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PRESTELMUNICH LONDON NEW YORK

NORBERT WOLF


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12 INTRODUCTION

14 I THE NEW STYLE: AN APPROACH

18 ART LUXURYLUXURY ART

20 THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

23 A NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHT

25 LUXURY FASHION AND REFORM DRESS

30 MOBILIZING INWARDNESS OR THE

BREAK WITH THE STATUS QUO

32 SELF-PROMOTION: THE ART MAGAZI NES

36 II PROBLEMS OF STYLE

40 VISIONS OF UNITY AND SPIRITUALIZATIONS41 YOUTHAWAKENING

46 SACRED SPRING

59 TOTAL WORK S OF ART

62 A CONSCIOUSNESS OF STYLE

64 RINASCI

68 III THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF STYLE

70 THE CULT OF BEAUTY71 THE BEAUTY OF WOMEN

78 THE MAGIC OF JEWELRY

84 SYNESTHESIA

85 BUILT SYMPHON IES

87 PAINTED MUSIC AND DANCED ARABESQUES

98 ORNAMENTS AND LINES

99 POLARIZATIONS

106 JAPONISM

110 IV PRELUDES

114 THE ENGLISH PATH

115 FROM BLAKE TO BEARDSLEY


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120 FROM RUSKIN TO THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

121 WILLIAM MORRIS, THE PRE-RAPHAELITES,

AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

126 THE FRENCH PROPHETS

127 TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

128 GAUGUIN AND THE NABIS

132 IN THE ORBIT OF SYMBOLISM

136 V EVERYWHERE AN

AWAKENING: THE GREAT

CENTERS OF ART NOUVEAU

140 GREAT BRITAIN141 GLASGOW AND MACKINTOSH

148 FRANCE

149 PARIS

149 La Maison Bing

150 Guimard

153 Mucha

154 GALL AND THE COLE DE NANCY

16 0 BELGIUM161 HENRY VAN DE VELDE: THE HOUSE IN UCCLE

162 VICTOR HORTA

16 6 THE NETHERLANDS

16 8 SPAIN

169 ANTONI GAUD

17 2 GERMANY

173 BERLIN AND WORPSWEDE

177 MUNICH179 THE ARTISTS OF THE DARMSTADT MATHILDENH HE

180 Joseph Maria Olbrich

182 Peter Behrens

183 HAGEN, WEIMAR AND VAN DE VELDE

18 8 AUSTRIA

189 THE WIENER WERKSTTTE

190 Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser

19 4 THE UNITED STATES195 NEW YORK AND TIFFANY

197 CHICAGO AND SULLIVAN

200 VI IMAGE SYSTEMS

20 4 FRANZ VON STUCK

21 4 GUSTAV KLIM T

224 FERDINAND HODLER

23 2 EDVARD MUNCH

238 VII ART NOUVEAU AND THE AVANTGARDE

24 0 THE PARADIGM OF ARCHITECTURE

24 1 VIENNA: BETWEEN RIN GSTRASSE

AND WHITE CITY

241 Otto Wagner

246 Adolf Loos

252 THE CASTING OUT OF ORNAMENT

25 6 THE PARADIGM OF PAINTING

257 Frantiek Kupka

257 Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter

262 Piet Mondrian and De Stijl

266 VIII CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTS

26 8 BETWEEN REALITY AND UTOPIA

27 2 THE SEMANTICS OF DESIGN

27 6 THE REVIVAL OF ART NOUVEAU

28 2 APPENDICES

29 0 REFERENCES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

29 5 INDEX OF NAMES


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12

Art Nouveau cannot be presumed to have thesame degree of art historical and cultural histori-cal significance as, for example, Impressionism orExpressionism. For this reason I will approach its

origins and historical development as carefully aspossible, that is to say as impartially as possible.

CHAPTER Iconcerns phenomena linked with thestyles self-promotion. Did it react to the modern

world of consumerism with what Walter Benjamincalled a mobilization of inwardness or did itplace priority on an attempt to avoid being clois-tered off from the world and rather to oppose thecontemporary industrialized world?

