury from 1927 until his death in 1940; it was never completed. Art Nouveau makes its appearance in this work as a paradigmatic confl ict phenom-enon of modernity: “The transfi guration of the solitary soul seems to be its goal. Individuality is its theory... It represents the fi nal attempted foray of an art besieged in its ivory tower by technol-ogy. It mobilizes all the reserves of inwardness. They fi nd their expression in the mediumistic language of lines, in the blossom as the symbol of naked, vegetative nature, opposing a technologi-cally armed environment [...].”13 In Art Nouveau, for Benjamin, established art carried out a futile rearguard action, a fi nal attempt to ennoble the

true substrata of modernity: technology and com-merce. And this at a time when, in addition to its technological achievements, it was precisely this commercial character of modernity that was becoming increasingly irrefutable—seen against this background the decorative-fantastical fl our-ishes on the Villa Ruggeri in Pesaro (fi gs opposite and bottom), for example, completed in 1902, parallel to the Turin exhibition, are indeed akin to atavistic mannerisms.

Benjamin inserted the sentence about Art Nouveau into the “exposé,” or exposition, to the Arcades Project, which he entitled “Paris, the Capi-tal of the Nineteenth Century.” Like the art of Art Nouveau, he saw the arcades—which had been built in the French metropolis in the decades after 1822 but by the time of his writing had already disappeared or become nostalgic enclaves in the cityscape—as “quintessential forms” of the Mod-ern.

Nineteenth-century tourists’ travel guides to Paris extolled these passageways—covered by iron and glass constructions and paneled in marble, cutting through entire quarters of the city—as shopping centers of industrial luxury and as objects of longing for sophisticated consumer desire. On both sides of these passageways and connecting corridors, which “are both house and street,”14 one elegant store followed the next under muted light from above. The arcades developed their greatest “radiance,” of course, in the evening, in artifi cial light: fi rst gas then later electric. At night, what “was fascinating was the fabric of the brilliance of the light, the brilliance of the commodities, and the mass of people in motion. ‘A labyrinth of brightly colored, glittering arcades like a collection of rainbow bridges in an ocean of light. A completely fairy-tale world.’”15

Like the boulevards, the arcades, too, developed into places of pleasure and strolling. “In the per-son of the fl âneur, intelligence takes to the market, intending to look at it, and in reality, neverthe-less, to fi nd a buyer. In this intermediary state … it appears as a Bohemian.”16

Admittedly, neither the arcades with their offerings of luxury goods, nor the strolling, nor

ART LUXURYLUXURY ART

GIUSEPPE BREGAVILLINO RUGGERI, 1902–07PESARO

20

the artifi cial light are “products” of Art Nouveau. The phenomena arose somewhat earlier and as they culminated in the late nineteenth cen-tury, they characterized the cultural cocktail of the Belle Époque and the fi n de siècle in all their nuances of taste. But Art Nouveau (at least a good part of it) readily embraced these options. The Galerie Bing can be cited as a representative example.17

Frequently described in the literature as an impresario of Art Nouveau, Siegfried Bing, a native of Hamburg who became a French citi-zen in 1876, was an expert in East Asian art. On December 26, 1895—in the bustling Paris street Rue de Provence, rather than an arcade—he opened a gallery and art dealership under the business name La Maison Bing, L’Art Nouveau. And with this he created the French catchphrase for those works of art that distanced themselves from the established taste of the salons and the bourgeoisie. Bing functioned not least as the Pari-sian representative for Louis Comfort Tiffany, who in turn represented Bing’s business interests in New York. Surrounded by noble design, in Bing’s gallery the well-heeled public open to the avant-garde could buy modern bronzes and images by the Nabis (see p. 128ff.) as well as ceramics, jew-elry, textiles, and glass from the product line of his American business partner, and, in keeping with sophisticated contemporary taste, there was also an abundant offering of Japanese antiquities.

THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

Art Nouveau artists, at least the representatives of the applied arts, generally had no fear of con-tact with commerce and modern trade. The role played by the design of advertising media in the entire “Stilkunst” or “style art” of around 1900 is suffi cient evidence of this.

Advertising kiosks had been in existence since 1855. They demanded striking advertising posters rather than the provisional bills formerly posted on house walls and street corners. Improved

printing techniques offered new design possi-bilities. Color lithography (chromolithography), patented in 1837, captured the market with the emergence of the lithographic printing press beginning in 1852, and in 1891 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec hazarded the step from the graphic arts to advertising art with his earliest poster Moulin Rouge. La Goulue (fi g. opposite), revolutionizing poster design in the process and anticipating many aspects of Art Nouveau. The artistically refi ned poster pitched anything and everything: bicycles, medications, nightclubs. Moreover, it was hoped that “courting” the visitors expected at the 1900 Paris world’s fair would boost sales of the products on display. And the presence of the new style was already obligatory at that same exposi-tion universelle; Samuel Bing designed a pavilion that housed a large model home consisting of six furnished and decorated rooms.

