Modernity and Modern Life

Art nouveau was self-consciously modern, the first international attempt to "show man his modern face," and its modernity was expressed in many ways. As we have seen, a devotion to nature and the use of natural forms was not exclusively an artistic choice. Nature also entailed ideas of social progress and devolution. It could stand for innocence or voluptuousness, or it could represent national aims. Because it yielded to both science and mysticism, the use of nature as a basis for decorative schemes was distinctly modern.

Nature was often the vehicle (although not the only one) for uniting the arts in a total visual environment. Gesamtkunstwerk, as this was called (German for "total work of art"), surrounded modern man in an appropriate setting: coordinated architecture, painted decorations, wallpaper, furniture, lighting, and so on. Gesamtkunstwerk was an art nouveau ideal and related to the notion that all the arts were unified. The word was originally used for the synthesis achieved in the musical theater of Richard Wagner. An environment that was integrated in this way offered respite from the anxieties of the industrial age. And it underscored the equally modern notion of equality of applied and fine arts.

Modernity was also signaled in a new approach to materials--especially iron and glass -- which was appropriate to and communicative of their functions. Modernity embraced industrial techniques or practices, but, paradoxically perhaps, it could also be expressed in a return to old handcraft and guild traditions.

At the root of many art nouveau preoccupations is what has been called a "sensitivity to the psyche." Fantasy, dream worlds, the esoteric and occult, the sexual -- which can seem to us superstitious, irrational, and even antimodern -- were regarded quite differently by men and women at the turn of the twentieth century.

Perhaps these claims on modernity seem misplaced in a style that was most completely expressed in the decorative arts, but this is largely a function of our own bias. In fact the decorative arts were -- and are -- well placed to be in the forefront of modern life. At the end of the nineteenth century, the questions were: What do we do with technology? How do we accommodate mass markets, new ways of selling, a huge new pool of middle-class consumers, new industrial techniques -- in sum, the modernization of culture? These changes had a direct impact in the public arena of the decorative arts before they were felt in painting or sculpture. The decorative arts were forced to respond to change first. They made art nouveau new.