CHAPTER IIseeks to clarify a problem rooted in thecontemporary terms Art Nouveau, Jugendstil,

Modern Style, and so on: whether the self-imageexpressed in these gives us the right, from the per-spective of art historical scholarship, to similarlyspeak of a style. I believe that a comparison withthe paradigm of Renaissance style permits impor-tant conclusions to be drawn, which additionallyilluminate Art Nouveaus penchant for the Gesamt-kunstwerk, or total work of art.

The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerkalso createsa transition to the idea of the physiognomy ofstyle, discussed in CHAPTER III, whose most impor-tant features lie in the all-encompassing cult of

beauty (which proves itself obsolete in the furthercourse of the twentieth century), in the striving forsynesthetic harmony, and in the immense signifi-cance of ornament and decoration.

In order to classify these qualities within the his-torical development, CHAPTER IVintroduces thosenineteenth-century artistic movements that led

to Art Nouveau or that closely touched upon it, inparticular Symbolism.

CHAPTER Vis devoted to the main centers of the

style and their artistic exponents, with the excep-tion of four outstanding painters for whom Ireserve a special chapter, which follows.

CHAPTER VIexamines the works and impact ofFranz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler,and Edvard Munch. It also returns to the questionraised previously of whether the art form of paint-ing must be excluded from Art Nouveau; whether,that is, Art Nouveau is realized only in the craftsand in architecture.

CHAPTER VIIdeals with the relationship between

Art Nouveau and the Functionalism of the earlytwentieth century, which sought to allow art tobe absorbed into everyday usefulness and thusto dispense with superfluous decoration. Theapologists for an ornament-free art categoricallycondemned Art Nouveau as a cosmetic aestheticof repression, as a fundamental self-delusion andcultural illusion; was this condemnation basedupon appropriate premises?

CHAPTER VIIIreturns to this problem in a resumptivelook back at the history of Art Nouveau and in lightof its revival, which began a couple of decades ago

(metaphor of a utopian hopesee below).

Two positions, which I single out from the litera-ture, offer extremely contrasting perspectives on

Art Nouveau, which ventured the attempta lateone in terms of cultural historyof combiningintrinsically artistic forms, but also fashion, dance,the culture of eating, and an environment suit-

INTRODUCTION


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able for children, into a style of life and of bindingthese to an ideal.

The first sees the new movement, which begantoward the end of the nineteenth century, in terms

of cultural psychology, and locates its guiding imagein Narcissistic self-love: Man is never less immedi-ate than when he seeks to bring forth the immediateexpression of himself. The idea of Jugendstil [as con-temporary Germans termed Art Nouveau] was tosurround people, in fact the era in its entirety

with nothing but reflections of their own innerselves Narcissus died because he lost himself inhis own reflection.1According to this view, Art Nou-

veaus autism, its aesthetic self-reflection in a masssociety, necessarily led to its swift conclusion.

The second interpretation, which could titleitself How Modernism Learned to Walk, locates

the failure of Art Nouveau not in its Narcissism,but rather in the opposing attempt, namely in itseffort to bring about a reconciliation of conven-tional expectations about art with the phenomenaof the technological age, and especially with thedriving impulses of technocratic motion. The factthat something like this was possibly a self-con-tradiction can be suspected, but it became certainfirst through Jugendstil. This was surely painful;its continuing popularity can therefore only beinterpreted as the irrational desire to repeatedlydelay this moment of realization. For this reasonJugendstil will probably live on forever as the

metaphor of a utopian hope.2

Obviously, the organizational structure of this booknecessarily ignores a whole array of points: in par-ticular technological aspects and questions of pro-duction technology have been set aside, for examplein the case of decorative glass and furniture, just ashas a listing of factory, workshops, and so on. Nor is

there any intention to list designers, artists, and theirworks anywhere near completely.3

The present book thus investigates fundamentalaspects. It raises, not least, the question of whether

one must presuppose an inborn failure on the partof Art Nouveau, or whether this assumption is notthe result of an overly narrow avant-garde view, into

whose coordinates art nouveau does not quite fit.These objectives simultaneously declare what

the book does not aim to achieve: It is not one ofthat large group of publications that organize thedevelopment of Art Nouveau chronologically orin terms of art as a whole. Only chapter VII followsthis model, with the intention of making it possibleto glean synoptic information of undoubted signifi-cance. But all the other chapters examine the fun-damental problems with which Art Nouveau saw

itself confronted in the historical and socio-culturalcontext of the epochal threshold around 1900.