Under the infl uence of Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret (on the latter, see p. 95), the artistic poster also made its appearance in England in 1894. During this year, for example, Dudley Hardy designed the poster for the operetta A Gaiety Girl for the Prince of Wales Theatre. But it was the Brothers Beggarstaff (a self-ironic reference to their limited income)—the Scotsman James Pryde and the Lon-don painter and woodcut artist Sir William Nich-olson—who brought the Art Nouveau poster to its high point in England. The two had trained in Paris and worked together until 1899.18

Unsurprisingly, the art of the poster prospered not only in Paris and London but in all the large European cities, such as Berlin, where, starting in 1901, to mention one fi nal name, Lucian Bernhard (actually Emil Kahn) emerged as the “creator of the modern Sachplakat, or object poster.”19

Aesthetically sophisticated advertising was not infrequently reproduced in the art magazines of the time and thus additionally “ennobled.” Henry van de Velde, for example, was commissioned by Eberhard von Bodenhausen to design all the advertising materials (until 1900) for the recently founded Tropon plant, a foodstuffs fi rm in Cologne Mühlheim. This included a poster (inci-dentally the only one van de Velde ever made),

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTRECPOSTER, “MOULIN ROUGE. LA GOULUE,” 1891COLOR LITHOGRAPH, 84 X 122 CMPRIVATE COLLECTION

20

the artifi cial light are “products” of Art Nouveau. The phenomena arose somewhat earlier and as they culminated in the late nineteenth cen-tury, they characterized the cultural cocktail of the Belle Époque and the fi n de siècle in all their nuances of taste. But Art Nouveau (at least a good part of it) readily embraced these options. The Galerie Bing can be cited as a representative example.17

Frequently described in the literature as an impresario of Art Nouveau, Siegfried Bing, a native of Hamburg who became a French citi-zen in 1876, was an expert in East Asian art. On December 26, 1895—in the bustling Paris street Rue de Provence, rather than an arcade—he opened a gallery and art dealership under the business name La Maison Bing, L’Art Nouveau. And with this he created the French catchphrase for those works of art that distanced themselves from the established taste of the salons and the bourgeoisie. Bing functioned not least as the Pari-sian representative for Louis Comfort Tiffany, who in turn represented Bing’s business interests in New York. Surrounded by noble design, in Bing’s gallery the well-heeled public open to the avant-garde could buy modern bronzes and images by the Nabis (see p. 128ff.) as well as ceramics, jew-elry, textiles, and glass from the product line of his American business partner, and, in keeping with sophisticated contemporary taste, there was also an abundant offering of Japanese antiquities.

THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

Art Nouveau artists, at least the representatives of the applied arts, generally had no fear of con-tact with commerce and modern trade. The role played by the design of advertising media in the entire “Stilkunst” or “style art” of around 1900 is suffi cient evidence of this.

Advertising kiosks had been in existence since 1855. They demanded striking advertising posters rather than the provisional bills formerly posted on house walls and street corners. Improved

printing techniques offered new design possi-bilities. Color lithography (chromolithography), patented in 1837, captured the market with the emergence of the lithographic printing press beginning in 1852, and in 1891 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec hazarded the step from the graphic arts to advertising art with his earliest poster Moulin Rouge. La Goulue (fi g. opposite), revolutionizing poster design in the process and anticipating many aspects of Art Nouveau. The artistically refi ned poster pitched anything and everything: bicycles, medications, nightclubs. Moreover, it was hoped that “courting” the visitors expected at the 1900 Paris world’s fair would boost sales of the products on display. And the presence of the new style was already obligatory at that same exposi-tion universelle; Samuel Bing designed a pavilion that housed a large model home consisting of six furnished and decorated rooms.

