Styles: New Look at Art Nouveau

When the movie My Fair Lady opens in October, it will hammer into the public consciousness a new appreciation of an old art style that was known in its day as art nouveau—new art. In planning the film’s sets and 1,000 period costumes, complete with white lace, pink muslin, and ostrich feathers sprouting from extravagant hats, British Designer Cecil Beaton drew on childhood memories of Edwardian England at the turn of the century. He thereby put the movie right in the current stylistic swim. For a decade the revival of art nouveau has been building in nostalgic museum shows in London, Munich and New York; now it has burst on Western Europe and is spreading to the U.S.

Art nouveau is the interior at Maxim’s, the typography of McCall’s, the Ziegfeld Theater, the shopping bags of London’s Elliott shoe company, the gaudy Metro exit at Paris’ Place de la Bastille, the Postal Savings Bank building in Vienna, the curly white painted Italian furniture, Tiffany lamps, Gallé vases, books with spiraling Aubrey Beardsley designs, and twisted, forged-iron banisters now flooding art shops and galleries.

Lilies—Water, Tiger, Calla. The style had its origins in pre-Raphaelite painting, flourished in Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous posters of Jane Avril, and was murdered by the cold cubism of Weimar’s Bauhaus. Now it seems oldfashioned, yet it marked a rebellion against the fussy, historically eclectic aspects of Victorian art. It found its forms in nature: the lily (water, tiger and calla), clinging vines, leaves of all kinds, jellyfish, polyps—a whole botanical garden of gentle, curving shapes.

In Paris’ Flea Market, a six-inch Gallé vase, which only a year or two ago would have sold for $30 or less, recently brought $130, sending antique dealers scurrying to their basements in search of other long-discarded bric-a-brac. In Britain, where the revival has fired popular fancy, William Morris prints are the current fashion fabric hit. Munich’s taste-setting decorator store, Die Einrichtung, recently supplemented its modern pieces with settees, rosewood chests, chairs, shelves and ceramics whose curvaceous shape and exotic flavor display kinship with the tenets of Henry van de Velde, Belgian painter, architect, designer, and leading prophet of art nouveau 70 years ago.

Old & Yet New. Fifteen years ago, says French Art Expert Maurice Rheims, “no one except King Farouk would have thought of buying Gallé vases.” But tastes change. The art-nouveau revival dates from 1952, when London’s Victoria and Albert Museum organized a great retrospective exhibit. In Germany, where the sway of the Jugendstil (as art nouveau was called there and in Austria) had been total and the counterblow of the 1920s most radical, rediscovery began in 1958 with a big show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst. In the U.S. the comprehensive 1960 “Art Nouveau” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art launched the rediscovery.

Partly, the European “revival is a sign of tiredness and nostalgia for calmer times,” says Milan Architect Gio Ponti. Hugh G. Wakefield of the Victoria and Albert Museum attributes the renewal to the cyclical rhythm in art taste: “Art nouveau is easily recognizable; yet it is now sufficiently far away from us so it has lost the connotation of old-fashioned.” But others think the revival of interest in craftsmanship, the elegant and refined, is no Proustian search to relive things past. Rather, it constitutes a revolt against the grim, stark, formless, spiritless expression of much abstract art and modern architecture.

The world looks back to the other styles of art nouveau’s time—Fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism—with an interest that is chiefly academic. But art nouveau was at heart a designer’s style; to look back at it is to arouse a warmly human desire to exploit once again, in modern design, its oddly disturbing colors, its writhing forms, its almost erotic character.