What Is Art Nouveau? A Beginner's Guide to the Movement

Feature image: Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze: "The Arts," "Paradise Choir," and "The Embracement" (Panel 9, right sidewall), 1901 © Secession / Image by Google

Art Nouveau took its name from a shop. On December 26, 1895, the Paris dealer Siegfried Bing opened the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, filling whole rooms with furniture, glass, jewelry, and paintings by the designers he championed, and the flat color and curving line of the Japanese prints he had long sold ran through the new style. Art Nouveau favored organic forms drawn from plants, flowers, insects, and the human figure, and its signature whiplash curve could wrap a book cover, a staircase banister, or a jeweled brooch with equal ease.

Between roughly 1890 and the First World War, Art Nouveau spread across Europe and changed its name at nearly every border, becoming Jugendstil in Germany, after the Munich magazine Jugend, Stile Liberty in Italy, after the London store Liberty & Co., Modernisme in Catalonia, Nieuwe Kunst in the Netherlands, Young Poland in Kraków, and the Vienna Secession in Austria. Every version of Art Nouveau drew on the Arts and Crafts ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris, Japanese prints, and Symbolist painting, and every version carried art into daily life, from posters and furniture to church windows and the cast-iron Paris Métro entrances of Hector Guimard.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born into an aristocratic family in Albi and spent his adult life in Montmartre, among its cafés, cabarets, dance halls, and theaters. The Moulin Rouge opened there in 1889, and its co-owners, Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler, bought Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, 1890, and hung it inside the club until 1893.

In 1891, the Moulin Rouge commissioned his first poster, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, whose silhouetted crowd and flat color came straight from Japanese prints and made him famous almost overnight, establishing the color lithograph as one of Art Nouveau's defining media. The poster stood about six feet tall on three joined sheets, and its scale alone announced that advertising could be art.

He went on to design posters, programs, scenery, and costumes for Paris theaters, and in 1895 he fixed on the red-haired actress Marcelle Lender, attending Hervé's operetta Chilpéric more than twenty times to watch her dance the bolero. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in "Chilpéric", 1895-96, is one of his largest canvases, though Lender reportedly called him a horrible man and told a friend he could keep the portrait. Toulouse-Lautrec died in 1901, at thirty-six, leaving a body of posters and lithographs that shaped Art Nouveau graphic design across Europe.

Jan Toorop was born in 1858 on Java, in the Dutch East Indies, and trained in Delft, Amsterdam, and Brussels, where he joined the avant-garde circle Les XX in 1884. His childhood on Java, with its shadow puppets and batik patterns, is often cited as a source for the elongated figures and ornamental rhythms of his later work.

He moved through Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism before arriving at Symbolism in the 1890s, and Jan Toorop, The New Generation, 1892, comes from the heart of that period, featuring his infant daughter, Charley.

In 1894, a Delft oil manufacturer commissioned Toorop to design a poster for its salad oil, and its flowing, parallel lines became so well known that his manner earned the nickname the salad oil style. The commission turned a product advertisement into a showcase for his Symbolist line, with two long-haired women in billowing drapery filling nearly the whole sheet. That line became one of Dutch Art Nouveau's signature forms, and Toorop's drawings and lithographs carried Art Nouveau curves into books and print shops across the Netherlands until 1905, when he converted to Catholicism and turned to religious subjects in a more geometric style.

In Sweden, Art Nouveau entered painting through the living room. Carl Larsson trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and turned to watercolor at the Scandinavian artists' colony in Grez-sur-Loing, where he met the painter Karin Bergöö, whom he married in 1883. Larsson had been born into a poor Stockholm family and entered the Academy's preparatory school at just thirteen, supporting himself as a photo retoucher and newspaper illustrator while he studied.

The couple later made their home at Sundborn in Dalarna, and Carl's watercolors of the house, first shown at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897 and published in the book A Home in 1899, sold in enormous editions with their graphic outlines and blocks of color close to Japanese art and Art Nouveau. The writer Ellen Key held them up as the model for a lighter, more beautiful Swedish interior, and the Larssons, who subscribed to the London magazine The Studio, shared her devotion to Ruskin and Morris. Carl Larsson, Getting Ready for a Game, 1901, was painted the year the family settled at Sundborn for good, and the house, which became Karin's life's work though her contribution went unrecognized until the 1980s, still stands today as Carl Larsson-gården.

In Kraków, Art Nouveau arrived as Young Poland, and Stanisław Wyspiański was its most versatile figure, a painter, playwright, and designer born in the city in 1869. As a student under Jan Matejko, he worked with Józef Mehoffer on the polychromes and stained glass of St. Mary's Basilica, and in 1895 he won the commission to paint the interior of the city's Franciscan church, covering its Gothic walls with flowers and geometric ornament before designing its stained glass, including a window of God the Father completed in 1904. His 1901 drama about a Kraków wedding remains a cornerstone of Polish theater.

In July 1903, the Austrian troops occupying the Royal Castle on Wawel Hill withdrew, and Wyspiański, with the architect Władysław Ekielski, drew up a plan to rebuild the hill as a Polish acropolis, modeled on the citadels of Athens and Troy, a national center of art and memory imagined at a time when Poland had no independent state. Stanisław Wyspiański, A Bend of the Vistula, 1904, dates from those years of devotion to Wawel. He died in 1907, at thirty-eight, and his funeral became a day of national mourning, a measure of how fully Young Poland had made Art Nouveau the voice of Polish national revival.

In 1897, Gustav Klimt and a group of younger artists broke from Vienna's academic establishment to found the Secession, with Klimt as its first president, and Viennese Art Nouveau grew into its own sharper, more geometric strand. The motto carved above the Secession's exhibition building promised to each age its art and to art its freedom, and its exhibitions brought painting, architecture, and design together under one roof.

From 1900 to 1916, Klimt spent several weeks each summer at the Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria, and from 1908 to 1912 he and the Flöge family rented a villa in Kammer facing Schloss Kammer, a castle he painted five times. Gustav Klimt, Avenue to Schloss Kammer, 1912, comes from his last summer there. Klimt used the square format for nearly all his landscapes, and the Belvedere connects the bold contours of his Attersee pictures to the works of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, whom he studied in Vienna, the same flattened, patterned surface that runs through the gold portraits and friezes that made him the leading painter of Viennese Art Nouveau.

By 1912, Art Nouveau was already giving way. Bing closed the Maison de l'Art Nouveau in 1904, a year before his death, as the fashion for Art Nouveau began to wane, and the First World War broke the exchange of magazines, exhibitions, and dealers that had carried the style from Paris to Kraków. The geometric side of the Vienna Secession fed into Art Deco, named after the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris.

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