Art Nouveau grew from plant curves and iron glass
An international decorative wave of the 1890s chased sinuous stems, whiplash lines, and open spaces built from iron, glass, ceramics, and later concrete. Brussels houses by Victor Horta—especially the 1893 Hôtel Tassel—sparked a style Hector Guimard soon wrapped around Paris Métro gates.
The movement set out to erase the wall between fine art and applied craft, flooding interiors, posters, furniture, jewelry and metalwork. Its British roots lie in William Morris's floral patterns, the Red House he fitted out with Philip Webb in 1859, Whistler's Peacock Room and Aubrey Beardsley's drawings. In France the key thinker was Viollet-le-Duc, who wanted nature's logic and modern materials to replace Beaux-Arts habit; his 1872 Entretiens sur l'architecture shaped Horta, Guimard, Gaudí and Louis Sullivan.
Viollet-le-Duc even anticipated the look himself, painting murals at Notre-Dame in 1851 that were stripped out in 1945 as too unorthodox. The name first surfaced in the 1880s, when the Belgian journal L'Art Moderne used it for the reforming artists of Les Vingt, and Siegfried Bing's Paris gallery, the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, made it famous from 1895. The high point came at the 1900 Paris Exposition, which showcased Louis Tiffany, alongside Alphonse Mucha's posters and the glass of René Lalique and Émile Gallé.
Every country renamed it. Germans said Jugendstil after the magazine Jugend, Italians stile Liberty after the London shop owner Arthur Lasenby Liberty, Catalans Modernisme, Danes Skønvirke, the Swiss fir-tree style, Americans Tiffany style, and Austrians Secession style. Belgian critics sneered at it as whiplash, eel or noodle style. It thrived in fast-growing cities chasing an identity, such as Turin, Glasgow, Darmstadt and Barcelona, and in Helsinki, then a centre of independence feeling inside the Russian Empire.
By the outbreak of war in 1914 the fashion was spent, and in the 1920s Art Deco and then modernism replaced it. Critics warmed to it again in the late 1960s, and in 1970 the Museum of Modern Art gave Guimard a major exhibition.
Source: Art Nouveau
