Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau

<strong>Organic reform: Reactionary tendrils, flowers, and flowing lines</strong><br /><br />For a fruitful period between the 1880s and the First World War, European and North American culture deferred to nature. With a <strong>symphony of flowing lines and organic shapes</strong>, Art Nouveau (“New Art”) inflected <strong>architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts, and illustration</strong>.<br /><br />Art Nouveau was deliberately nouveau. With a spirit of willful reform, its practitioners sought to distance themselves from the imitative historicism that characterized much 19th-century art and replace it with <strong>undulating, decorative qualities</strong>. Turning to <strong>vine tendrils, flowering buds, and bird feathers as ornamental reference</strong>, they pursued not only a linear freedom but also liberation from the weight of artistic tradition and expectation.<br /><br />At the same time, Art Nouveau followed the example of the earlier English Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements to reject established hierarchies of artistic practice, to emphasize <strong>a return to handcraftsmanship</strong>, and to <strong>synthesize artistic media and practices into a <em>Gesamtkunstwerk</em>, or total work of art</strong>. In this, as in its turn to nature, Art Nouveau is often seen as an aesthetic response to the Industrial Revolution, <strong>a recoil from the mass-produced and mechanic, and an elevation of the human hand and wonders of the great outdoors</strong>.<br /><br />This fresh TASCHEN edition considers Art Nouveau as a broad historical phenomenon with distinct local features. We consider the style’s wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its <strong>particular flavor in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, and Chicago</strong>. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity. The result is a vivid portrait of the age and a movement that is as much <strong>entrenched in our imagination of the <em>fin de siècle</em> as it is in the trajectory of modernism</strong>.