PRAEGER WORLD OF ART PAPERBACKS $3\

The sources ofmodern architectureand design

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PRAEGER WORLD OF ART SERIES

The Sources ofModern Architecture

and Design

The Sources ofModern Architecture

and Design

Nikolaus Pevsner

FREDERICK A. PRAEGER PublishersNEW YORK WASHINGTON

BOOKS THAT MATTER

PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN I968

BY FREDERICK A. PRAEGER, INC., PUBLISHERS

III FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. IOOO3

1968 IN LONDON, ENGLAND BY THAMES AND HUDSON LTD, LONDONLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 68-I9137PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONEA Style for the Age

CHAPTER TWOArt Nouveau 43

CHAPTER THREENew Impetus from England 1 1

5

CHAPTER FOURArt and Industry 147

CHAPTER FIVETowards the International Style 1 79

Notes on the Text 202

Biographical Notes 204

Select Bibliography 214

Index 215

Introduction

Where lie the sources ofthe twentieth century ? Sources bespeaka stream, then a river, and finally, in our particular case, theocean of the International Style of the 1930s. Do Prometheusand the unknown inventor of the wheel stand by the source asthe geniifontis? No; because there are breaks, and our civiliza-tion is not connected with that distant past by a continuous flow.But even if we admit that civilizations 'rise and fall, crumble,are extended. Are renewed, destroyed', even ifwe keep withinWestern civilization, are the sources of the twentieth centurythen the invention of clocks with wheels and weights and ofprinting with movable type? They are; for without printingand clocking-in there could be no twentieth century. Masscommunication and mass production are among the thingsdistinguishing ours from all preceding centuries. However, itis only the quantitative exploitation which belongs exclusivelyto us, not the invention itself. And that is indeed a phenomenonto rank high in force among the sources ofthe twentieth centuryand therefore of modern art.The twentieth century is the century of the masses : mass

education, mass entertainment, mass transport, universities withtwenty thousand students, comprehensive schools for twothousand children, hospitals with two thousand beds, stadiawith a hundred thousand seats. That is one aspect; the other isspeed oflocomotion, every citizen being an express-train driveron his own, and some pilots travelling faster than sound. Bothare only expressions of the technological fanaticism of the age,and technology is only an appHcation of science.

Science, technology, mass locomotion, mass production andconsumption, mass communication - in the field of the visualarts which is our field in this book, that means the predominanceof architecture and design over the hcaux-arts, it means the

predominance of the city over the small town and the country,and it means the concentration on architecture and design forthe masses and on what new materials and new techniques cando for them.

If this is accepted as a diagram of the twentieth century, so faras we can observe and analyse it, where do its sources lie then?We can now endeavour to list and consider them in their orderof time.

CHAPTER ONE

A Style for the Age

Architecture and design for the masses must be functional, inthe sense that they must be acceptable to all and that their well-functioning is the primary necessity. A chair can be uncomfort-able and a work of art, but only the occasional connoisseur canbe expected to prefer its aesthetic to its utilitarian qualities. Theplea for functionalism is the first of our sources. AugustusWelby Northmore Pugin, born in 1812, the EngHsh son of aFrench father, wrote on the first page of his most importantbook : 'There should be no features about a building which arenot necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety . . .The smallest detail should . . . serve a purpose, and constructionitself should vary with the material employed.'^ That waswritten in 1 841 , but it was not new then. It is the direct continua-tion of the principle of French seventeenth and eighteenthcentury rationalism. Architecture, writes Batteaux,^ 'is not a

spectacle . . . but a service', and 'security, fitness, convenience,propriety' are all familiar from Cordemoy to Boffrand and theyounger Blondel. To quote two less familiar passages, neitherFrench : Hogarth called the first chapter ofhis Analysis ofBeauty,'Of Fitness', starting thus: 'Fitness of the parts to the design forwhich every individual thing is form'd ... is of the greatestconsequence to the beauty ofthe whole ... In ship-building thedimensions of every part are confin'd and regulated by fitnessfor saiHng. When a vessel sails well, the sailors call her a beauty;the two ideas have such a connection.'^ And the Abbate LodoH,not uninfluenced perhaps by Hogarth, referred in his stimulatingconversations to the Venetian gondola as a piece of functionaldesign, and stipulated that nothing ought to appear in a buildingwhich is not 'truly fulfilling its function' or: 'has not its ownproper function' and is not 'an integral part of the fabric' anddesigned in a logical relation to the 'nature of the material'.^

9

The fact that Pugin, who came first in this string ofquotations,called the hook which he started with this clarion call The TruePrinciples of Pointed or Christian Architecture, the fact that his

principal purpose was not a plea for functionalism but for theGothic Revival as the expression of a Catholic Revival, eventhe fu't that he argued extremely intelligently the functionalaspect of the Gothic style, of buttresses, of rib-vaults and so on,all these facts do not concern us at present. He was read by theGothicists, but he was also read by the Functionalists. For suchexisted among the mid-nineteenth century writers and thinkers.Gottfried Semper in Germany, with his explanation of theapplied or decorative arts as conditioned by materials and tech-niques, was one ofthem. He had lived in London as a refugee inthe years 185 1-5, and must have been in contact with the smallgroup of architects, artists and administrators responsible forthe preparation, the success and the ruthless criticism of theGreat Exhibition of 1851 : Henry Cole in the first place, OwenJones, Matthew Digby Wyatt and Richard Redgrave in thesecond.These men, even before the exhibition, had issued a small

journal called xh^ Journal oj Design and Manufactures and in thishad applied the principles of Pugin, as Semper was going to dolater, to matters of craft and industrial art. Pugin had objectedto carpets where one walks 'upon highly relieved foliage',^ theJournal now insisted that carpets should keep to 'a level or lowplane', ^ that wallpapers should convey 'the proper impressionof flatness'"^ and in a more general way, that 'the first considera-tion of the designer should be perfect adaptation to intendeduse'^ and that every object 'to afford perfect pleasure must be fitfor the purpose and true in its construction'.^No wonder that these men, when the Crystal Palace had gone

up and been filled with the proudest products of all nations,were appalled at the standard of taste displayed. 'The absence ofany fixed principle in ornamental design is most apparent,' theywrote, and 'the taste of the producers is uneducated'. ^^ Nowonder cither that they admired the Crystal Palace itself10

I The Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1 85 1 and re-erectedat Sydenham in 1853 (above, looking along the roof to the 'transept').Joseph Paxton's building, which was entirely prefabricated, marked thefirst major escape from historical styles in architecture

