Art Nouveau

Art, Architecture and Design in Transformation

Charlotte Ashby

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350061163
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Design
• Categoría: Design History & Criticism

Art Nouveau presents a new overview of the international Art Nouveau movement. Art Nouveau represented the search for a new style for a new age, a sense that the conditions of modernity called for fundamentally new means of expression. Art Nouveau emerged in a world transformed by industrialisation, urbanisation and increasingly rapid means of transnational exchange, bringing about new ways of living, working and creating. This book is structured around key themes for understanding the contexts behind Art Nouveau, including new materials and technologies, colonialism and imperialism, the rise of the 'modern woman', the rise of the professional designer and the role of the patron-collector. It also explores the new ideas that inspired Art Nouveau: nature and the natural sciences, world arts and world religions, psychology and new visions for the modern self. Ashby explores the movement through 41 case studies of artists and designers, buildings, interiors, paintings, graphic arts, glass, ceramics and jewellery, drawn from a wide range of countries.

PART 1

The Structures of Art Nouveau

1

The nineteenth-century roots of Art Nouveau

Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1853)

The Art Nouveau movement arose in response to a perceived problem: the need for art and design to meet the needs of a new age. This new age had its roots in changes stretching back to the burgeoning of the Industrial Revolution and the origins of European colonialism in the sixteenth century. The pace of change accelerated through the nineteenth century, transforming landscapes, creating cities and changing patterns of life around the world. The new forms taken by Art Nouveau did not spring into being fully formed at the end of the nineteenth century. One starting point was new thinking about the expression of function and meaning in architecture, which originated with the Gothic Revival. Another key source was exposure to different art and design cultures, particularly that of Japan. A third source, introduced here, was new scientific ideas about nature, which suggested new ways to understand and represent the world. Each case study reflects different efforts to reconcile the competing demands of modernity and tradition, national and international identities for art and scientific rationalism alongside spiritual ideals.

The Gothic Revival, design reform and the Oxford Museum of Natural History (1860)

The ‘dreaming spires’ of Oxford might seem a strange place to start this exploration of design’s engagement with the forces of modernity. The Oxford Museum is however an example of how mid-nineteenth-century British architecture and design responded to these challenges (Figure 1.1). One of the most influential theorists of architecture’s resistance to modernity was John Ruskin (1819–1900), whose ideas were closely followed in the museum’s design. Ruskin’s reputation was to grow through the nineteenth century until, in the 1890s, his ideas were quoted and reproduced in art magazines across the world as a foremost authority on design reform (Hanley & Maidment 2016: 137–95). Ruskin’s theories and the example of the Oxford Museum exemplify a response to modernity based on effort to reclaim values eroded by rapid industrialization. This idea of the recovery of aesthetic and spiritual meaning from the past fed directly into the developing Arts and Crafts movement and continued to resonate through much Art Nouveau.

FIGURE 1.1 Deane & Woodward, Oxford Museum of Natural History (Oxford, 1860) © Roger Fenton / Stringer / Getty Images.

The Oxford Museum (1860) married this principle of revival with the use of new technologies and the invention of new forms to accommodate new functions and usage. Museums were one of the many new building types of the nineteenth century. They reflected the expanding world of academic knowledge and new ideals of public education. The modern world was marked by a proliferation of new building types for new forms of public life and municipal management. The Oxford Museum was designed to educate the public, as well as provide laboratories and teaching spaces required for the science departments of the university.

It may seem anomalous to modern eyes that this building clothed its contemporary agenda in a generally gothic appearance, particularly noted for the richness of its hand-carved ornament and the detail of its polychromatic stonework. This seeming paradox frames the fact that exactly how design should respond to modernity remained far from clear through the nineteenth century. For much of the century debate was focussed on different historical styles and which might be regarded as appropriate for different buildings. For example, the Gothic was usually regarded as appropriate for churches, while various Italian Renaissance styles were seen as suitable for banks and commercial premises, by association with the origins of banking in renaissance Florence. The variety of styles available was extensive as art historical studies and archaeology provided more and more forms to draw on, from Chinoizerie to the Northern Renaissance and from Egyptian to Etruscan finds. Prompted by this, critics voiced concerns about this eclecticism and argued for the identification of one, single approved style for modern building (Bergdoll 2000: 139–70). These debates provide the backdrop to the conclusion reached by the end of the century, that what was needed was not a historical style but a new approach altogether: Art Nouveau.

Two strands characterize both British and wider European debates on design reform in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, history maintained its crucial position as the reference point from which design was expected to draw its essential logic. On the other hand, the intended function of the building, the load-bearing system employed and the materials used were given greater significance in deciding what a building should look like. Debates about modern architecture continued to revolve around the term ‘style’. ‘Style’ was used to refer to outward appearance, usually dominated by historical ornament (Grecian, Gothic, Baroque, etc.). But the meaning of the term ‘style’ also became increasingly elastic. Discussions of what ‘style’ modern architecture should embrace made simultaneous reference to the duty of the design to articulate and serve the character of the building: what it was for and how it was built. The term ‘style’ might refer in its broadest sense to the ethos of the building and the relationship between construction and appearance. Which meaning was intended by different authors can often only be inferred by context.

Increasingly, it was not merely aesthetically important to choose the right style; it was morally important. Architectural style was the language in which the building addressed the public, and this mode of address could be considered nationally appropriate or foreign (in the positive sense of exotic or the negative sense of alien), academic or hackneyed, strange or familiar and, ultimately, honest or dishonest when it came to the nature of the building within (Alofsin 2006). It was on these grounds that the experimental architecture of the end of the century was welcomed as a ‘new style’ and a final solution to these debates.