In order to keep the bibliography within bounds,I have limited myself to important works that arerelatively easily accessible to the reader. I alsosought to set limits to the footnotes by generallyciting only quotations or particularly importantsources of ideas from the literature. As a rule I haveavoided listing again in the footnotes publicationsalready in the bibliography that clearly deal withconcrete artists, factual matters, and so on. Thislimitation should not lead the reader to falsely pre-sume that my investigations are not indebted to all

the publications mentioned.

In addition I would like to thank Stefanie Penck ofPrestel Verlag, who supported this project from the

very beginning; Anita Dahlinger for her astute andthorough image research; and not least EckhardHollmann, whose editorial supervision of the text

was performed with reliable and seasoned diligence.


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I

THE NEWSTYLE: AN

APPROACH


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Harry Graf Kessler, too, at the end of thenineteenth century, deemed the cooperationbetween high and applied art as a gain for thelatter: Now, he enthusiastically stated, for the firsttime, the applied arts [participate] in the mysticalradiance that has always transfigured thegreatart, architecture, sculpture, and painting. Whileinsurmountable obstacles kept them [the culturalpioneers; N. W.] for the time being away from thedesign of practical life , in art the adaptationto the new feeling for life met with the weakest

resistance. For this reason, it was there that theprofound transformation from old to new humanbeing first manifested itself.8

Clearly then, the amount of avant-gardepower one attributes to the new styleand

which kind of poweris a function of what onediscursively subsumes under it or expects fromit. Henry Wilsons design for the Ladbroke GroveFree Library in London in 189091 has beendescribed by several architectural historians asthe earliest example of the new styleof Art Nou-

veauin Europe, an assessment rejected by TimBenton, however, for it is based solely on a small

number of superficial decorative elements.9In thefield of painting, long before Kandinsky, experi-ments conducted with ornamental abstraction inthe style of Henry van de Veldes imageAbstractPlants (Abstrakte Pflanzenkomposition) of 1893 (fig.right) had been considered incunabula of the newstyle. While researchers generally date its begin-nings to the 1890s, the chronology of its closingstages presents significant problems.

Laird M. Easton postulates three formal prem-ises of Art Nouveau. These consist, first, in therejection of the spatial illusionism that was an

essential formal tool of the academic art of thenineteenth century; second, in ornament as areplacement for naturalistic representationalelements: with the help of complex rhythms,the ornamental principle is suffused by sym-metrically arranged and frieze-like sequences,even in the case of subject matter with anunavoidably object-like quality; and third, inthe dictates of the line, which, in extreme cases,

led to organic or zoomorphic growths as inthe work of Antoni Gaud (compare pp. 52/53and 168ff.). The playfully flamboyant version,Easton believed, invited parody, thus prompt-ing its imminent demise. Easton thus concurs

with those authors who place the death of ArtNouveau in the first decade of the twentiethcentury. Following upon floral Art Nouveau, amovement emerged that was liberated fromthe stream of ornament, and was practiced byartists such as Henry van de Velde, Charles Ren-

nie Mackintosh, and Josef Hoffmann.10But withthis, Easton claims, Art Nouveau had reachedits conclusion, for now began a radically orna-ment-free and technical design, which, via Otto

Wagner, Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, and others,led to the German Bauhaus or, in the US, to theFunctionalist building style of Louis Henry Sul-livan and Frank Lloyd Wright.11

A minority of scholars sees the formal con-trast just described as arising genetically from ArtNouveau, as two sides of one and the same coin,so to speak, and sees this matrix as remainingin effect at least into the years of the First World

War. Later chapters will attempt to show why Ishare this view.