Under the infl uence of Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret (on the latter, see p. 95), the artistic poster also made its appearance in England in 1894. During this year, for example, Dudley Hardy designed the poster for the operetta A Gaiety Girl for the Prince of Wales Theatre. But it was the Brothers Beggarstaff (a self-ironic reference to their limited income)—the Scotsman James Pryde and the Lon-don painter and woodcut artist Sir William Nich-olson—who brought the Art Nouveau poster to its high point in England. The two had trained in Paris and worked together until 1899.18

Unsurprisingly, the art of the poster prospered not only in Paris and London but in all the large European cities, such as Berlin, where, starting in 1901, to mention one fi nal name, Lucian Bernhard (actually Emil Kahn) emerged as the “creator of the modern Sachplakat, or object poster.”19

Aesthetically sophisticated advertising was not infrequently reproduced in the art magazines of the time and thus additionally “ennobled.” Henry van de Velde, for example, was commissioned by Eberhard von Bodenhausen to design all the advertising materials (until 1900) for the recently founded Tropon plant, a foodstuffs fi rm in Cologne Mühlheim. This included a poster (inci-dentally the only one van de Velde ever made),

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTRECPOSTER, “MOULIN ROUGE. LA GOULUE,” 1891COLOR LITHOGRAPH, 84 X 122 CMPRIVATE COLLECTION

23brochures, labels, and folding boxes. Bodenhau-sen’s friend, Harry Graf Kessler, together with Julius Meier-Graefe, took on the job of printed propaganda. The poster of 1898 (fi g. opposite) received special attention. Its abstract ornamenta-tion, typographical tension between dynamism and geometry, and the symbiosis of artistic aspi-ration and industrial promotion, of individual expression and matter-of-fact information, was seen as positively revolutionary.20 Because of its artistic value, the poster was published in reduced size as a color lithograph in Pan, the most luxuri-ous German art magazine of the time; but it also appeared in the periodicals Dekorative Kunst and, in October of 1898, in L’ Art Décoratif. Van de Velde’s poster was unanimously acclaimed a high-point in the history of the medium.

Visual motifs from the Munich painter Franz von Stuck were frequently quoted in the German advertising of the early nineteenth century. The industrial product Odol, a tooth and mouth care product produced by the Lingner fi rm, copiously instrumentalized Stuck’s mythical worlds for its advertisements in the magazine Die Jugend.21 The fact that this was so easily possible, according to a biting remark by Meier-Graefe, was due to the fact that Stuck’s sphinxes looked “like waitresses at the Munich Hofbrauhaus.”22 A certain awkwardness inherent within Stuck’s combinations of naturalis-tic and symbolic elements cannot be disregarded.

But more worthy of consideration in our context is a statement concerning posters and advertising made by Karl Hauer in 1907 in the Fackel, edited by Karl Kraus: “… I am very inclined to see the artistic poster as far more pernicious and sinister than the non-artistic one. For the fi ne arts ... are being usurped by the manufacturers’ need for advertising. The fi ne artists, of whom there are far too many today and who all want to live, earn faster and better by designing advertising mate-rials than by creating mature works of art. The baron of industry today pays better and more eas-ily than court, church, noble, or art dealer. So, the painter draws up posters, advertising sheets, and picture postcards …”23

Whereas Benjamin reproached the visual arts for playing the sorcerer’s apprentice who tries to instrumentalize the “broom” of modern means of production but is unable to do so, Hauer conversely saw the danger that the modern world of commodi-ties and advertising could degrade genuine artistic value into trivial commercialized formulas..

THE NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHT

In its symbiosis with electric lighting, one of Art Nouveau’s “Promethian” central concerns—the aes-theticization of innovative technologies—yielded an exemplary result.

HENRY VAN DE VELDEPOSTER, “TROPON,” 1898COLOR LITHOGRAPH ON PAPERCALMANN & KING, LONDON

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANYTIFFANY STUDIOS TEN-LIGHT LILY TABLE LAMP, c. 1900PRIVATE COLLECTION

23brochures, labels, and folding boxes. Bodenhau-sen’s friend, Harry Graf Kessler, together with Julius Meier-Graefe, took on the job of printed propaganda. The poster of 1898 (fi g. opposite) received special attention. Its abstract ornamenta-tion, typographical tension between dynamism and geometry, and the symbiosis of artistic aspi-ration and industrial promotion, of individual expression and matter-of-fact information, was seen as positively revolutionary.20 Because of its artistic value, the poster was published in reduced size as a color lithograph in Pan, the most luxuri-ous German art magazine of the time; but it also appeared in the periodicals Dekorative Kunst and, in October of 1898, in L’ Art Décoratif. Van de Velde’s poster was unanimously acclaimed a high-point in the history of the medium.

