Art Nouveau

For two decades on either side of 1900, a generation of European designers tried to make the entire built world — buildings, doorknobs, posters, hairpins, café chairs, Métro entrances — speak a single visual language. That language was drawn from nature: tendrils, vines, lilies, flowing hair, peacock feathers, the curve of a wave. Art Nouveau ("New Art") was the first international design movement of the industrial age, and it was, at its core, an argument with industry. If machines were producing endless identical objects, the answer was not to refuse machines but to put designers in charge of them — and to demand that everything machines made should be beautiful, individual, and continuous with the natural world.

The movement had many local accents. In Paris, it was the sinuous Métropolitain entrances of Hector Guimard and the posters of Alphonse Mucha. In Vienna, it sharpened into the Secession, with Gustav Klimt's gold-leafed canvases and Josef Hoffmann's gridded geometry already pointing toward modernism. In Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh produced a chillier, more rectilinear variant. In Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí pushed the organic logic into actual architectural impossibility. In Brussels, Victor Horta dissolved the line between iron structure and floral ornament so completely that staircases looked grown rather than built.

Art Nouveau collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen. By 1910 it was being mocked as decadent, fussy, and incompatible with the brutal new century the World War was already unfolding. The movement that took itself most seriously — that wanted to redesign civilization — was the first casualty of civilization's collapse. But its claim that ornament could be intelligent, and that the designer's responsibility extended to every object in the room, would echo through every movement that followed.