17

HENRY VAN DE VELDEABSTRACT PLANTS,1893MIXED MEDIARIJKSMUSEUM KRLLER-MLLER, OTTERLO

CARLO BUGATTICHAIR, TABLE, AND

THRONE CHAIR, c. 1900PAINTED WOOD, EMBOSSED BRASSFITTINGS, AND METAL INLAYSCHAIR HEIGHT: 86.5 CM, TABLE HEIGHT:76.5 CM, THRONE CHAIR HEIGHT: 154.5 CMSOTHEBYS, LONDON


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ART LUXURYLUXURY ART


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In his opening address at the Turin exhibition in1902, which presented the most complete exhibi-tion of Art Nouveau worldwide, the Italian minis-ter of education and cultural affairs Nunzio Nasiacclaimed the new style as an art that would bedemocratic, in order to elevate the aesthetic tasteof the masses to a previously unknown height,and at the same time to create new jobs.12Theemotionalism of his choice of words scarcelyconceals the mercantile essence of the statement,

which also makes clear why in Italy the new style

was generally referred to as lo Stile Liberty afterthe Art Nouveau department store Liberty inLondon. Arthur Lasenby Liberty, a cunning entre-preneur, opened his department store in Londons

West End in 1875; there, in addition to goodsimported from the Near and Far East, he sold acollection of Orientalizing fabrics and wallpapers.

Among the designers was the Christopher Dressermentioned above. Liberty products were soonavailable worldwide: textiles, embroidery, carpets,furniture and fashion, silver, tin, and decorativeobjects. The Liberty style availed itself of nosingle design norm, but rather a design strategy

aimed at exquisite products with a restrainedlymodernist appearance.

The interpretation of Art Nouveau in WalterBenjaminsArcades Projectstands in only appar-ent contradiction to the commodities fetishismof the stile Liberty. Benjamin worked on thisphilosophy of the history of the nineteenth cen-tury from 1927 until his death in 1940; it was nevercompleted. Art Nouveau makes its appearancein this work as a paradigmatic conflict phenom-enon of modernity: The transfiguration of thesolitary soul seems to be its goal. Individuality is

its theory... It represents the final attempted forayof an art besieged in its ivory tower by technol-ogy. It mobilizes all the reserves of inwardness.They find their expression in the mediumisticlanguage of lines, in the blossom as the symbol ofnaked, vegetative nature, opposing a technologi-cally armed environment [...].13In Art Nouveau,for Benjamin, established art carried out a futilerearguard action, a final attempt to ennoble the

true substrata of modernity: technology and com-merce. And this at a time when, in addition toits technological achievements, it was preciselythis commercial character of modernity that wasbecoming increasingly irrefutableseen againstthis background the decorative-fantastical flour-ishes on the Villa Ruggeri in Pesaro (figs oppositeand bottom), for example, completed in 1902,parallel to the Turin exhibition, are indeed akin toatavistic mannerisms.

Benjamin inserted the sentence about Art

Nouveau into the expos, or exposition, to theArcades Project, which he entitled Paris, the Capi-tal of the Nineteenth Century. Like the art of ArtNouveau, he saw the arcadeswhich had beenbuilt in the French metropolis in the decades after1822 but by the time of his writing had alreadydisappeared or become nostalgic enclaves in thecityscapeas quintessential forms of the Mod-ern.

Nineteenth-century tourists travel guidesto Paris extolled these passagewayscoveredby iron and glass constructions and paneled inmarble, cutting through entire quarters of the

cityas shopping centers of industrial luxury andas objects of longing for sophisticated consumerdesire. On both sides of these passageways andconnecting corridors, which are both houseand street,14one elegant store followed thenext under muted light from above. The arcadesdeveloped their greatest radiance, of course, inthe evening, in artificial light: first gas then laterelectric. At night, what was fascinating was thefabric of the brilliance of the light, the brillianceof the commodities, and the mass of people inmotion. A labyrinth of brightly colored, glitteringarcades like a collection of rainbow bridges in an

ocean of light. A completely fairy-tale world.15Like the boulevards, the arcades, too, developedinto places of pleasure and strolling. In the per-son of the flneur, intelligence takes to the market,intending to look at it, and in reality, neverthe-less, to find a buyer. In this intermediary state itappears as a Bohemian.16

Admittedly, neither the arcades with theirofferings of luxury goods, nor the strolling, nor

GIUSEPPE BREGAVILLINO RUGGERI,190207PESARO


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the artificial light are products of Art Nouveau.The phenomena arose somewhat earlier andas they culminated in the late nineteenth cen-tury, they characterized the cultural cocktail ofthe Belle poque and the fin de sicle in all theirnuances of taste. But Art Nouveau (at least agood part of it) readily embraced these options.The Galerie Bing can be cited as a representativeexample.17

Frequently described in the literature as animpresario of Art Nouveau, Siegfried Bing, a

native of Hamburg who became a French citi-zen in 1876, was an expert in East Asian art. OnDecember 26, 1895in the bustling Paris streetRue de Provence, rather than an arcadeheopened a gallery and art dealership under thebusiness name La Maison Bing, LArt Nouveau.

