Two opposing aesthetics make themselves felt in Art Nouveau design: one is a return to the organic and curvilinear, the other a tendency toward abstraction and repetition. Drawing on traditional craft design and heavily indebted to Japanese print-making, Art Nouveau designers... [more]

Two opposing aesthetics make themselves felt in Art Nouveau design: one is a return to the organic and curvilinear, the other a tendency toward abstraction and repetition. Drawing on traditional craft design and heavily indebted to Japanese print-making, Art Nouveau designers employed plant and animal motifs represented with heavy, trailing lines and flat colors. Often these motifs would take on a geometrical edge and would be repeated to form patterns covering entire print fields or filling borders for illustrations. In England, William Morris (1834-96) brought the Arts and Crafts movement to bear on the design of books and illustrations. Reacting against the Industrial Revolution, he reintroduced letterforms and tendril-filled borders that recall medieval manuscripts. Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) created graphics using sinuous, flowing black line. His sometimes lurid subject matters (he illustrated Oscar Wilde's "Salome") almost drip wickedly off the page. In Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh took this elongated feel and made it symmetrical, vertical, and abstract. On the French side of the Channel, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) caused a sensation with sensual portrayals of public figures like Sarah Bernhardt. Framed by elaborate plants and flowing organic forms, his women were icons of glamour. Eugene Grasset (1841-1917), another poster designer, provided some of the essential elements of this style with his Art Nouveau typefaces, as well as the thick black contour lines and flat colors he adopted from Japanese woodcuts. In Vienna, Mackintosh's abstract verticals were influential. Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) produced posters for the Vienna Secession and designs for the movement's magazine Ver Sacrum. Their work emphasizes rectilinear symmetry and bold patterns. Magazines played a large role in popularizing Art Nouveau style in Germany, with the arrival of Jugend (the source of "Jugendstil") and Simplicissiumus in 1896. Both journals broke classical conventions with naturalistic illustrations that dominated the page. And they replaced traditional typography with brushed letterforms and ornamental typefaces. Having catalyzed the transition from Victorianism to the modern, Art Nouveau began to lose its momentum around 1915. After World War I, Dada, Bauhaus, and other Modernist movements began to explore different directions for design. In the 1960s, however, designers looked back to Nouveau's serpentine forms and sensuous symbolism to inspire their own return to nature -- the psychedelic prints of the period drip with line and color. Today, Art Nouveau is recognized as one of the most fertile periods in design history. [show less]