Art Nouveau

Art nouveau

Art nouveau was an global decorative style that thrived basically during the two decades, the 1890s and 1910s that fixed the turn of the century. It included all the design arts and furniture, architecture, and product design, fashion, and graphics and subsequently included posters, and teapots, dishes, advertisements, packages, and spoons; chairs, door frames, and staircases, factories, subway entrances, and households. Art nouveau’s finding visual value is an organic, plantlike line. Freed from origins and gravity, it can either ripple with whiplash energy or flow with neat lines as it expresses, modulates, and decorates a given space. Vine tendrils, flowers for example the rose and lily, birds mainly peacocks, and the human female form were normal motifs from which this fluid line was changed.

The term art nouveau ascended in a Paris gallery run by art dealer Samuel Bing, which opened in 1895 as the Salon de l’Art Nouveau. In adding to Japanese art, “new art” by European and American artists was showed and sold there. This gallery became a global meeting place where many fresh artists were presented, between them the American glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose work had a sizable impact in Europe.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design, which first seen in 1936, was one of the first records to give art nouveau an important place in the expansion of twentieth-century art and architecture. Pevsner saw the movement’s main features as “the long sensitive curve, evocative of the lily’s stem, an insect’s feeler, the thread of a blossom or infrequently a slender flame, the arc undulating, flowing and interplaying with others, sprouting from angles and covering irregularly all available surfaces.”

Chéret and Grasset

The change from Victorian graphics to the art nouveau style was a steady one. Two graphic artists working in Paris, Jules Chéret from 1836 till 1933 and Eugène Grasset from 1841 till 1917, played significant roles in the change. In 1881 a new French law regarding freedom of the press lifted many censorship limits and allowed posters everywhere except on churches, at polls, or in areas chosen for official notices. This new rule led to a booming poster industry employing designers, printers, and affi cheurs (billposters). The streets developed an art gallery for the state, and valued painters felt no shame at creating publicity posters. The Arts and Crafts movement was making a new respect for the applied arts, and Jules Chéret showed the way. Now commended as the father of the modern poster, Chéret was the son of an indigent typesetter who paid four hundred francs to secure a three-year lithographic internship for his son at age thirteen. The teenager spent his weekdays lettering backwards on lithographic stones and his Sundays riveting art at the Louvre. After completing his education he worked as a lithographic craftsman and renderer for numerous businesses and took drawing classes. At age eighteen he went to London but could only find work making catalogue drawings of furniture, so he return ed to Paris after six months.

Jules Chéret, poster for Orphée

aux Enfers (Orpheus in Hades), 1879.

Chéret evolved toward larger, more

animated fi gures and greater unity of

word and image.

 

Jules Chéret, poster for La

biche au bois (The Doe in the Wood),

1866. Chéret’s early green and black

poster used the multiple image

format so popular in the 1860s. The

lettering is a harbinger of the swirling

forms marking his mature style.

 Bibliography:

·        Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

·        Mr. Bing and L'art Nouveau | New York Public Library | BiblioCommons. 2015. Mr. Bing and L'art Nouveau | New York Public Library | BiblioCommons. [ONLINE] Available at:http://nypl.bibliocommons.com/item/print_item/18673934052_mr_bing_and_lart_nouveau. [Accessed 30 January 2015].