The variety of styles presented in the architectural competition for the Oxford Museum included Classical, Renaissance and Gothic and exemplified the ‘battle of the styles’ that raged through the mid-nineteenth century (Herrmann 1992). Ruskin championed the Gothic as the appropriate solution for all modern, British architectural needs. Two prominent books The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–4) introduced his theories to the Victorian public. Subsequent translation of these works, or excerpts from them, spread Ruskin’s ideas worldwide. He presented the Gothic as the model for modern architectural reform by virtue of its responsiveness to intended function and available materials, in contrast to the abstract principles of Classical beauty. His theories mingled aesthetic appreciation with moral and philosophical approval for the architectural values, including the idea of truthfulness in materials, logical composition and responsiveness to practical needs:

For in one point of view Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture . . .

. . . it is one of the chief virtues of the Gothic, builders that they never suffered ideas of outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and value of what they did. If they wanted a window, they opened one; a room, they added one. (Ruskin 2003 [1851–4]: 168)

The Gothic, for all its romantic and medieval associations, was understood as a rational choice because of this adaptability. A comparison of Deane and Woodward’s winning design with other entries reveals this in operation (O’Dwyer 1997: 160–73). The symmetry of Classical designs would have required the housing of the variety of disparate functions of the building – display galleries, lecture hall, chemical laboratory and so on – behind an entirely symmetrical facade. Whereas the Gothic allowed for greater flexibility: different volumes and different sized windows arranged where they were needed. Adaptability and specialization were ideas linked to efficiency and to an acknowledgement that the modern world had become increasingly complex in its varied requirements.

The accommodation of tradition remained important, as another angle of design reform sought to consider architecture’s wider relationship with its environment and context. The Gothic matched the architectural character of the medieval foundation of the University of Oxford. Through this relationship to place and local tradition architecture could be understood to express values specific to its location and users. One of the principles of the wider Gothic Revival movement across Europe was the idea that it represented a direct relationship to national history, unlike the imported and pagan forms of Classicism. This assessment chose to overlook the pan-European dimensions of Gothic architecture. Both the functional flexibility of the Gothic and its resonances with national tradition were values that were retained by Art Nouveau designers, but shorn by them of any strict adherence to historical models.

A crucial factor in the perceived modernity and rationality of the Gothic was the notion that the relationship between architectural form and ornament was analogous to the patterns of natural growth exhibited in nature. We shall go on in Chapters 2 and 7 to see how this idea developed into a core paradigm within the Art Nouveau movement. In relation to the Oxford Museum, the architect George Edmund Street asserted:

[T]here seems to be a particular propriety in selecting the style [Gothic] which, above all others that have ever existed, took nature and natural forms for her guide and her ornaments, in a Museum intended mainly for the reception of a collection illustrative of Natural History. (Street 1853: 403–4)

This quote reveals widely held understanding that the structures of Gothic architecture were sound and ‘right’ because they echoed the divine logic of nature.

In the writings of Ruskin, this idea took the form of a conceptual synthesis of Gothic forms and natural forms, northern climate and nature and the presence of God: ‘this look of mountain brotherhood between cathedral and Alp’ (2003 [1851–4]: 164). But it was an association with a long pedigree in European thought. Nature as a model for architectural principles lay at the foundations of architectural theory in Germany:

How joyfully I stretched my arms towards it [Strasbourg Cathedral], surveying its vast harmonious masses, animated by countless delicate details of structure! As in the works of eternal Nature, every form, down to the smallest fibril, alive, and everything contributing to the purpose of the whole! (Goethe 1772)

As well as in France:

The forests were the first temples of divinity and in them men acquired the first ideas of architecture. This art must, therefore, have varied according to the climates. The Greeks turned the elegant Corinthian column, with its capital of foliage, after the model of a palm tree. [. . .] The forests of Gaul were, in their turn, introduced into the temples of our ancestors, and those celebrated woods of oak thus maintained their sacred character. (Chateaubriand [1802] 1815: 288)

Nature aligned with God and this was a key idea for those who supported the Gothic style. It offered an antidote to the supposed godlessness of the nineteenth century. This position was asserted so vigorously that The Builder, a British magazine of architecture, could joke that a man who deviates from the principles of Ruskin to build something that is merely comfortable for himself could be regarded as putting his eternal soul in jeopardy (The Builder 1862/19: 283). But in the previous quotes there is also evidence of the rationalism that was associated with the Gothic alongside the spiritual: the idea of structural logic and of all parts contributing to the function of the whole, as the leaf does to the tree. In this way, it is also possible to see adherence to the Gothic, not just in the light of its Christian associations, but also in relation to new modes of scientific thought.

Rather than reproducing historical ornament, the ornamental scheme of the Oxford Museum was based on the visual reproduction of the most up-to-date system for the classification of plants (Forgan 1989: 415). The aim was to represent the natural world through the building itself, not just its display cases (Holmes & Smith 2020). Though they received guidance on the scheme, the majority of the s tonework was not designed by the architect, but worked up via a direct carving method by the Irish stonemasons, James and John O’Shea, who worked directly from specimens collected each day from the Oxford Botanic Garden (O’Dwyer 1997: 230). The availability of these specimens reflected the systematic acquisition of species from around the world, facilitated by the ever-expanding colonial apparatus. The knowledge arrayed for public consumption in both the Oxford Museum and Botanic Garden reflected a centre of gravity for world knowledge located in colonial centres of power. With every flower, fern and palm at their disposal in botanical gardens and herbariums across Europe, the inspiration was in place for designers to take ornament in many new directions (Gamwell 2002).

Through the ingenuity of the architect, the language of Gothic architecture was also employed to reflect the func...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The Structures of Art Nouveau
• PART II The content of Art Nouveau
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright