ART NOUVEAU

Art Nouveau was a phenomenon with many faces. Between 1890 and 1910, artists developed a variety of styles from the plant-like forms of the Belgian-French Art Nouveau to the ornamentation of the Viennese Secession. For a fruitful period between the 1880s and WWI, European and North American culture deferred to nature. With a symphony of flowing lines and organic shapes, Art Nouveau influenced architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts and illustration. Turning to vine tendrils, flowering buds, and bird feathers as ornamental reference, artists pursued not only a linear freedom but also liberation from the weight of artistic tradition and expectation. Highlights include beautiful Tiffany and Gallé vases, the Paris Métro, train stations, department stores, door handles, furniture, dining rooms, cartoons, posters, chairs, porcelainware, Macintosh's Art-Lovers House design, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Austrian glassware and more. Ther are exquisite multi-coloured glass domes, leaded glass windows like Grasset's Le Printemps, a double page colour spread of Maurice Denis' Palting Badminton with your ladies in white flowing dresses in woodlands to stylised functional and beautiful interiors and Aubrey Beardsley's Arthurian lithographs. This edition considers the style's wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavour in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, Brussels, Nancy, Barcelona, Darmstadt, Helsinki and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Maximilian Liebenwein, Walter Crane and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity plus unusual works by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. Oozing with hundreds of colour photos. 264 pages, softback. 21 x 24cm.
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