The Crystal Palace is the mid-nineteenth century touchstone,ifone wishes to discover what belongs wholly to the nineteenthcentury and what points forward into the twentieth. TheCrystal Palace was entirely of iron and glass, it was designed bya non-architect, and it was designed for industrial quantityproduction of its parts. It is a source in one sense, but it also hadits sources, and they take us back once again to the eighteenthcentury. The use of iron in architecture starts in France in the1780S with Soufflot and Victor Louis, who were especiallyconcerned with making theatres fireproof, and in England inthe 1 790S with manufacturers who, acting as their own designers,attempted to make their factories fireproof In both cases the

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II

iron was an expedient of high utiHtarian but of no aestheticsignificance. It came into the open, as it were, playfully and onlyinternally, in some romantic buildings such as Nash's RoyalPavilion at Brighton in 1815-20, and seriously and externally inthe great bridges of the same years. The earliest iron bridge was

///. 2 in fact designed as early as 1777 - the Coalbrookdale Bridge inEngland. It has a span of 100 feet. It was at once surpassed by thebridge at Sunderland which in 1793-6 spanned 206 feet, andthis by James Finley's Schuylkill Bridge of 1809, with 306 feet.The two English bridges had been iron arches, the SchuylkillBridge was a suspension bridge, and the suspension principlegave us the finest of the early nineteenth-century bridges such

2 Coalbrookdale Bridge, Shropshire, 1777-81, the first iron bridge in theworld. Its builder, the ironmaster Abraham Darby, was assisted by a minorarchitect, T. F. Pritchard. The bridge crosses the Severn with a span of onehundred feet

3 The Menai Suspension Bridge, linking North Wales with the Isle ofAnglesey, was built by Thomas Telford between 1818 and 1826 as part ofthe Holyhead to Chester Road. Telford, the greatest road and canalengineer of the early nineteenth century, had earlier designed a vast single-span iron bridge of unprecedented boldness (never built) to replaceLondon Bridge

as Thomas Telford's Menai Bridge of 1 8 1 8-26 with a main spanof 579 feet.Some architects later in the nineteenth century - Matthew

Digby Wyatt among them - were ready to count them amongthe fmest structures of the century. But they were not the workof architects. The architects, as we have seen, had been readyto use iron in a minor way, where necessity arose, but otherwiseat best they only played with it. Now this is what Wyatt wrotein 1 8 50-1, apropos the bridges, these 'wonders of the world':'From such beginnings what glories may be in reserve ... wemay trust ourselves to dream, but we dare not predict.'^

^

This was the year of the Crystal Palace. Pugin called it the 'glassmonster', ^2 Ruskin a 'cucumber frame', ^^ but Wyatt wrotethat the building was likely to accelerate the 'consummationdevoutly to be wished' and that 'the novelty of its form anddetails . . . will exercise a powerful influence upon nationaltaste' . ^ "^ A httle later he even foretold from the union ofiron andglass 'a new era in architecture'.^^ This was still in 1851.

13

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5 The Bibliotheque Ste-Genevieve in Paris, by Henri Labroustc (i 843-50),an iron-frame structure frankly revealed as such. At this date iron-framingwas normally given a stone or plaster disguise

But by then, a few of the most adventurous architects ofrepute had begun to take notice of iron, and Labrouste'sBibhotheque Ste-Genevieve in Paris of 1843-50 and Bunning'sCoal Exchange in London of 1846-9 remain the earliest build-ings whose aesthetic character is determined by iron. Labrouste'shas the greater elegance and ornamental restraint, as Labroustewas indeed doubtless the better architect ofthe two. That comesout even more clearly in the exteriors : Bunning's of an un-principled jollity which was accepted at the time in England asbelonging to the Free or Mixed Renaissance; Labrouste's alsoofthe Renaissance and also a free Renaissance, but treated nobly,with discipline and economy ofdecoration. And both architectshid their display of iron behind solid stone.

///^' 4, 5

4 Part of the icon-gallcried interior of the C^oal Exchange in London, by J. B.Bunning (1846-9). Its demolition in 1962 was one of London's most serious andfutile recent losses

Wyatt appreciated Bunning, a greater man appreciatedLabrouste and was guided by him: Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc(1814-79). When Labrouste stopped teaching, his pupilsinduced Viollet-le-Duc to take over, and he taught for a shorttime. In connection with this he began to deliver his Entretiensin 1858, published the first volume in 1863 and the moreimportant second in 1872. His approach to architecture is thefunctionahst's. He demands the ^alliance ofform with need' andwith 'the means of construction'.^^ He demands truth: that'stone should appear as stone, iron as iron and wood as wood',^^that no 'monumental appearances should conceal bourgeoishabits'. ^^ And consequently he insists on the necessity of a stylefor the nineteenth century. Today, he says, 'we possess immenseresources provided by industry and ease of transportation.'^^Architecture belongs 'almost as much to science as to art'.^oArchitects must cease to be interested only in whether theirfa

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6 W.H. Barlow's train-shed of St Pancras Station, London, of 1864: atremendous feat of engineering with its pointed arch spanning 243 feet

But it was not his field, as it was not Viollet-le-Duc's. Whenhe was asked to design a hotel in connection with the newSt Pancras Station in London, he provided a towering Gothicpile hiding entirely the magnificent metallic construction whichthe engineer William H. Barlow had erected behind it as atrain-shed and which, with its span of 243 feet, was the largestspan ever, until then, achieved by man. It remained the largestin Europe for twenty-five years, until it was finally vastly sur-passed by Dutert and Contamin's splendid Halle des Machitics atthe Paris Exhibition of 1889, with its 362 feet span.

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111.7

17

But while iron and glass, and the new aesthetic vocabularywhich its extensive use entailed, went on in exhibition buildingsand train-sheds and also in factories and office buildings, wheremuch light and a cellular structure were demanded, thearchitect continued to keep away from the new materials and tobe satisfied with the trappings of Gothic, Renaissance and -

more and more - Baroque. Neither the aesthetic possibilities ofdefeating the limitation of past styles by means of the newpossibilities of skeletal construction nor the social possibilitiesof mass-produced parts were taken seriously by the profession.The great impetus in the fields of aesthetic and social renewal

came from England and centres in the larger-than-life figure ofWilliam Morris, poet, pamphleteer, reformer, designer -

trained a little at university, a Httle in architecture, a little in

painting - and ending by being a manufacturer and shopkeeper,though a very special one. Morris's firm was started in 1861, incollaboration with his close friends, the architect PhiUp Webband the painters Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti and Burne-Jones.Morris's theories, as he lived them from when he was twenty-five and as he expounded them in impetuous lectures from whenhe was over forty, are familiar. They derive from Ruskin whohad hated the Crystal Palace, had gone out of his way to saythat a railway station could never be architecture and deniedwith frantic fanaticism the necessity for his age to search for astyle of its own: 'A day never passes without our . . . architectsbeing called upon to be original and to invent a new^ style . . . Wewant no new style of architecture ... It does not matter onemarble splinter whether we have an old or new architecture . . .The forms ofarchitecture already known to us are good enoughfor us, and far better than any of us'.^^ Morris was wiser. Herefuted the current historicism, the 'masquerading in otherpeople's cast-off clothes', 26 but he too recommended architectsto 'study the ancient work directly and to learn to understandit'. 27 He was not a revolutionary; he loved the Middle Ages andloved nature and the open country, and he hated the big cities.His hatred was visual at first, but turned social almost at once.