And with this he created the French catchphrasefor those works of art that distanced themselvesfrom the established taste of the salons and thebourgeoisie. Bing functioned not least as the Pari-sian representative for Louis Comfort Tiffany, whoin turn represented Bings business interests inNew York. Surrounded by noble design, in Bings

gallery the well-heeled public open to the avant-garde could buy modern bronzes and images bythe Nabis (see p. 128ff.) as well as ceramics, jew-elry, textiles, and glass from the product line of his

American business partner, and, in keeping withsophisticated contemporary taste, there was alsoan abundant offering of Japanese antiquities.

THE MATTER OF ADVERTISING

Art Nouveau artists, at least the representatives

of the applied arts, generally had no fear of con-tact with commerce and modern trade. The roleplayed by the design of advertising media in theentire Stilkunst or style art of around 1900 issufficient evidence of this.

Advertising kiosks had been in existence since1855. They demanded striking advertising postersrather than the provisional bills formerly postedon house walls and street corners. Improved

printing techniques offered new design possi-bilities. Color lithography (chromolithography),patented in 1837, captured the market with theemergence of the lithographic printing pressbeginning in 1852, and in 1891 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec hazarded the step from the graphic artsto advertising art with his earliest posterMoulin

Rouge. La Goulue(fig. opposite), revolutionizingposter design in the process and anticipatingmany aspects of Art Nouveau. The artisticallyrefined poster pitched anything and everything:

bicycles, medications, nightclubs. Moreover, itwas hoped that courting the visitors expected atthe 1900 Paris worlds fair would boost sales of theproducts on display. And the presence of the newstyle was already obligatory at that same exposi-tion universelle; Samuel Bing designed a pavilionthat housed a large model home consisting of sixfurnished and decorated rooms.

Under the influence of Toulouse-Lautrec andJules Chret (on the latter, see p. 95), the artisticposter also made its appearance in England in1894. During this year, for example, Dudley Hardydesigned the poster for the operettaA Gaiety Girl for

the Prince of Wales Theatre. But it was the BrothersBeggarstaff (a self-ironic reference to their limitedincome)the Scotsman James Pryde and the Lon-don painter and woodcut artist Sir William Nich-olsonwho brought the Art Nouveau poster to itshigh point in England. The two had trained in Parisand worked together until 1899.18

Unsurprisingly, the art of the poster prosperednot only in Paris and London but in all the largeEuropean cities, such as Berlin, where, starting in1901, to mention one final name, Lucian Bernhard(actually Emil Kahn) emerged as the creator ofthe modernSachplakat, or object poster.19

Aesthetically sophisticated advertising was notinfrequently reproduced in the art magazines ofthe time and thus additionally ennobled. Henry

van de Velde, for example, was commissionedby Eberhard von Bodenhausen to design all theadvertising materials (until 1900) for the recentlyfounded Tropon plant, a foodstuffs firm inCologne Mhlheim. This included a poster (inci-dentally the only one van de Velde ever made),

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTRECPOSTER, MOULIN ROUGE. LA GOULUE,1891COLOR LITHOGRAPH, 84 X 122 CMPRIVATE COLLECTION


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23brochures, labels, and folding boxes. Bodenhau-sens friend, Harry Graf Kessler, together withJulius Meier-Graefe, took on the job of printedpropaganda. The poster of 1898 (fig. opposite)received special attention. Its abstract ornamenta-tion, typographical tension between dynamismand geometry, and the symbiosis of artistic aspi-ration and industrial promotion, of individualexpression and matter-of-fact information, wasseen as positively revolutionary.20Because of itsartistic value, the poster was published in reduced

size as a color lithograph in Pan, the most luxuri-ous German art magazine of the time; but it alsoappeared in the periodicalsDekorative Kunstand, in October of 1898, inL Art Dcoratif. Van de

Veldes poster was unanimously acclaimed a high-point in the history of the medium.

