Art: Time of the Tapeworm

Exactly how or where it started no one quite knows, but once it got going in the 1890s, it proved as catching as a virus. From Vienna to Chicago, new buildings shot up all curves and curlicues as though seen in a Coney Island mirror. Stairways were twisted into elaborate swirls; paintings and statues became studies in swoops. Today, the style known as Art Nouvemt seems about as “new” as Grandmother’s antimacassar. But as Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art set out to prove last week, in the most comprehensive and ingeniously mounted U.S. exhibit on the subject to date (see color), modern scholars are no longer inclined to laugh it out of court.

It was in May 1897 that the German architect Alexander Koch sounded a theme for the growing style by calling for the “complete integration of all artists, architects, sculptors, painters and technical artists.” Just as Wagner had tried to create a “total theater” so there was now to be a total art, embracing every conceivable object. Though Belgium more than any other country led the way, the new style seemed to pop up all over the Western world.

Blake & Botany. Before it got its final name, the French called it Moderne, the Spanish Modernismo, the Germans Jugendstil. Architect Hector Guimard, who designed Paris elaborate Metro stations, blandly called it the Guimard Style. To some irreverent critics of the day, it was also the Tapeworm Style. In Art Nouveau’s orchidaceous world of tendrilar lines, sweeping forms and bright stained glass, old Japanese woodcuts, the drawings of William Blake and a new fascination with botany all had their influence.

Nothing was safe from it, for art and craftsmanship had been declared equal. Architects designed chinaware and brooches; some painters even gave up their canvases (“Down with these useless objects”) to potter around with posters and fancy screens. When Toulouse-Lautrec dined at the home of the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, he found that the food had been chosen for its color. It was characteristic of the age that Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray had one favorite novel bound in nine different ways to suit his changing moods.

Elegance & Experiment. In time, what was billed as revolution degenerated into mere ornamentation. By World War I, Art Nouveau was dead—perhaps the briefest art movement in history. Why, then, have scholars begun again to take it seriously? In the new view, it is seen as a genuinely liberating upheaval that gave some of the modern masters their first taste of bold experiment. Some of art’s biggest names—Rodin and Ernst Barlach, Bonnard, Edvard Munch, Gauguin and Picasso—were at one time caught up in it. There is another reason for Art Nouveau’s comeback. Its dipsy-doodling fancies may sometimes be gaudy, even ludicrous, but they recall a period that did have a kind of uninhibited elegance.