Sources and Inspirations

Art nouveau designers were consciously trying to break free from past convention. In place of the historical revival styles -- neobaroque, neoclassical, Gothic revival -- that had dominated for a half century or more, they wanted, at the end of the nineteenth century, to find an art appropriate to modern life. This idea was expressed in a motto over the door of the Secession Building in Vienna: "Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit" (To the age its art. To the art its freedom). This did not mean, however, that art nouveau was without sources and inspirations. The most important are discussed below.

The English Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements
England did not embrace art nouveau. Works in this style by English artists were most often sold abroad. But many of the design strategies -- and ideas -- that shaped art nouveau arose in England. It was there, which had industrialized faster than other nations, that dissatisfactions with "progress" first surfaced, prompting men like John Ruskin and William Morris to call for restoration of the standards of craftsmanship practiced in past eras. Ruskin believed objects could be both useful and beautiful and that their decoration should derive from nature. Morris, designer and committed socialist, became the defining figure of the arts and crafts movement. Stylized arts and crafts patterns offered art nouveau designers an approach to natural forms that was conventionalized by repetition and abstraction.

Art nouveau also inherited the arts and crafts belief in the unity of all the arts and, with that, a rejection of any distinction between fine and applied art. Many art nouveau designers were influenced by the arts and crafts approach to materials, handwork, and an insistence on honesty in construction. And the movement's strong ethical base and egalitarian ideals were congenial to the many art nouveau practitioners with socialist or anarchist political associations.

While arts and crafts promoted an ideal of "art for all," it was the notion of "art for art's sake" that fired the aesthetic movement. Its quest for the pure aesthetic experience verged on hedonism and decadence, and the sort of scandalous lifestyles exemplified by Oscar Wilde. The aesthetic movement contributed to art nouveau a romantic individualism and a taste for eroticism. It also offered examples of cultivated refinement and elegant simplicity, particularly in the work of American artist James McNeill Whistler.

Arts of Japan and Islam
As one critic around 1900 put it, Japanese art "set us free and made us bold." Japanese woodblock prints enjoyed a huge vogue, especially in Paris, at the end of the nineteenth century. Their flat planes, strong colors, abruptly cut-off scenes, and looming perspectives had been a powerful influence on impressionist and postimpressionist artists, and the same qualities attracted art nouveau designers as well.

Also important for art nouveau were decorative objects from Japan: ceramics, textiles, and lacquerware. Their elegant designs based on plants and insects would reappear on many types of art nouveau objects, including glass, jewelry, metalware, textiles, ceramics, and furniture.

The art of the Islamic world had been influential in Europe for many hundreds of years, but art nouveau was particularly receptive to its sinuous curves and arabesques. The Near East also supplied art nouveau with an exotic setting for sensual luxury and the erotic. Most of art nouveau's femmes fatales were associated with the Orient: Salomé, the Carthaginian princess Salambo, the sphinx. At a time when the position of women in society was changing, these females -- exotic, dangerous, and sexual -- could only exist in some "otherly" place.

Historical Styles
In seeking an art appropriate to its own time, art nouveau did not reject historical styles, but it did look on them with new eyes. In France art nouveau designers fashioned a modern look based on eighteenth-century rococo. The style of Louis XV -- asymmetrical, with curving lines and motifs derived from plants and shells -- had assumed something of the character of a national style by the end of the nineteenth century and was promoted by the state. Considered frivolous and decadent after the revolution, rococo had been rehabilitated largely through the efforts of brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who, as writers, publishers, and aesthetes, championed artists like François Boucher. In the nineteenth century's romanticized view, rococo offered refinement, even languor, and its "feminine" lines held a distinctly sensual appeal: "Visions of the eighteenth century haunted him. . . . Boucher Venuses, all flesh and no bone, stuffed with pink cottonwool, looked down on him from every wall. . . . It is the only age that has known how to envelop a woman . . . shaping the furniture on the model of her charms" (Joris Huysmans, A Rebours [Against the Grain], 1884).

Elsewhere -- in Germany and Austria, for example -- artists turned to the art of the ancient world. They gave the architectural forms and mythological subjects of ancient Greece or Rome a new resonance, one that emphasized dark Dionysian forces over rationality and proportion.

Symbolism
Those living at the end of the nineteenth century experienced a rapidly changing world. Unprecedented advances in almost every sphere of activity were met by an equally pervasive sense of impending chaos and degeneration. It was a time of both technology and spirituality, of "machines and ghosts."

Symbolism was one manifestation of their malaise. It has been called the final gasp of nineteenth-century romanticism: not a style, but what Charles Baudelaire called a "mode of feeling." Symbolism informed the works of poets (including Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine), musicians (Claude Debussy most famously), and artists of very different stripes. What was important, as Jean Moréas wrote in the Symbolist Manifesto, was to "clothe the idea in sensitive form."

Symbolism gave art nouveau a metaphysical approach to the visual world. Art revealed what could not be seen; it could provide access to what industrial life had left behind.

Folk and National Styles
Following the model of Paul Gauguin, who went to Brittany and then to the South Seas hoping to tap the power of an unspoiled "primitive" culture, symbolists often made use of ancient and mystical folk traditions. These traditions can be seen in art nouveau works from many regions, especially in northern and eastern Europe. In some places the use of folk traditions had a specifically nationalistic character. (The same could be said of art nouveau's use of rococo in France.)

Nature
By far the most important source of inspiration for art nouveau was nature, and in surprisingly complex ways. To a person living at the end of the nineteenth century, nature was not neutral, the way we might consider plant or animal motifs to be today. More than simply suggesting shapes and patterns for artists to copy, nature was a model for transformation and metamorphosis. Its changeable states could also mirror psychological realities.

The sixth edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species was published in 1871. Cheaper than previous editions and illustrated for the first time, it gained a much wider audience and attracted the attention of more artists. The concept of evolution was expanded to engage social progress as well as progress in the arts. Artists were interested in the look and the dynamics of nature. Meanwhile, improved microscopy and undersea exploration yielded new species that were recorded in illustrated scientific manuals. Art nouveau designers mined these sources for new creatures on which to base more exotic organic forms. Several art nouveau designers were in fact trained as botanists and produced botanical illustrations.