7 The Hall des Machines, built for the Paris Exhibition of 1889. It was primarilythe work of engineers, led by V. Contamin, though assisted in the details by tharchitect Dutert - a pattern that was to become characteristic in the future

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London to him was not only 'a whole county covered withhideous hovels', ^^ but also a 'beastly congregation of smoke-dried swindlers and their slaves'. ^^ The Middle Ages were notonly pleasing to his eyes, they were also - as they had been toRuskin - right in their social structure, or what he believed tohave been their social structure. In the Middle Ages, he said,art was not 'divided among great men, lesser men, and littlemen',^ artists were not, as they are now, 'highly cultivated

men whose education enables them, in the contemplation ofthepast glories of the world, to shut out from their view the every-day squalors that most of men live in'.^^ Artists were plainworkmen, 'common fellows' who worked away 'on the anvil'or 'about the oak beam' with 'many a grin of pleasure'. ^^ Thethings which are museum pieces now 'were common things intheir own day'.^^ And the reason why that was so, is that in theMiddle Ages 'daily labour was sweetened by the daily creationof Art'. ^"^ And so Morris arrived at his definition of art as 'theexpression by man of his pleasure in labour'. ^^ He arrived at thedemand that art should become this again: 'a happiness for themaker and the user.' For while the average man can have nointerest in the self-conscious isolated artist, he can enjoy whatthe craftsman does for him. So art should be not only 'by thepeople' but also 'for the people'. ^^ 'I do not want art for a few,any more than I want education for a few, or freedom for afew.'37

It is a strange system of theory to be guided by for a man inthe mid-nineteenth century. It can only be understood as ademonstration of opposition to the standard and the taste ofdesign as it was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of London in1 85 1, Paris in 1855, London again in 1862 and Paris again in1867.

Looking at the goods, especially the domestic goods, illus-trated in the catalogues of these exhibitions, one can understandMorris's outbursts. In the Middle Ages 'everything which wasmade by man's hand was more or less beautiful,' today 'almostall wares that are made by civilized man are shabbily and

20

pretentiously ugly.'^^ What is offered and sold is 'hurtful to thebuyer, more hurtful to the seller, if he only knew'.-^*^ Ourhouses are filled with 'tons upon tons of unutterable rubbish',and the only acceptable things are usually in the kitchen. '^o Thereason is that they alone are honest and simple, and 'thetwo virtues most needed in modern life (are) honesty andsimplicity '."^^ Morris maintained that a bonfire ought to havebeen made of nine-tenths of all that was in wealthy people'shouses. ^2

Morris in his own day was no doubt right in blamingindustry. 'As a condition of life, production by machinery isaltogether an evil.'"*^ But if you refuse to accept the machine,you cannot produce cheaply. What Morris's firm made wasbound to be expensive, and could not be 'for the people'. Norwas it strictly speaking 'by the people'; for Morris and hisfriends designed their chintzes and wallpapers, their furnitureand stained glass, and while it was made, admittedly, by hand(though not always), it was not really creative craft. Yet, in spiteof such inconsistencies, Morris succeeded in what he had set outto achieve. He made young painters and architects* in allcountries turn to craft or design ; that is, he directed them to-wards helping people in their everyday lives.Why he succeeded, where Henry Cole and his friends had not,

is easily seen. For one thing he practised (up to a point) what hepreached. He was a fanatical craftsman himself, trying his handat wood-carving and illumination as early as 1856, and furnish-ing his first rooms in London with Morris-designed andcarpenter-made 'intensely medieval furniture ... as firm and asheavy as a rock'."*^ Two years later he got married, and a yearafter, in i860, he moved into Red House, a house at BcxleyHeath outside London, designed for him by his friend PhilipWebb and furnished to Webb's and Morris's own designs. Thehouse was daring in many ways, in exposing its red brick with-out a coat of stucco, in planning from inside out, that is, withsecondary consideration of fa(;:ades, and in frankly showing theconstruction inside.

21

>iijsjj^

Such a detail as the fireplace is of a truly revolutionarycharacter, completely devoid of any period allusions andcompletely functional in displaying its brick courses horizontallywhere the logs are laid and vertically where the smoke goes up.It is an exception in its own day and more prophetic of thecoming twentieth century than anything in the field ofdomesticdesign in any country for thirty years to come. Most of thefirm's early furniture is much more backward-looking, thoughto the simplicity of the cottage and never to the displays of therich man's house. Yet even among the furniture sold by the firm,one can find occasional pieces of remarkably independentdesign. A chair designed by the Pre-Raphaelite painter FordMadox Brown about i860, for instance, though also clearly asimple cottage chair, shows originality in the slender elongationof the rails of the back.

Simphcity and directness unite this chair, Webb's fireplace,and the very fine designs in the flat of Morris and his firm, suchas his famous Daisy wallpaper designed in 1862 and Webb's

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III. 72

III.

8 Red House, Bexleyheath, Kent,which was designed by Phihp Webbin 1859 for his friend WilliarnMorris, was comfortable, domestic,and very free in its handling ofperiod precedent. In some details,like this fireplace, Webb shows anoriginality that looks forward toVoysey or Lutyens

9 Under the influence of Morris'sideas furniture designers went back

to the simplicity of the Englishcottage, and revived several

traditional types from the country.This chair by Ford Madox Brown

of about i860, with its straight linesand rush seat, antedates the

foundation of the Morris firm

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10 The firm of Morris and Co. exerted a decisive influence on almost everyaspect of design and interior decoration; it produced these tiles designed byPhilip Webb in 1862, for a fireplace in Norman Shaw's Old Swan House(see III. 1 7)

III. 10 Swan tiles designed in the same year. It was the absence ofsimplicity and directness from the goods one could buy in theexisting shops and stores which led to the creation of the firm.And there again Morris directed development both as acraftsman and a designer. When he decided that the firm shouldturn to the printing of textiles, and saw that bad dyeing wasone of the chief troubles, he learned to dye for himself Andlater, when the firm turned to tapestry weaving, he spent 516hours in four months at the loom. But Morris's success was not