Visual motifs from the Munich painter Franz von Stuck were frequently quoted in the German advertising of the early nineteenth century. The industrial product Odol, a tooth and mouth care product produced by the Lingner fi rm, copiously instrumentalized Stuck’s mythical worlds for its advertisements in the magazine Die Jugend.21 The fact that this was so easily possible, according to a biting remark by Meier-Graefe, was due to the fact that Stuck’s sphinxes looked “like waitresses at the Munich Hofbrauhaus.”22 A certain awkwardness inherent within Stuck’s combinations of naturalis-tic and symbolic elements cannot be disregarded.

But more worthy of consideration in our context is a statement concerning posters and advertising made by Karl Hauer in 1907 in the Fackel, edited by Karl Kraus: “… I am very inclined to see the artistic poster as far more pernicious and sinister than the non-artistic one. For the fi ne arts ... are being usurped by the manufacturers’ need for advertising. The fi ne artists, of whom there are far too many today and who all want to live, earn faster and better by designing advertising mate-rials than by creating mature works of art. The baron of industry today pays better and more eas-ily than court, church, noble, or art dealer. So, the painter draws up posters, advertising sheets, and picture postcards …”23

Whereas Benjamin reproached the visual arts for playing the sorcerer’s apprentice who tries to instrumentalize the “broom” of modern means of production but is unable to do so, Hauer conversely saw the danger that the modern world of commodi-ties and advertising could degrade genuine artistic value into trivial commercialized formulas..

THE NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHT

In its symbiosis with electric lighting, one of Art Nouveau’s “Promethian” central concerns—the aes-theticization of innovative technologies—yielded an exemplary result.

HENRY VAN DE VELDEPOSTER, “TROPON,” 1898COLOR LITHOGRAPH ON PAPERCALMANN & KING, LONDON

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANYTIFFANY STUDIOS TEN-LIGHT LILY TABLE LAMP, c. 1900PRIVATE COLLECTION

25

After Edison’s crucial improvements to the electric incandescent bulb in 1879, the fi rst central elec-tric stations in London and New York went into operation in 1882.24 The “new” light of the light bulb demanded new lighting fi xtures. Art Nouveau was ready to assist, above all the Tiffany company (fi g. p. 23). But as solitary objects in collections and muse-ums—which is how these lamps are usually expe-rienced—they are robbed of their original context and thus their intended effect. Their aim—typical of the time—of reforming the “aura” of an interior by means of light and the transparency of glass as a material, and of setting luminous accents within that interior, has been taken from them.

Louis Bell, the author of the fi rst, in the words of Schivelbusch, “light-dramaturgical treatise” (The Art of Illumination, 1902), explained that for aes-thetic reasons it could be appropriate to soften the lighting to a gentle yellow glow by decorating the lampshades accordingly. In the 1890s Tiffany imple-mented this principle to perfection by means of spe-cifi c colorations and calculated irregularities in the material structure. “By pushing the masses together before cooling, these fabulously colored glass fl uxes—which shimmer in all the colors of the spec-trum and give the most delicate nuances of color—obtain a wavy and irregular surface so that they permit the light to penetrate to different degrees, and soon denser and lighter places appear in the mass. Other effects are obtained by striking pieces out of large blocks of glass; their irregular fracture sites generate various plays of light.” (Zeitschrift für Beleuchtungswesen, 1898, no. 1, p. 9).25

Tiffany glass was also used for windows, to mute the daylight penetrating intrusively from the street into the private sphere, in a manner similar to muting the “raw” electric light. An additional goal was fi lling the aesthetically unsatisfying emp-tiness of the window with the help of colored light, in order to let the interior function as a whole, harmonized within itself.

When Tiffany sent his window The Four Sea-sons to the world’s fair in Paris in 1900, the Euro-peans immediately admired these opalescent, lead-mounted faeries on the border between banal exterior world and auratic inner world. Crit-

ics extolled the glass landscape scenes in the high-est tones. The window met with the same hymnic resonance at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo in 1901 and the International Applied Arts exhibition in Turin in 1902. Tiffany later disassem-bled the window into four parts and in 1905 had it built into his country estate Laurelton Hall on Long Island. Today the segments are part of the holdings of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum (fi gs opposite and bottom).

LUXURY FASHION AND REFORM DRESSFashion, too—and this meant primarily women’s fashion—captured the attention of Art Nouveau artists around 1900. Henry van de Velde, a trail-blazer in so many areas, thought about the ques-tion of how the clothing of the inhabitants could be matched to the interiors he had designed. In his autobiography, he retroactively (and also euphemistically) appraised his programmatic speech of August 1900 about an “ideal” (mean-ing timeless) clothing as the “fi rst fundamental encounter between qualifi ed representatives of the industrial arts and an artist.” The speech, entitled “Zur künstlerischen Hebung der Frauen-tracht” (On the Artistic Improvement of Women’s Costume), was delivered during an exhibition of modern women’s dresses created after artists’ designs; the director of the new local museum, Friedrich Deneken, had organized the exhibi-tion on the occasion of the German Dressmakers’ Show in the Krefeld Stadthalle. On display there were reform dresses that van de Velde, together with colleagues, had designed after English and Scandinavian models.

