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Art Through Time · 1890 to 1914

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau, French for new art, was the international style of about 1890 to 1914 that took its lines from nature: whiplash curves, climbing plants, flowers, and women with long flowing hair. It ran through everything at once, from posters and paintings to jewelry, furniture, glass and buildings.

Its painters and designers were Alphonse Mucha in Paris, Gustav Klimt in Vienna, Aubrey Beardsley in London, and, in architecture, Victor Horta in Brussels, Hector Guimard in Paris and Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona.

When
1890 to 1914
Where
Brussels and Paris
Began
Horta's Hôtel Tassel, Brussels, 1893; Siegfried Bing's shop, Paris, 1895
Grew out of
Arts and Crafts movement, Japonisme, Symbolism

When was Art Nouveau?

Art Nouveau begins in the early 1890s. Victor Horta's Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, of 1893, is its first great building, and the style took its name from Siegfried Bing's shop in Paris, the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, which opened in 1895. It peaked at the Paris World's Fair of 1900, the year Guimard's cast-iron entrances to the new Métro went up, and it was over by the First World War, in 1914.

It had a different name in each country: Jugendstil in Germany, after the Munich magazine Jugend, founded in 1896; Secession in Vienna, after the artists who broke from the academy there in 1897; Modernisme in Barcelona; Stile Liberty in Italy, after the London shop Liberty.

How to recognize Art Nouveau

  • The whiplash line. A long, curling line that swells and snaps back, like a stem or a strand of hair.
  • Nature as ornament. Lilies, irises, poppies, peacock feathers, dragonflies and vines, flattened into pattern.
  • The woman as emblem. Women with long hair standing for the seasons, the arts or the hours of the day, as in Mucha's The Seasons.
  • Flat color and strong outline, learned from Japanese woodblock prints.
  • Gold and pattern. In Klimt's Vienna, figures dissolve into mosaics of gold, as in The Kiss.
  • No line between art and design. The same hand drew the poster, the jewel and the chair.

Mucha's Paris and Klimt's Vienna

In December 1894, a young Czech illustrator named Alphonse Mucha was asked at short notice to design a poster for the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Gismonda went up on the walls of Paris in January 1895, tall and narrow, gold and pale, and collectors peeled copies off the walls. Bernhardt gave him a six-year contract, and the Mucha style became, for many people, Art Nouveau itself.

In Vienna, Gustav Klimt and his friends left the official artists' society in 1897 to found the Secession, with the motto "To every age its art, to art its freedom" over the door of their exhibition hall. Klimt's golden period followed: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and The Kiss, both of 1907 to 1908, and the design for the Tree of Life, for a dining room mosaic in Brussels.

Famous Art Nouveau works

What came after Art Nouveau?

By 1910 its curves looked old-fashioned. Designers turned to straight lines and machine forms, which after the war became Art Deco, and painters turned to the broken forms of Cubism and the raw color of Expressionism.

Inside Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau painters

More Art Nouveau paintings

See Art Nouveau on the timelineEvery art movement in order