II Lily, machine-woven Kidderminster carpeting, by William Morris, 187

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13 Silk damask designed by OwenJones, a friend of Henry Cole andsupporter of the Great Exhibition:

the Cole circle, even before Morris,reacted against the florid photo-

graphic naturalism of HighVictorian designs, and produced

flat patterns for flat surfaces

1i

12, 13

only grounded in the example of craftsmanship he set, it waseven more due to his genius as a designer. The designs of theCole circle are dry and doctrinaire, Morris's are brimful of Hfe. IlhThat is one memorable thing about them ; the others are these.His designs are always crisp. There is no 'slobbering and messingabout' in them.'^^ Secondly, he succeeded better than anyonebefore or after him in achieving a balance between nature andstyle, between the flatness recommended for textiles, etc., byPugin and the Cole circle, and the richness and abundance offlower and leaf as he had studied it so well in his childhood andyouth. Moreover, his designs - in terms of design, not of Ills. 11,12imitation - possess the equivalent of the closeness and density ofnature observed. Finally - and this matters most in our particularcontext - the designs, especially those of before 1876, are notin any way closely dependent on the past. They may beinspired to a certain extent by Elizabethan and Jacobeanembroidery, but they are essentially original.

An example of Morris's own design - a chinz {Tulip, 1875) that shows theehness and crispness of Morris at his best

Just as Morris knew that to re-establish values in the things ofone's everyday use was a matter of social conscience before itcould ever become a matter of design, so he also knew - andin this he proved just as much a prophet - that the revival ofsound architecture must precede the revival of sound design.'Unless you are resolved', he said in 1880, *to have good andrational architecture, it is . . . useless your thinking about art atall '46 'ji^g great architect' of his own day, he knew, lived a Hfecarefully 'guarded from the common troubles of commonmen'.'^'^ What he was referring to here is the fact that the leadingarchitects of the nineteenth century spent their lucrativeworking hours designing churches, public buildings andcountry houses and villas for the rich. This attitude changedonly gradually, and it will be one of our tasks in this book towatch the change. Its first stage is what became known as the

14 Norman Shaw's country houses may be compared with those of PhilipWebb. Banstead, Surrey, of 1884, shows the same sensibly informalplanning, though the angular chimney-stack and the neatly placed windowsare more self-consciously urbane

15 A later house by Philip Webb: Standen near East Grinstcad, Sussex, ot1892. Beginning as always from the requirement of comfort and con-venience, Webb achieves a design combining sincerity and elegance

English Domestic Revival, a turn ofsome architects of Morris'sgeneration to the domestic field, entirely or almost entirely,and at the same time to a smaller scale and a greater delicacy ofdetail.

The two most important names are that of Morris's friendPhilip Webb and that of Richard Norman Shaw. We have Ills. 14, 75already met Webb more than once. An early work of hismaturity is Joldwyns in Surrey of 1873. Its chief merits are acombination o{ boldness and straightforwardness, a refusal todo anything for show, and a great faith in local buildingmaterials. Webb, like Morris, was not a revolutionary. Heloved old building in the country and used its methods andmotifs. He was never afraid of mixing styles and he relishedunexpected solecisms such as the long chimneys ot Joldwyns,or the far-projecting five gables in a row at Standen, a house of ///. i s1892.

29

///. 17

1 6 Shaw was an almostexact contemporary ofMorris and Webb. Whatdistinguishes him is hissophisticated wit and hiswiUingness to play withhistorical styles for amusingeffect. His New ZealandChambers, in the City ofLondon, 1872, uses motifsfrom the seventeenth andeighteenth century to createan efficient, well-lit office

block

Shaw was a different character, more the artist, where Webbwas the builder, more fanciful and elegant and perhaps alsomore sensitive. He, too, never departed far from the past, atleast in his individual motifs, and he too mixed them withdelight. The oversailing upper floors of Swan House, Chelsea,of 1876, are in the tradition of timber-framed building. Theoriel windows on the first floor are a favourite English motifof about 1675, the excessively slender windows above areQueen Anne - but the deHcate, even piquant ensemble is Shaw

30

17 Old Swan House,Chelsea, by Shaw (1876).Each of its elements canbe traced to a historical

source, but their combinationhas an elegance that isunmistakably Shaw's

and no one else and had a great deal of influence in England andAmerica. Shaw even introduced this novel idiom into the Cityof London. New Zealand Chambers of 1872, unfortunatelydestroyed in the Second World War, is just as dainty anddomestic. The oriel windows on the ground floor are speciallyremarkable. There is no period motif here; they are simplyintroduced to allow a maximum ofdaylight to enter the offices.Shaw's country houses are nearer Webb's, although they alsocan perhaps be called more lighthearted.

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III. i4

31

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III

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gjgji1 8 Bedford Park, near London - the first garden suburb The

earliest

houses of about 1875 were designed in a modest style that hasinfluenced

domestic architecture ever smce. Gardens were large and informal;old

trees were kept to give a pleasant rural feeling

There is one more respect in which Shaw's work concerns us

///. 18 here. At Bedford Park, not far from London, though at the

time still not engulfed in the town, he built from 1875 the first

garden suburb ever. The idea was not his, but Jonathan Carr's

who had acquired the site. However, Shaw made it cometo Hfe, in terms of streets of modest houses and of old trees

preserved in the gardens and new trees planted in the streets.

32

Again the design of the houses is not specially original. Theirsource is Tudor England and Stuart England, though again notthe England of the 'prodigy houses' but of the manor house ofthe size of William Morris's own at Kelmscott in Oxfordshire.Webb and Shaw had established the middle-class house as theprogressive architect's chief preserve. Morris had re-establishedthe aesthetic importance of our closest everyday surroundings.But neither he nor Webb nor Shaw had felt as strongly aboutthe necessity of an original style of the nineteenth century,that is, about forms not taken over from the past, as Viollet-le-Duc had done. It made little difference; for Viollet-le-Duc,when it came to designing, was ifanything more period-boundthan Webb and Shaw. No one in Europe could get awayentirely from historicism before the i88os.