The reform dress, fi rst advocated by doctors in the 1880s and then later by the feminist move-ment as well, functioned as a foil to French haute couture, which around 1900 still dictated the body-deforming silhouette of wasp waist and pro-truding bustle. The reform dress countered this style with a loosely falling cut and dispensed with the lace-up corset; the decoration of the haute

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY“SPRING,” FROM THE STAINED-GLASS WINDOW “THE FOUR SEASONS,” c. 1899/1900THE CHARLES HOSMER MORSE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, WINTER PARK, FLORIDA

25

After Edison’s crucial improvements to the electric incandescent bulb in 1879, the fi rst central elec-tric stations in London and New York went into operation in 1882.24 The “new” light of the light bulb demanded new lighting fi xtures. Art Nouveau was ready to assist, above all the Tiffany company (fi g. p. 23). But as solitary objects in collections and muse-ums—which is how these lamps are usually expe-rienced—they are robbed of their original context and thus their intended effect. Their aim—typical of the time—of reforming the “aura” of an interior by means of light and the transparency of glass as a material, and of setting luminous accents within that interior, has been taken from them.

Louis Bell, the author of the fi rst, in the words of Schivelbusch, “light-dramaturgical treatise” (The Art of Illumination, 1902), explained that for aes-thetic reasons it could be appropriate to soften the lighting to a gentle yellow glow by decorating the lampshades accordingly. In the 1890s Tiffany imple-mented this principle to perfection by means of spe-cifi c colorations and calculated irregularities in the material structure. “By pushing the masses together before cooling, these fabulously colored glass fl uxes—which shimmer in all the colors of the spec-trum and give the most delicate nuances of color—obtain a wavy and irregular surface so that they permit the light to penetrate to different degrees, and soon denser and lighter places appear in the mass. Other effects are obtained by striking pieces out of large blocks of glass; their irregular fracture sites generate various plays of light.” (Zeitschrift für Beleuchtungswesen, 1898, no. 1, p. 9).25

Tiffany glass was also used for windows, to mute the daylight penetrating intrusively from the street into the private sphere, in a manner similar to muting the “raw” electric light. An additional goal was fi lling the aesthetically unsatisfying emp-tiness of the window with the help of colored light, in order to let the interior function as a whole, harmonized within itself.

When Tiffany sent his window The Four Sea-sons to the world’s fair in Paris in 1900, the Euro-peans immediately admired these opalescent, lead-mounted faeries on the border between banal exterior world and auratic inner world. Crit-

ics extolled the glass landscape scenes in the high-est tones. The window met with the same hymnic resonance at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo in 1901 and the International Applied Arts exhibition in Turin in 1902. Tiffany later disassem-bled the window into four parts and in 1905 had it built into his country estate Laurelton Hall on Long Island. Today the segments are part of the holdings of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum (fi gs opposite and bottom).

LUXURY FASHION AND REFORM DRESSFashion, too—and this meant primarily women’s fashion—captured the attention of Art Nouveau artists around 1900. Henry van de Velde, a trail-blazer in so many areas, thought about the ques-tion of how the clothing of the inhabitants could be matched to the interiors he had designed. In his autobiography, he retroactively (and also euphemistically) appraised his programmatic speech of August 1900 about an “ideal” (mean-ing timeless) clothing as the “fi rst fundamental encounter between qualifi ed representatives of the industrial arts and an artist.” The speech, entitled “Zur künstlerischen Hebung der Frauen-tracht” (On the Artistic Improvement of Women’s Costume), was delivered during an exhibition of modern women’s dresses created after artists’ designs; the director of the new local museum, Friedrich Deneken, had organized the exhibi-tion on the occasion of the German Dressmakers’ Show in the Krefeld Stadthalle. On display there were reform dresses that van de Velde, together with colleagues, had designed after English and Scandinavian models.

