This emphasis on ornamentation and linear patterning was not merely decorative. For many Art Nouveau artists the essence of the style was the symbolic content in the pattern, which emerges as a visual metaphor charged with spiritual energy and meaning:
Optimism and fatigue are symbolized by two movements, an upward one and a downward one, which occur together in serpentine sinusoids between two poles which attract alternately, thus formulating the profile of the movement which can be seen in all structural and decorative elements. The two mutually complementary poles are connected with specific human destinies. Another aspect of this characteristic is Art Nouveau’s relationship with music which acts as a catalyst of human experience. Music breeds rhythmic movement and heartbeat. Art Nouveau is primarily a mimic art which evokes, assumes, and in the end leads to a certain way of human behaviour. (Franco Borsi, quoted Mucha 126)
How useful such a comment is for understanding particular works is open to debate, but it is a reminder that, at least in the eyes of its practitioners, Art Nouveau was never about mere decoration. Given its sense of having an important social and political purpose and the emphasis on symbols of spiritual energy, most Art Nouveau stands diametrically opposed to the notion of Art for Art’s sake. It placed an enormous emphasis in the possibilities for spiritual renewal through the new art and hence was for many people, not simply a particular style, but a way of life. One of the most eloquent and original embodiments of this vision is the Bilek Villa in Prague, built in 1912 by the sculptor Frantisek Bilek according to a design based explicitly on the creator’s very personal spiritual symbolism.
[Parenthetically, we should observe that, for all his sturdy assertions of independence, Mucha, along with other Art Nouveau artists, was very drawn to Henri Cazalis and his organization Societe Internationale de l’Art Populaire, a group committed to infusing art with a strong sense of social purpose. As Jiri Mucha observes, “Now, with . . . occultism on the one hand and Labor’s Art Social on the other, his craving for ideal motives was at least partly satisfied” (123)]
As Madsen goes on to point out, this emphasis on dynamic patterning of lines and natural shapes sometimes led to a very abstract and structural-symbolic art, sometimes to a very floral and organic art (especially in France) or to linear two-dimensional art, and sometimes to a constructive and geometrical art (18-20), so that there is an enormous range included under this one label. Art Nouveau furniture or glassware, for example, ranges all the way from elaborately patterned and deliberately floral designs to much sparer geometric forms, with no immediate reference to the sensuous particularity of nature. And in architecture the term Art Nouveau includes everything from the excessively dynamic designs of the famous Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, who turned several buildings in Barcelona into a showcase of his unique style, to the much “cleaner” Sezession-style buildings of Jan Kotera in Prague (more about this later).
This new style was given many different names and nicknames (often derogatory) in different places. The following is a partial list (from Madsen and others): Paling stijl (eel style), Schnörkelstil (scroll style), Bandwurmstil (tape worm style), gereizter Regenwurm (popping up earthworm), Moderne Strump anlinien (modern suspender line), Jugenstil (young style), Neu Stil (new style), Neudeutsche Kunst (new German art), Sezessionstil (secession style), Stile floreale (floral style), Stile Inglese (English style), Liberty Style, Yachting Style, Style Métro, Noodle Style, Lilienstil (Lily style). The name Art Nouveau itself derives from the name of a shop in Paris owned by Samuel Bing, who in 1895 renamed the store Art Nouveau. The popularity of the style and the store helped to make the name apply more widely than originally intended (at least in France). Bing commented later:
At its birth Art Nouveau had no pretensions to being a generic term. It was simply the name of an establishment opened as a rallying point for youth keen to show their modern approach. (quoted Madsen 28)
This emphasis on the energetic and dynamic patterning of lines was fuelled, too, by the revival of interest in Celtic art and the passion throughout Europe and America for Japanese art, especially its decorative elements, its exoticism, and its conception of space (see Madsen 58 ff)—all these seemed to offer artistic inspiration to those wishing to turn away from conventional 19th century art and to find ways of bringing fresh and exciting and morally purposeful visual beauty into an age increasingly dominated by the industrial city and the machine.
These various trends are well illustrated in the way in which Art Nouveau pictured women—and portraits of women are astonishingly frequent in the new art (especially in Mucha’s work). Here again, there is a wide range of treatment, but one common image in Art Nouveau is a single woman as the focus of the patterned lines, so that the figure or the face is an integral part of the pattern and derives from it a particular focus, strength, and intensity. Many of the best known paintings from Art Nouveau (including Mucha’s work) feature portraits of women
There is a often a powerful sense of sexuality in these pictures—from Beardsley’s decadence in the illustrations for Salome to the robust health and charm of Mucha’s country girls to Klimt’s open eroticism. However much we might want to delve into the psychological pressures promoting some of these visions of women, what I find particularly interesting about many of these portraits is the directness of the gaze and the confidence in the posture—these women are indeed sexual, but they don’t strike me as mere playthings or objects, nor do they offer us demure Victorian rectitude. They have about them a sense of themselves, of their own passionate natures and their own power. The energy latent in the patterning serves to charge them with a sometimes disturbing power and independence.
Klimt created an ideal type in his Viennese woman: the modern female, slender as an ephebe—he painted creatures of an enigmatic charm—the word ‘vamp’ was not yet known but Klimt created the type of a Greta Garbo, a Marlene Dietrich long before they existed in reality. (Bertha Zuckerkandl, quoted in Frodl 77)
Parenthetically, one might note here the importance of these female illustrations in advertisements (a particularly marked element in Mucha’s posters). Here, for almost the first time we have major artists creating, as part of their most lucrative and famous work, sexually charged portraits of women to sell market commodities (from cigarettes and liquor to train tickets and bicycles). Again, this is something we have grown accustomed to (depressingly so), but much of Mucha’s popularity rested on the power of these fresh images in his advertisements (a reminder of how capitalism can simultaneously serve to liberate people from old ideas and traditional images and attitudes, while at the same time creating new problems).
Another area where Art Nouveau had a direct and lasting impact was in architecture, particularly in its tendency to develop the structural elements in the construction (especially iron) so that they served also as ornamentation for the building, an “architectural symbolism of structure” (Madsen 104). In addition, in some Art Nouveau architecture, especially with its most famous (or notorious) practitioner Gaudi, the body of the building is developed as something very dynamic, sinuous, and rhythmic, often with rounded corners and very non-traditional designs.
Art Nouveau architecture expresses a radical division at the heart of the movement’s desire to reject conventional historical models and return to nature, a paradox emerging out of precisely what “appealing to nature” or “returning to reality” involved.
The interest of the modern movement in the world of plants and nature in general had, without doubt, a deeper symbolic meaning. It appears that this was an expression of the romanticism of the time, a visual representation of the myth of nature as a paradise, which was seen as a place of refuge by the same people who only a few years earlier dreamt about the bygone world of the Prague Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque. . . . But the wider contemporary concept of nature as “life” and “reality,” including the reality of physical laws to which nature is subject and which modern architecture—albeit timidly at first—tried to express, suggests also a different interpretation of naturalism in the modern movement. Already in 1899, the critic K. B. Madl considered modern architecture to be a “realistic architecture” that sought a precise form for “the support and weight, their differences, transitions, and dimensions,” and whose decorative aspect, spare, precise and atmospheric, “found its point of departure in the real world.” It appears that the early modern attitude toward nature, or rather toward reality, was characterized by a certain duality: in it romanticism mingled with realism, dreams with actuality. (Svacha 61)
This perceptive observation helps to account for the co-existence within Art Nouveau of some of the features we have mentioned earlier, elaborately naturalistic floral designs together with increasingly pure geometric form. And it enables one to understand how the reactions against Art Nouveau, particularly the emphasis on certain forms of ornamentation, could arise from the within the most cherished ideas of the “movement.” For some of the harshest attacks on Art Nouveau were inspired by a strong reaction against the way some forms of it promoted excessive ornamentation (which, in turn, was often associated with sexual decadence). The following excerpt (which may reveal more about the writer than about Art Nouveau) comes from a well-known and often quoted essay (“Ornament and Crime”) by Czech-Austrian architect Adolf Loos (b. 1870), who was determined to show that anyone with “an inner urge to smear the walls with erotic symbols” was hopelessly depraved:
It is natural that this instinct become unleashed and evokes such displays of degeneracy mainly public facilities. We can measure the culture of a nation according to the degree of wall scribbling in the the lavatories. With children it is a natural phenomenon, their first artistic expressions are erotic symbols scribbled on a wall. But what is . . . normal with a child becomes a manifestation of degeneracy in modern man. I have come to the following conclusion which I am donating to mankind as a present: the development of culture is concurrent with the removal of ornaments from objects of daily use. . . . the first ornament born, the cross . . . is of erotic origin. The horizontal line is a lying woman, the vertical one, a man penetrating her . . . (Adolf Loos, quoted Mucha 128).
Madsen lists some other important features of Art Nouveau architecture, as follows (in brief): an emphasis on asymmetry and flattened arches, a tendency to merge one room into another, so as to create a more organic sense of the division of space (which was accompanied by an organic principle in the ground plan—the attempt to make the building seem to rise from the ground), and the use of the façade as a decorative surface to celebrate the “symbolic value of ornament.”