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19 Kelmscott Manor, William Morris's beloved house: the picturesqueand plain outline of such old houses, with wings added gradually throughthe centuries, inspired English architects from Webb and Shaw onwards

21 W.G. Low House,Bristol, Rhode Island,

by Stanford White(18S7, demolished), hi

America architectssuch as White and

Richardson were ableto break with historical

precedent even moreradically than Webb

and Shaw

20 (below) The F.L.Ames Memorial GateLodge at North Easton,Mass., by H.H.Richardson (i 880-1),in his favourite massivestonework

And Europe does in fact not cover the world situation anylonger at this juncture. The defeat of historicism was the workof Americans as much as Europeans, though their front ofattack was significantly broader than that of the English. In thefield ofthe private house, H. H. Richardson and Stanford Whiteof McKim, Mead and White showed as much fresh enterpriseas Shaw, though admittedly not without knowing of his earlierhouses. Occasionally, as in the house for W.G.Low at Bristol,Rhode Island, of 1887, which has been foolishly allowed todisappear, White displayed a radicalism beyond Shaw's andexplicable no doubt by his pioneer background of building ina young nation. The same radicalism was applied with evengreater independence in commercial architecture. It is here thatAmerica about 1890 established international leadership.

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III. 21

35

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The flict that America now reached this crucial moment isone of the most memorable facts of the century. The UnitedStates had been colonial in their reaction to European styles.They had become provincial, that is, part of a common frontof progress, but an outlying part. Now all at once they lefteveryone else behind. They did this in first developing theskyscraper and then in finding a new style for it. In 1875 inNew York the Tribune Building by Hunt rose to 260 feet, in1890 the Pulitzer (World) Building by Post to 375 feet.These early skyscrapers are simply high houses, not even

especially characterized as office buildings. It would have beenpossible to characterize them so ; for English office buildings hadevolved a style as early as the 1840s in which the facade wasreduced to a grid of stone piers and large windows. Chicago, a

22 As early as the mid-nineteenth century Englishoffice buildings had evolveda functional style in whichthe w^all was reduced to agrid of verticals andhorizontals. This example atNos. 5-7 Aldermanbury,London, by an unknownarchitect, dated from about1840

23 The GuarantyBuildmg, Buffalo (1895)-the masterpiece of Louis

Sullivan. In techniqueand in its strong vertical

emphasis it points forwardto the twentieth century,

but its elaborate andcomplex ornament places

it still in the age of ArtNouveau {see III. 26)

uM^m fsgr^^r""'-

newer city than New York, and one in which traditions couldnot possibly matter, took up this novel and logical treatmentand made it the standard of its skyscrapers. Moreover, Chicagoadded of its own the equally logical and most far-reachinginnovation of applying the system of the iron frame, originallya system used for factories, to the high office building. This wasfirst done by WilHam Le Baron Jenney in the Home InsuranceBuilding in 1883-5. It was an untidy and fussy building, butthe tidying up was done only five or six years later by a fewmore talented architects : Burnham & Root, Holabird & Roche

///. 23 and Louis SulHvan. Holabird & Roche's Tacoma Buildingdates from 1887-9, Burnham & Root's Monadnock Building(not a frame structure) from 1889-91, SuUivan's WainwrightBuilding at St Louis from 1891. In the following years appear-ances were rapidly even further purified. Holabird & Roche's

///. 24 classic moment is the Marquette Building of 1894, SulHvan's///. 2^ the Guaranty Building of 1895 ^t Buffalo.

The importance of the School of Chicago is threefold. Thejob of the office building was here approached with a perfectlyopen mind and the functionally best solution found. An un-traditional building technique offered itself to fulfil the needs ofthe job and was at once accepted. And it was now at lastarchitects who took the necessary action, and no longerengineers or other outsiders. Sullivan in particular knew clearlywhat he was doing. In his Ornament in Architecture, an articleof 1892, he had written: 'It would be greatly for our aestheticgood, ifwe should refrain entirely from the use ofornament fora period ofyears, in order that our thought might concentrate . .

.

upon the production ofbuildings . . . comely in the nude.'"^^ YetSulHvan himself loved ornament, though he used it externallyonly in a few judiciously chosen places. It is a very personalfeathery foliage ornament, inspired partly by the Morris

Ills. 2^, 26 Movement, but much freer, wilder and more entangled. It hasbeen called Art Nouveau or Proto-Art Nouveau, and whethersuch a term is justifiable cannot be decided until Art Nouveauhas been closely examined.

24 The Marquette Building, Chicago, by Holabird & Roche. Here in 1894 thesteel frame is completely expressed around large, broad windows (those at thebottom are already the 'Chicago type', see III. 182), the detailing is plain, and the

whole is so well planned it is still highly efficient today

Ni

I!

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25, 26 Cast-iron ornament by Louis Sullivan, (right) on the Guaranty Building(1895, see III. 25) and (above) on the Carson Pirie Scott store (begun 1899, ///. 182).Ornament in architecture had a special importance for Sullivan, and his own, withits tensions and exuberant curls, is strikingly original

This is in fact our task now; for Art Nouveau was the othercampaign to drive out historicism. This is its primary significancein European design and architecture, whatever other delightsand aberrations it may harbour. Among the sources of modernarchitecture and design it is still the most controversial. Today'sarchitecture and design having taken a turn away fromrationalism and towards fancy, Art Nouveau has suddenlybecome topical, and the very qualities of it which in thisnarrative will appear historically most dubious are hailed.Books and exhibitions have vied with each other to present itsfascination. All the more important must it be to attempt ananalysis - aesthetic as well as historical.

40

RHMnCKMURDO,RRIBR 1 8 B 3^.RLLEN. SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON. KENT.

27 Mackmurdo's title-page for his book of 1883 defending Wren's CityChurches introduced motifs which became popular throughout Europe

CHAPTER TWO

Art Nouveau

The term Art Nouveau comes from S. Ding's shop in Parisopened late in 1895, the corresponding German term Juj^endsti

I

from a journal which began to appear in 1896. But the style isolder. Traditionally it is supposed to have started fully maturein Victor Horta's house, no. 6 rue Paul-EmileJanson in Brussels, ///. 88and that house w^as designed in 1892 and built in 1893. l^ut itmarks no more than the transfer of the style from the small toa larger scale and from design to architecture.The incunabula of Art Nouveau belong to the years 1883-8.