The reform dress, fi rst advocated by doctors in the 1880s and then later by the feminist move-ment as well, functioned as a foil to French haute couture, which around 1900 still dictated the body-deforming silhouette of wasp waist and pro-truding bustle. The reform dress countered this style with a loosely falling cut and dispensed with the lace-up corset; the decoration of the haute

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY“SPRING,” FROM THE STAINED-GLASS WINDOW “THE FOUR SEASONS,” c. 1899/1900THE CHARLES HOSMER MORSE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, WINTER PARK, FLORIDA

26

couture dress, with its ruffl es, sequins, and bows à la Paris, contrasted with the reform dress’s sub-dued decorative style drawn from Art Nouveau ornament. The reform dress sought to encourage the woman’s natural freedom of movement as well as bring her outfi t into harmony with the aes-thetic appearance of the environment.26

Aside from the fact that the textile industry—which depended on changes in fashion—was not exactly enthusiastic about the “timeless” dress, it was for other reasons that the reform dress never caught on in Germany. Even if the product originally had a certain appeal—like the dress designed around 1900 by Hugo Höppener, known as Fidus, for his wife (fi g. bottom left)27—its “Ger-man” plainness, if not to say lack of imagina-tion, was soon made use of polemically against the erotic refi nement of Parisian haute couture. Nationalist groups that entered the fray compared the free fall of the sturdy fabric to the fl uid garb worn by the high Gothic sculpture of Uta in the donor’s choir of Naumburg Cathedral. “Not the thrill, the tyranny of the frou-frou must form the basis of women’s clothing, but chaste simplicity.”28

Not in terms of beauty, but certainly in terms of the fashion’s commercial usefulness, the productions of the Wiener Werkstätte (see p. 189) must also be regarded as a dead end: Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill (fi g. bottom right) founded the fashion

workshop from which Vienna now exerted a lasting infl uence on Paris, especially the fashion creations of Paul Poiret. In 1917 Otto Lendecke, who had trained with Poiret, launched the fashion maga-zine Die Damenwelt. Although a mere fi ve issues appeared, these became an exquisite testimony to the Viennese fashion of the time. Even Gustav Klimt took part in designing the title pages. The style of dress, after designs by more than eighty artists, was distinguished by a forced individuality; the designs, whether hand-printed or produced by machine, sparkled with an incredible richness of invention; all the fabrics were produced in their own workshops.29

Only the dresses from the atelier of a designer like Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo could compete, if not in the range of products then certainly in the exquisiteness of their appearance.

Fortuny came from a renowned family of Span-ish artists; his parents moved to Venice in 1889. He received his artistic training in Paris with Giovanni Boldini, among others . He was a painter, photogra-pher, inventor, and passionate devotee of Richard Wagner as well as an exclusive fashion designer. From 1899 his atelier was in Venice, in the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei (today the Museo Fortuny). He fi rst garnered international attention for his stage sets, complete with elaborate projection effects, which he developed for a production of Tristan and Isolde at the Scala in Milan in 1900.30 Beginning around 1907, however, his fame rested above all

on his designs for women’s dresses, which, due to their timeless elegance, their fi ne fabrics, and conse-quently their immense price, were intended exclu-sively to appeal to the sure sense of taste of women clients from European and American high society. The greatest success was enjoyed by his Delphos gowns (fi g. right)—made of precious silk, caress-ing the body in a free fall of fi ne pleats, and often combined with a tunic or wrap, they drew, as the reference to Delphi in their name implies, upon the basic form of the ancient Greek chiton. Moreover they were splendidly colored and printed with Ori-ental or Renaissance ornament in the style of artists like William Morris (compare fi gs p. 122f.). Fortuny essentially retained this type—an overwhelmingly beautiful reform dress, as it were—unchanged, so that it is scarcely possible to date them.

These dresses and fabrics cannot without reserva-tion be classifi ed as Art Nouveau products, and yet they are close to its ideal of beauty. They were celebrated in writing by Gabriele D’Annunzio and Marcel Proust, and worn by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis (see p. 93 ff.) at several of their dance performances. They remained cult objects for decades and it was de rigueur for someone like Peggy Guggenheim, like so many Hollywood starlets interested in art, to have herself photo-graphed in an outrageously expensive Delphos robe from the Atelier Fortuny.