Visual motifs from the Munich painter Franzvon Stuck were frequently quoted in the Germanadvertising of the early nineteenth century. Theindustrial product Odol, a tooth and mouth careproduct produced by the Lingner firm, copiouslyinstrumentalized Stucks mythical worlds for itsadvertisements in the magazineDie Jugend.21The

fact that this was so easily possible, according to abiting remark by Meier-Graefe, was due to the factthat Stucks sphinxes looked like waitresses at theMunich Hofbrauhaus.22A certain awkwardnessinherent within Stucks combinations of naturalis-tic and symbolic elements cannot be disregarded.

But more worthy of consideration in our contextis a statement concerning posters and advertisingmade by Karl Hauer in 1907 in the Fackel, editedby Karl Kraus: I am very inclined to see theartistic poster as far more pernicious and sinisterthan the non-artistic one. For the fine arts ... arebeing usurped by the manufacturers need foradvertising. The fine artists, of whom there arefar too many today and who all want to live, earnfaster and better by designing advertising mate-rials than by creating mature works of art. The

baron of industry today pays better and more eas-ily than court, church, noble, or art dealer. So, thepainter draws up posters, advertising sheets, andpicture postcards 23

Whereas Benjamin reproached the visual artsfor playing the sorcerers apprentice who tries toinstrumentalize the broom of modern means ofproduction but is unable to do so, Hauer converselysaw the danger that the modern world of commodi-ties and advertising could degrade genuine artistic

value into trivial commercialized formulas..

THE NEW AESTHETIC OF LIGHTIn its symbiosis with electric lighting, one of ArtNouveaus Promethian central concernsthe aes-theticization of innovative technologiesyieldedan exemplary result.

HENRY VAN DE VELDE

POSTER, TROPON,1898COLOR LITHOGRAPH ON PAPERCALMANN & KING, LONDON

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANYTIFFANY STUDIOS TEN-LIGHT

LILY TABLE LA MP,c. 1900PRIVATE COLLECTION


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After Edisons crucial improvements to the electricincandescent bulb in 1879, the first central elec-tric stations in London and New York went intooperation in 1882.24The new light of the light bulbdemanded new lighting fixtures. Art Nouveau wasready to assist, above all the Tiffany company (fig. p.23). But as solitary objects in collections and muse-umswhich is how these lamps are usually expe-riencedthey are robbed of their original contextand thus their intended effect. Their aimtypicalof the timeof reforming the aura of an interior

by means of light and the transparency of glass asa material, and of setting luminous accents withinthat interior, has been taken from them.

Louis Bell, the author of the first, in the wordsof Schivelbusch, light-dramaturgical treatise (The

Art of Illumination, 1902), explained that for aes-thetic reasons it could be appropriate to soften thelighting to a gentle yellow glow by decorating thelampshades accordingly. In the 1890s Tiffany imple-mented this principle to perfection by means of spe-cific colorations and calculated irregularities in thematerial structure. By pushing the masses togetherbefore cooling, these fabulously colored glass

fluxeswhich shimmer in all the colors of the spec-trum and give the most delicate nuances of colorobtain a wavy and irregular surface so that theypermit the light to penetrate to different degrees,and soon denser and lighter places appear in themass. Other effects are obtained by striking piecesout of large blocks of glass; their irregular fracturesites generate various plays of light. (Zeitschrift fr

Beleuchtungswesen, 1898, no. 1, p. 9).25

Tiffany glass was also used for windows, tomute the daylight penetrating intrusively from thestreet into the private sphere, in a manner similarto muting the raw electric light. An additional

goal was filling the aesthetically unsatisfying emp-tiness of the window with the help of colored light,in order to let the interior function as a whole,harmonized within itself.

When Tiffany sent his window The Four Sea-sonsto the worlds fair in Paris in 1900, the Euro-peans immediately admired these opalescent,lead-mounted faeries on the border betweenbanal exterior world and auratic inner world. Crit-

ics extolled the glass landscape scenes in the high-est tones. The window met with the same hymnicresonance at the Pan-American Exhibition inBuffalo in 1901 and the International Applied Artsexhibition in Turin in 1902. Tiffany later disassem-bled the window into four parts and in 1905 hadit built into his country estate Laurelton Hall onLong Island. Today the segments are part of theholdings of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum(figs opposite and bottom).