They are the following. Arthur H. Mackmurdo, wealthyyoung architect and designer, in 1883 wrote a book on SirChristopher Wren's churches in the City of London - not asubject that seems to call for Art Nouveau - and gave it a title-page fully Art Nouveau. What justifies this statement? The ///. zyarea inside the frame is filled by a non-repeating, asymmetricalpattern of tulips, stylized vigorously into flaming shapes. Tothe left and right sharply cut short by the frame are twocockerels, pulled out to an excessive thinness and length. Thecharacteristics which we shall see recur whenever we speak ofArt Nouveau are the asymmetrical flaming shape derived fromnature, and handled with a certain wilfulness or bravado, andthe refusal to accept any ties w^ith the past. Of course Mack-murdo's design is not without ancestors, but they are not to befound among the hallowed period styles.He must have looked at Morris and, like Morris, at the Pre-

Raphaelites. He must have known WiUiam Blake, as thePre-Raphaelites did, but he was also famihar - socially too -

with Whistler, and although Whistler was an Impressionist inhis formative years, he soon found an aim of his own, the aim toblend the Hght, soft, hazy tones of Impressionism with the

43

29 Three trends after i860: (top ri^ht)seeming naturalism pleasantly formalizedin the signet of Morris and Co. (c 1861);(bottom right) sinuous elegance in Mack-murdo's signet for the Century Guild,incorporating its initials CO (1884);(above) Japanese stylization in Whistler'scalligraphic Butterfly signature

28 (left) The Peacock Room, 1876-7:lavish decoration by Whistler in blue andgold 'Japonaiserie' of a room designed byThomas Jeckyll for the shipping magnateF.R. Leyland's collection of porcelain

creation o{ piquant decorative patterns, sometimes almostabstract, sometimes linear as in the celebrated Peacock Room of1876-7. His equally celebrated signet, the butterfly, is anexample of his genius for witty stylization. Companions areMorris's early signet of his firm and Mackmurdo's of theCentury Guild which he started in 1882. The three signets sumup a story of nature and abstraction in which Morris, Whistlerand Mackmurdo are of equal importance. It need hardly beadded that the idea of calling a firm a guild was a bow to theRuskin and Morris circle. It was to convey connotations of theMiddle Ages and of cooperation instead of exploitation or

///. 28

III

45

30 Title page of theHobby Horse, designedby Selwyn Image in1884. Printed onhand-made paper ina carefully chosentraditional typeface,It heralded a style ofbook-design lastingwell into this century.'Never before', saidThe Studio, 'hadmodern printing beentreated as a seriousart.'

competition. Mackmurdo's guild brought out a journal the///. JO Hobby Horse, and the title-page and typography of this also are

worth remembering. It preceded by six years Morris's morefamous venture into typography and book-making, theKelmscott Press. Mackmurdo designed textiles for his guild in1884 too, and they possess much of the originality and the

Ills. 32, 33 swagger ofthe Wren title. It is difficult to assess the effects of theCentury Guild. The eighties were the years of Morris's widesuccess as a designer. His by then much more staid, symmetrical,as it were, classic designs for textiles were the principal influencein England. But Mackmurdo's daring also found an echo hereand there. Heywood Sumner, who was indeed for a while

46

associated with the Guild, worked in its style. The cover of thetranslation of Fouquc's Undine (1888) is a masterpiece in its ownright. The world of sprites or fairies of the water was bound toappeal to Art Nouveau sensibility. Hair and waves and sea-weeds were as alluring as such elemental creatures themselves,not guided by reason but by instinct. For order enforced byintellect is one of the things against which Art Nouveau was inopposition, and the conscious selection of styles of the past to beimitated represented that principle of enforced order.

///. JJ

31 Cover of Fouque's Undine by Heywood Sumner, 1888

ltt:

32, 33 The beginnings of Art Nouvcau: printed cotton fabrics (1884),above

Single Flower, right. Peacock, by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, partly derived

--^

:^^^

from Morris but containing all the elements of the later style. They were printedby Simpson and Godlce of Manchester for the C^Mitury Caiild

///. 36

Ills 34, 35

Mackmurdo's exploration was one in two dimensions, asindeed Morris's had been. But efforts at breaking the shackles ofhistoricism in the crafts, expressing themselves in the shapingnot the decorating of objects, were not entirely lacking either.Pride of place here goes to France. Emile Galle of Nancy wasfive years older than Mackmurdo. His glass vessels of 1884 andafter are as alien to nineteenth-century conventions as Mack-murdo's book and textile designs, with their soft, subtle coloursand the mystery of their naturalistically-represented flowersemerging out of cloudy grounds. Nor was Galle alone, even inthese earliest years. Eugene Rousseau, for instance, a much oldercraftsman in Paris ofwhom too little is known, turned to a newstyle at the same time. The Musee des Arts Decoratifs boughtcertain pieces from him in 1885, and among them is 2i jardinierein imitation ofjade and a tall vase of clear glass, both strikinglyindependent and courageous. The scratched-in pattern of thetall vase is particularly bold - Klee rather than Morris.

50

34, 35 In glass the Art Nouvcau creatednovel shapes as well as novel decoration.Among its pioneers was Eugene Rous-seau, with such pieces as a vase withKlee-like scratched decoration (r[^ht}and an imitation-jade jardiniere (left),both of 1884-5

36 A vase of shadedcoloured glass by EmileCialle, of about 1S95,decorated with a cyclamenin enamel. Cialle, like Obristilll. >4) had studied botany

51

37 Crackleware goblet by Ernest Baptiste Lcveille {c. i SSy) ; marbled withcolour both inside and out, and only about 6 inches high

E.B.Leveille, a pupil of Rousseau, showed glass at the ParisExhibition of 1889, wholly in the same spirit, for instance a vase

///. 37 oi craquele glass marbled in green and red. In ceramics there isonly one parallel to Rousseau, and that takes us to the mostinfluential of all outsiders, to Gauguin.

52

/-. sr?^'

23*A-^-*: 11-^

38 Crystal vase decorated with translucent enamel, abt)ut 9 inches high, bvEmileGalle(i887)

39 The only leading painter toexpernnent with crafts at thistime was CJauguin: he carvedand painted tliis wooden panelin iHHi for a cupboard in hisown dining-room

40 Gauguin alsodesigned a ceramic

centrepiece for a table,in the form of a girl

bathing in a pool 1888

54

41 A pitcher by Gauguin,baked and enamelled in 1886

by Chaplet

Gauguin is the only one of the leading painters who not onlyinfluenced design by his forms but experimented with craftshimself. In 1881, before he had given up his job at the bank todevote himself to art, he decorated a cupboard in his dining-room with carved wooden panels in decidedly exotic shapesand painted red, green, yellow and brown. Primitivism startsfrom here, and a primitivism very different from Philip Webb's.Webb went back to the English countryside, Gauguin alreadyhere to barbarity. Then, in 1886 he turned to pottery. The jughere illustrated is as original and as ruthlessly crude. The epcrgnewith the bathing girl of 1888 is a little less uncompromising. Infact, the introduction of the female figure into objects for usewas both in the nineteenth-century tradition and to the likingof Art Nouveau.

///.

///.