HUGO HÖPPENER, KNOWN AS FIDUSREFORM DRESS, c. 1900WHITE LINEN, BLACK EMBROIDERYCOLLECTION HALLERISCHES FAMILIENARCHIV, BERLIN

EDUARD JOSEF WIMMER-WISGRILLHOUSECOAT MADE FROM A SILK BY DAGOBERT PECHE, c. 1920/21MAK-AUSTRIAN MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS/CONTEMPORARY ART

MARIANO FORTUNY Y MADRAZO“DELPHOS GOWN,” c. 1920SILKKUNSTGEWERBEMUSEUM, STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN

FOLLOWING PAGES:WIENER WERKSTÄTTEPAIR OF LADIES‘ SHOES, c. 1914COLORED SILK REP, LEATHERHISTORISCHES MUSEUM DER STADT WIEN, VIENNA

26

couture dress, with its ruffl es, sequins, and bows à la Paris, contrasted with the reform dress’s sub-dued decorative style drawn from Art Nouveau ornament. The reform dress sought to encourage the woman’s natural freedom of movement as well as bring her outfi t into harmony with the aes-thetic appearance of the environment.26

Aside from the fact that the textile industry—which depended on changes in fashion—was not exactly enthusiastic about the “timeless” dress, it was for other reasons that the reform dress never caught on in Germany. Even if the product originally had a certain appeal—like the dress designed around 1900 by Hugo Höppener, known as Fidus, for his wife (fi g. bottom left)27—its “Ger-man” plainness, if not to say lack of imagina-tion, was soon made use of polemically against the erotic refi nement of Parisian haute couture. Nationalist groups that entered the fray compared the free fall of the sturdy fabric to the fl uid garb worn by the high Gothic sculpture of Uta in the donor’s choir of Naumburg Cathedral. “Not the thrill, the tyranny of the frou-frou must form the basis of women’s clothing, but chaste simplicity.”28

Not in terms of beauty, but certainly in terms of the fashion’s commercial usefulness, the productions of the Wiener Werkstätte (see p. 189) must also be regarded as a dead end: Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill (fi g. bottom right) founded the fashion

workshop from which Vienna now exerted a lasting infl uence on Paris, especially the fashion creations of Paul Poiret. In 1917 Otto Lendecke, who had trained with Poiret, launched the fashion maga-zine Die Damenwelt. Although a mere fi ve issues appeared, these became an exquisite testimony to the Viennese fashion of the time. Even Gustav Klimt took part in designing the title pages. The style of dress, after designs by more than eighty artists, was distinguished by a forced individuality; the designs, whether hand-printed or produced by machine, sparkled with an incredible richness of invention; all the fabrics were produced in their own workshops.29

Only the dresses from the atelier of a designer like Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo could compete, if not in the range of products then certainly in the exquisiteness of their appearance.

Fortuny came from a renowned family of Span-ish artists; his parents moved to Venice in 1889. He received his artistic training in Paris with Giovanni Boldini, among others . He was a painter, photogra-pher, inventor, and passionate devotee of Richard Wagner as well as an exclusive fashion designer. From 1899 his atelier was in Venice, in the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei (today the Museo Fortuny). He fi rst garnered international attention for his stage sets, complete with elaborate projection effects, which he developed for a production of Tristan and Isolde at the Scala in Milan in 1900.30 Beginning around 1907, however, his fame rested above all

on his designs for women’s dresses, which, due to their timeless elegance, their fi ne fabrics, and conse-quently their immense price, were intended exclu-sively to appeal to the sure sense of taste of women clients from European and American high society. The greatest success was enjoyed by his Delphos gowns (fi g. right)—made of precious silk, caress-ing the body in a free fall of fi ne pleats, and often combined with a tunic or wrap, they drew, as the reference to Delphi in their name implies, upon the basic form of the ancient Greek chiton. Moreover they were splendidly colored and printed with Ori-ental or Renaissance ornament in the style of artists like William Morris (compare fi gs p. 122f.). Fortuny essentially retained this type—an overwhelmingly beautiful reform dress, as it were—unchanged, so that it is scarcely possible to date them.

These dresses and fabrics cannot without reserva-tion be classifi ed as Art Nouveau products, and yet they are close to its ideal of beauty. They were celebrated in writing by Gabriele D’Annunzio and Marcel Proust, and worn by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis (see p. 93 ff.) at several of their dance performances. They remained cult objects for decades and it was de rigueur for someone like Peggy Guggenheim, like so many Hollywood starlets interested in art, to have herself photo-graphed in an outrageously expensive Delphos robe from the Atelier Fortuny.