LUXURY FASHIONAND REFORM DRESSFashion, tooand this meant primarily womensfashioncaptured the attention of Art Nouveauartists around 1900. Henry van de Velde, a trail-blazer in so many areas, thought about the ques-tion of how the clothing of the inhabitants couldbe matched to the interiors he had designed. Inhis autobiography, he retroactively (and alsoeuphemistically) appraised his programmaticspeech of August 1900 about an ideal (mean-

ing timeless) clothing as the first fundamentalencounter between qualified representativesof the industrial arts and an artist. The speech,entitled Zur knstlerischen Hebung der Frauen-tracht (On the Artistic Improvement of WomensCostume), was delivered during an exhibitionof modern womens dresses created after artistsdesigns; the director of the new local museum,Friedrich Deneken, had organized the exhibi-tion on the occasion of the German DressmakersShow in the Krefeld Stadthalle. On display there

were reform dresses that van de Velde, togetherwith colleagues, had designed after English and

Scandinavian models.The reform dress, first advocated by doctors

in the 1880s and then later by the feminist move-ment as well, functioned as a foil to French hautecouture, which around 1900 still dictated thebody-deforming silhouette of wasp waist and pro-truding bustle. The reform dress countered thisstyle with a loosely falling cut and dispensed withthe lace-up corset; the decoration of the haute

LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANYSPRING, FROM THE STAINED-GLASS

WINDOW THE FOUR SEASONS,c. 1899/1900THE CHARLES HOSMER MORSE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART,WINTER PARK, FLORIDA


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couture dress, with its ruffles, sequins, and bows la Paris, contrasted with the reform dresss sub-dued decorative style drawn from Art Nouveauornament. The reform dress sought to encouragethe womans natural freedom of movement as

well as bring her outfit into harmony with the aes-thetic appearance of the environment.26

Aside from the fact that the textile industrywhich depended on changes in fashionwas notexactly enthusiastic about the timeless dress,it was for other reasons that the reform dress

never caught on in Germany. Even if the productoriginally had a certain appeallike the dressdesigned around 1900 by Hugo Hppener, knownas Fidus, for his wife (fig. bottom left)27its Ger-man plainness, if not to say lack of imagina-tion, was soon made use of polemically againstthe erotic refinement of Parisian haute couture.Nationalist groups that entered the fray comparedthe free fall of the sturdy fabric to the fluid garb

worn by the high Gothic sculpture of Utain thedonors choir of Naumburg Cathedral. Not thethrill, the tyranny of the frou-frou must form thebasis of womens clothing, but chaste simplicity.28

Not in terms of beauty, but certainly in terms of thefashions commercial usefulness, the productionsof the Wiener Werksttte (see p. 189) must also beregarded as a dead end: Eduard Josef Wimmer-

Wisgrill (fig. bottom right) founded the fashion

workshop from which Vienna now exerted a lastinginfluence on Paris, especially the fashion creationsof Paul Poiret. In 1917 Otto Lendecke, who hadtrained with Poiret, launched the fashion maga-zineDie Damenwelt. Although a mere five issuesappeared, these became an exquisite testimony tothe Viennese fashion of the time. Even Gustav Klimttook part in designing the title pages. The style ofdress, after designs by more than eighty artists, wasdistinguished by a forced individuality; the designs,

whether hand-printed or produced by machine,

sparkled with an incredible richness of invention; allthe fabrics were produced in their own workshops.29

Only the dresses from the atelier of a designerlike Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo could compete, ifnot in the range of products then certainly in theexquisiteness of their appearance.

Fortuny came from a renowned family of Span-ish artists; his parents moved to Venice in 1889. Hereceived his artistic training in Paris with GiovanniBoldini, among others . He was a painter, photogra-pher, inventor, and passionate devotee of Richard

Wagner as well as an exclusive fashion designer.From 1899 his atelier was in Venice, in the Palazzo

Pesaro degli Orfei (today the Museo Fortuny). Hefirst garnered international attention for his stagesets, complete with elaborate projection effects,

which he developed for a production of Tristanand Isoldeat the Scala in Milan in 1900.30Beginningaround 1907, however, his fame rested above all