39

4^

III. 40

55

42 Man with the Axe by Paul Ciauguin, 1891

43 Gauguin'sAux Roches

Noires of 1889,from the cata-

logue of anexhibition of

impressionist andsynthetic painting

at the CafeVolpini in Paris

Where Gauguin comes closest to the Mackmurdo-Sumnerendeavours is in his work in two dimensions, that is, as apainter and a graphic artist. The catalogue title-page for theCafe Volpini exhibition of 1889 is violently primitive again, apainting such as the Man with the Axe has the vermiculatinglines which became a hall-mark ofArt Nouveau. Their influencewas brief but wide, and not only on painters such as Munch.Gauguin conveyed his concern with craft as well as his style to

///. 43

III. 42

44 The serpen-tine Hne of thewater ripples inGauguin's Man

with the Axe(left), painted inTahiti in 1891,

reappear in Henrivan dc Vcldc's

title-page designfor Dominical, ot

1892

///.

///.

46

43

his friends ofPont-Avcn, and so we find Emilc Bernard in 1888doing wood-carving as well as an applique wall-hanging, andJ.F. Willunisen in 1890 turning to ceramics very much of theGauguin kind. Willumsen stayed in France and then returnedto Denmark. There, however, while he had been away, aparallel development had begun in ceramics, independent, itseems ofPont-Aven. Thorvald Bindesb^ll, two years older thanGauguin, and an architect by training, the son in fact of themost original Danish architect of the neo-Greek movement,

45 Among Gauguin's friends at Pont-Aven many were roused by hisexample to take up crafts. The Danish painter Jens Ferdinand Willumsenproduced this vase in the form of a mother, father and baby (1890)

4^ Emilc Bernard, also one of the Pont-Aven circle, made this wall-hanging of Breton women picking pears in i8S8

had ill the i88os begun to work in ceramics. The plate of 1891with its crudely drawn tulips asyniiiietrically and indeed casually

///. 47 arranged still links up with Gauguin and Art Nouveau ; his later///. ^S plates stand entirely on their own in the whole of Europe. One

is tempted to sec in them a parallel to the Kandinsky moment inart; but they antedate it by nearly twenty years. One might also- and morejustly - look in the direction ofGaudi, but even thenBindesb^ll seems to retain priority. Bindesb^ll's impactremains, and what ties him into our particular context here, isthe attitude of the architect turning potter and indeed craftsmanin general.

47 The Dane Thorvald Bindesb011 became the most original ceramicartist of his generation. The dish, of 1 89 1 , is still Art Nouveau in its twistinglines, naturalistic tulips and asymmetry, though there are influences fromthe East

48 A later dish by Bindcsb011 of 1899, with its bold abstract decoration,places him in a class apart from every other artist in Europe at the time.Both the dishes shown here are glazed ceramic with sj^riijfito decoraticMi andboth are large - about 18 inches in diameter

61

mffn^f^ ^^

50 Silver tablc-ccntrc with inlays of mothcr-of-pcarl, designed by (.illnrtfor Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1H87 and presented t(^ her bv herofficers. It stands over 3 feet high

mi^nmK:^ iri*ii.,^

51 Wrought-iron grille of Gaudi's early Casa Vicens, c. 1880, based onpalm fronds; the son of a coppersmith, Gaudi used metalwork lavishly

decorative purposes will also have come from Viollet-le-Duc'sEntretiens, which show in the details of spandrels between iron

///. 32 arches how medievalizing foliage trails can be made of iron.///. 5 1 Gaudf s first house, the Casa Vicens at Barcelona, of 1 878-80, is

medievalizing too, though in a fantastical semi-Moorish way,and fantastical also are the spiky palm-fronds or stars of the iron

///. log fence. In the Palau Giiell of 1885-9, his first major job, theforms are less aggressive and more ingratiating, and theparabolic shape of the portal is as unexpected and free fromreferences to the p9St as are the undulations of the iron. The easeof bending wrought iron and its ductility, which allow forthe most delicate stalk-like filaments, made iron a favouritematerial of Art Nouveau.

64

It came into its own at once with Horta*s house of 1892-3already referred to (p. 43). The famous staircase of no. 6 ruePaul-Emile Janson has a slender iron column left exposed, an ///.iron handrail of thin tendril-like curves, and in addition, not of

52 Detail from Viollet-le-Duc's Entretiens (1872), demonstrating cast-ironconstruction and the use of iron foliage in a spandrel

iron, applied wall, floor and ceiling decoration of the samecurves. One can hardly believe that this could have beendesigned without influence from the England of Macknmrdo.Indirect influence from Pont-Aven is more easily proved, as weshall see presently. Although we are dealing with architecturehere, the job on the staircase was essentially one of decorating,

///. log like Gaudi's at the entrance to the Palau Giiell. We are notsufficiently prepared yet for the architecture proper of bothbuildings and their designers.

Art Nouveau is indeed very largely a matter of decoration -

so much so that some have denied its validity as an architecturalstyle - and it is furthermore largely a matter of surface decora-tion. We must now follow it through the years of its conquestand international success - a short-lived success; for it beganabout 1893, arid it was faced with a formidable opposition fromabout 1900 onwards. After 1905 it held out only in a fewcountries, and mostly in commercial work in which no creativeimpetus was left, if there ever had been any.

53 The Angels' Watch by the Belgian designer Henri van de Velde (1891),no doubt inspired by the Pont-Aven group. This is the essence of ArtNouveau - a recognizable subject, but every outline reduced to undulation

54 Obrist's embroidery Whiplash (1892-4), like an exotic botanical plate,shows one plant's leaves, bud, flower and root. Obrist had studied botany,and looked to art to 'glorify nature never seen till now, its powerful life andgigantic divine forces'

As textiles and the art of the book initiated the movement,they may be considered first. Henri van dc Velde, Belgianpainter, influenced by the pointillistcs and by Gauguin, turnedto design about 1 890, the first such case ofconversion by Morristhat we can watch closely. The tapestry, or rather applique wallhanging, called Angels' Watch, of 1 891, can only be understoodas an echo of the work of Bernard. It interests us because thedisposition ofthe forms and the all-pervading undulations makeit so thoroughly Art Nouveau. The trees are stylized morerigorously than the figures. A year or two later Hermann Obristdid that curious piece ofembroidery which is inspired by How erswith their root. It is a tour dc force, and if one compares it w ith

67

///. s ^

///. 34

55 'It was as if spring had come all of a sudden,' said van de Velde when hefirst saw designs by Voysey. Water-Snake is an exuberant design of about1890. Voysey is in the line of Morris and Mackmurdo, but Art Nouveautransforms his early designs into something quite distinct

the best work in the field of textiles in England during the sameyears, the work of Charles F. Annesley Voysey, a first impres-sion is obtained ofthe restraint and the sanity ofEngland during

///. 36 those years. Excesses of Art Nouveau are all but absent. Oneexception to this rule has already been named: Alfred Gilbert;the other - Scottish and not English - will be commented onlater. Voysey's textiles of about 1890 are clearly influenced by

Ills. j2, JJ Mackmurdo's, but they are milder in their rhythms and a littlemore accommodating. Less than ten years later Voysey was toabandon this style altogether and turn to another, more original,but less Art Nouveau.