HUGO HÖPPENER, KNOWN AS FIDUSREFORM DRESS, c. 1900WHITE LINEN, BLACK EMBROIDERYCOLLECTION HALLERISCHES FAMILIENARCHIV, BERLIN

EDUARD JOSEF WIMMER-WISGRILLHOUSECOAT MADE FROM A SILK BY DAGOBERT PECHE, c. 1920/21MAK-AUSTRIAN MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS/CONTEMPORARY ART

MARIANO FORTUNY Y MADRAZO“DELPHOS GOWN,” c. 1920SILKKUNSTGEWERBEMUSEUM, STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN

FOLLOWING PAGES:WIENER WERKSTÄTTEPAIR OF LADIES‘ SHOES, c. 1914COLORED SILK REP, LEATHERHISTORISCHES MUSEUM DER STADT WIEN, VIENNA

31

30

“MOBILIZING INWARDNESS” OR THE BREAK WITH THE STATUS QUOToday the term avant-garde generally functions as a synonym for processes that radically broke down or break down the status quo in art. In contrast to this, Peter Bürger reserves the term for the specifi c early twentieth-century attitude that opposed the autonomy of art and art’s resulting lack of social consequences, an attitude that sought to convert art into life praxis. But the aspirations of the avant-garde movements of the time toward this goal were ultimately unsuccessful; they were not able to bring art into immediate contact with everyday reality and to functionalize their works as social works.31

Let us imagine once again, bearing the discourse of the avant-garde in mind, one of those interiors whose windows were fi lled with opalescent Tif-fany glass. As mentioned above, the aura of the fi ltered daylight, transformed into color, shut out the banality of the external world. Walter Benja-min commented on this phenomenon as well. He begins his refl ections with a consideration of the living space of the mid-nineteenth century and its contrast to the world of business: “The private man who accommodates reality in the offi ce

demands from the interior that it sustain his illu-sions. … The phantasmagoria of the interior arises from this; to the private man it represents the universe.” Around the turn of the century, accord-ing to Benjamin, the “culmination of the interior” reached its conclusion, that inward transfi guration of the “solitary soul” mentioned above, a “mobili-zation of inwardness”—the room turns out to be a “sanctuary of art” and consequently a signifi er of its inhabitant.32

Indeed—as we should not forget—the inte-rior spaces enclosed by colored Art Nouveau windows did obstruct any perspective upon the outer world, the street, the square, the daily life of the city. Due to their colorful “lack of trans-parency” the gaze rebounds inwards, into the hermeticism of the interior, the place in which inwardness is “mobilized.” This would thus constitute evidence of Art Nouveau’s failure to produce an identity of art and life, evidence that it succeeded merely in conjuring up an illusory world of l’art pour l’art—art for art’s sake—and of self-satisfi ed aesthetic artifi ciality: for one fi nal time in Western art. It would be confi rmation of the claim made by Benjamin in the Arcades Project that, in Art Nouveau, “high art” futilely slaves away at the essential conditions of a new era. If we consider a further example in this light, namely the above-ground Paris Métro sta-tions designed by Hector Guimard around 1900

(fi g. right), then it seems we must concur with Benjamin: nothing here indicates a concern with access to mass transit. Rather than sober, functional forms in keeping with their techni-cal task, here artistic “autism” has taken up residence: stalks of cast iron painted leek-green, and sweeping electrical orchid-lamps: a fantasti-cal metamorphosis of architecture and nature, which even inspired the occasional reference to French Art Nouveau as the “Style Métro.” In the “art capital” of the time, the transition from technologized subterranean space to the grand facades above apparently demanded artistic fl amboyance.33

One could also interpret the technology of the dome shell with which Joseph Maria Olbrich crowned the Secession Building in Vienna in 1898 as a capitulation before the demands of an art that shaped its objects exuberantly, even excessively. Its perforated structure, the fi ligree interweaving of the wrought laurel leaves, fi re-gilded on the outside and shimmering delicate green on the inside (fi g. opposite), is an aesthetic manifesto merged with symbolic elements as well. Another attempt, if we want to follow Benjamin, on the part of “high” art to triumph over the functionality of the Modern.

In contrast, however, it is the functional and technical moment that dominates when, in 1908, Olbrich uses a violet-black brick face (compare fi gs p. 180f.) on the crown of the Hochzeitsturm in Darmstadt, which refl ects the sunlight fall-ing on the stepped gables in a golden glow. “He binds the splendor of gold—since time immemo-rial a symbol of both earthly and spiritual power, now immaterial with his sun collectors—to the tower of the crown, thus using modern methods to realize his goal of a sublime architecture, in the best sense.”34 The scholarly literature univer-sally considers the Olbrich of the Vienna Seces-sion building to be an Art Nouveau artist; but the essential question in the comparison I have just drawn is whether the Olbrich of the Darmstadt Hochzeitsturm can be considered just as much of one.

JOSEPH MARIA OLBRICHDOME SHELL OF THE VIENNA SECESSION BUILDING, 1897/98VIENNA

HECTOR GUIMARDENTRANCE TO THE MÉTRO STATION PORTE DAUPHINE, c. 1900PARIS