HUGO HPPENER, KNOWN AS FIDUSREFORM DRESS,c.1900WHITE LINEN, BLACK EMBROIDERY

COLLECTION HALLERISCHES FAMILIENARCHIV,BERLIN

EDUARD JOSEF WIMMER-WISGRILLHOUSECOAT MADE FROM A SILK

BY DAGOBERT PECHE, c. 1920/21MAK-AUSTRIAN MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS/CONTEMPORARY ART


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on his designs for womens dresses, which, due totheir timeless elegance, their fine fabrics, and conse-quently their immense price, were intended exclu-sively to appeal to the sure sense of taste of womenclients from European and American high society.The greatest success was enjoyed by his Delphosgowns (fig. right)made of precious silk, caress-ing the body in a free fall of fine pleats, and oftencombined with a tunic or wrap, they drew, as thereference to Delphi in their name implies, upon thebasic form of the ancient Greek chiton. Moreover

they were splendidly colored and printed with Ori-ental or Renaissance ornament in the style of artistslike William Morris (compare figs p. 122f.). Fortunyessentially retained this typean overwhelminglybeautiful reform dress, as it wereunchanged, sothat it is scarcely possible to date them.

These dresses and fabrics cannot without reserva-tion be classified as Art Nouveau products, and

yet they are close to its ideal of beauty. They werecelebrated in writing by Gabriele DAnnunzioand Marcel Proust, and worn by Isadora Duncanand Ruth St. Denis (see p. 93 ff.) at several of their

dance performances. They remained cult objectsfor decades and it was de rigueur for someonelike Peggy Guggenheim, like so many Hollywoodstarlets interested in art, to have herself photo-graphed in an outrageously expensive Delphosrobe from the Atelier Fortuny.

MARIANO FORTUNY Y MADRAZODELPHOS GOWN,c. 1920SILKKUNSTGEWERBEMUSEUM,

STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN

FOLLOWING PAGES:WIENER WERKSTTTEPAIR OF LADIES SHOES, c. 1914COLORED SILK REP, LEATHERHISTORISCHES MUSEUM DER STADT WIEN,VIENNA


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MOBILIZING INWARDNESSOR THE BREAK WITH THESTATUS QUO

Today the term avant-garde generally functions asa synonym for processes that radically broke downor break down the status quo in art. In contrast tothis, Peter Brger reserves the term for the specificearly twentieth-century attitude that opposed theautonomy of art and arts resulting lack of social

consequences, an attitude that sought to convertart into life praxis. But the aspirations of the avant-garde movements of the time toward this goal

were ultimately unsuccessful; they were not ableto bring art into immediate contact with everydayreality and to functionalize their works as social

works.31

Let us imagine once again, bearing the discourseof the avant-garde in mind, one of those interiors

whose windows were filled with opalescent Tif-fany glass. As mentioned above, the aura of thefiltered daylight, transformed into color, shut out

the banality of the external world. Walter Benja-min commented on this phenomenon as well. Hebegins his reflections with a consideration of theliving space of the mid-nineteenth century andits contrast to the world of business: The privateman who accommodates reality in the office

demands from the interior that it sustain his illu-sions. The phantasmagoria of the interior arisesfrom this; to the private man it represents theuniverse. Around the turn of the century, accord-ing to Benjamin, the culmination of the interiorreached its conclusion, that inward transfigurationof the solitary soul mentioned above, a mobili-zation of inwardnessthe room turns out to bea sanctuary of art and consequently a signifier ofits inhabitant.32

Indeedas we should not forgetthe inte-

rior spaces enclosed by colored Art Nouveauwindows did obstruct any perspective upon theouter world, the street, the square, the daily lifeof the city. Due to their colorful lack of trans-parency the gaze rebounds inwards, into thehermeticism of the interior, the place in whichinwardness is mobilized. This would thusconstitute evidence of Art Nouveaus failure toproduce an identity of art and life, evidence thatit succeeded merely in conjuring up an illusory

world of lart pour lartart for arts sakeandof self-satisfied aesthetic artificiality: for one finaltime in Western art. It would be confirmation

of the claim made by Benjamin in theArcadesProjectthat, in Art Nouveau, high art futilelyslaves away at the essential conditions of a newera. If we consider a further example in thislight, namely the above-ground Paris Mtro sta-tions designed by Hector Guimard around 1900

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