68

^^

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56 Voyscy's NYniphcas, a printed cotttin of iSSS

57 Georges Leniinen'scatalogue for an exhibitionoC Les llii^^t (1891) is closerto the boldness and vigour ofGauguin than to thesophistication of his fellow-Belgian Horta

58-60 The typographic revival be-gun by Mackmurdo (III. 27) andMorris was carried on in Belgiumby van de Velde with these free,scrolly initials for his magazine VanNu en Straks, of 1896 (right ; see alsoIII. 44). In Germany Otto Eckmanndesigned this alphabet and cover forRuskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture(far right), both about 1900

70

57

4442

In typography Belgium again held a key position. Les Vinj^t,that adventurous club of artists whose exhibitions were perhapsthe most courageous in Europe - they had shown Gauguin in1889, van Gogh in 1890, books and works of English artist-craftsmen in 1 892 - had as the title-page of its catalogue in 1 891a design by Georges Lemmen reflecting Gauguin at his most ///.Art Nouveau. The year after, van de Velde went into bookdecoration. His title-page to Max Elskamp's Dominical is ///.uncannily close to the Gauguin of the Man with the Axe, painted ///.in Tahiti the year before. O^ 1896 are the initials made forVan Nu en Straks, delightful play with the typical swelling and ///. ^8tapering curves ofGauguin as well as the English book artists inthe Mackmurdo succession. Here again the contrast to the staidsplendour of the Kelmscott Press is great and can serve as areminder of how differently things were to go in England.Germany joined in the new Belgian style after a few years'hesitation. Otto Eckmann who died young in 1902 and PeterBehrens who soon repented these wild oats were the leadingdesigners. Eckmann left painting for design in 1894, Behrens in1895. Both designed type-faces of Art Nouveau character Ills. 39, 60about 1900 and also book decoration, printed matter forbusiness firms, book jackets, bindings and so on.

flBeDeF6B3KbmnoPQRSCuvwxyzabcdefghijkimnopqrsHuuwxyzdick 1234567890

A remark on book-binding itself must be appended to theseremarks on the art of the book. The reason for picking out, asone of the examples to be illustrated, a binding by the Nancy

///. 6 1 craftsman Rene Wiener is that it introduces us to a differentaspect of Art Nouveau. The asymmetric and the curving, curlyshapes which were de rigueur could be obtained abstractly ornaturalistically. Van de Velde believed as fervently in the one,as the artists ofNancy believed in the other. Neither was whollyoriginal. Henry Cole and his friends had preached the necessityof ornament being 'rather abstractive than . . . imitative*,"^^the Victorian decorators themselves in all countries hadwallowed in accurately portrayed roses, cabbage leaves and allthe rest. Now Galle had an inscription above the door to hisstudio which read: 'Our roots are in the depths of the woods,beside the springs, upon the mosses', and wrote in an article:'The forms furnished by plants adapt themselves quite naturally

6i Bookbinding too was affected by the new ideas: one of its masters wasRene Wiener of Nancy, who produced this portfolio for engravings -decorated with vines and a press - designed and made by Camille Martinin 1894

Sf^x:

,

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62 Binding by Wiener for Flaubert's Salammbo (1893), with enamelledcorners by Camille Martin. Victor Prouve, who did the leather-work,designed it to suggest the contents of Flaubert's novel, which he had longadmired: it shows Moloch, the moon-goddess Tanit, and Salammbowrithing in the python's embrace

to line-work. '^0 Line is the operative word. In the mid-nineteenth century, naturaHsm reigned in all fields; the naturalsciences were worshipped. Even in a church, otherwise imitatedaccurately from the style of say the thirteenth century, thefoliage of the capitals was made yet more real than it had beenat any moment in the Middle Ages, and the leaves of nativetrees and hedgerows were displayed proudly. Art Nouvcaudesigners went to nature because they were in need of forms toexpress growth, not of human making, organic not crystallineforms, sensuous not intellectual forms.

So much for Nancy - and of course others in other countries.Van de Velde on the other hand insisted on the intellectualprocess of converting nature to make it ornament. Ornament,he said, must be 'structural and dynamographic'. 'The leastnaturalistic association' would menace the eternal values of

73

63 A necklace(1900) also byLalique, is a filigreedesign of hazel-nutsand foliage in lowrelief, with trans-lucent enamels anddiamonds

///. 63

ornament. ^^ Few were as radical as van de Velde, but as a matterof principle, Voysey, for instance, agreed: 'To go to nature isof course to go to the fountain head, but . . . before a livingplant a man must go through an elaborate process of selectionand analysis. The natural forms have to be reduced to meresymbols. '52 The future was with the abstractionists not thenaturalists, even if not the immediate future. For as soon as ArtNouveau spread and became commercially exploitable, itsvan de Velde version was too exacting, and the less puremixtures ofcurvaceous ornament with the curvaceous forms ofplants or indeed the female body, were certain of a greatersuccess.

The years of universal success, at least on the continent ofEurope, were the ending years of the nineteenth and the veryfirst years of the twentieth century. The catalogue of the ParisExhibition of 1900 is a mine ofArt Nouveau. The necklace withpendant by Rene Lalique was shown, and it illustrates, as do

74

64 Art Nouvcau jewellery ortered the greatest opportunity tor tantasy. InRene Lalique's pendant of 190 1 naturalistic and stylized shapes are inextric-ably combined. The flowing lines arc at once the steins of flowers and awoman's hair; at the bottom, like some exotic fruit, hangs a pearl

6$ (left) A brooch by Wilhclm Lucas von Lranach combines manyfavourite Art Nouveau motifs - insects, sea-creatures, intertwining linesand an atmosphere ofcorruption and menace - to show a butterfly strangledby an octopus

66 (right) A brooch by Lalique (i 894) in the form ofa peacock, its enamelledgold tail set with moonstones

///. 64 Lalique's pendant and brooch, the part played by nature andthe part by styHzation in Art Nouveau. From Germany came

///. 63 the brooch by Wilhelm Lucas von Cranach. It represents anoctopus strangling a butterfly, though it can just as well be seenabstractly and is perhaps seen in that way to greater advantage.It is an exquisite display of red, green and blue enamel withbaroque pearls and small precious and semi-precious stones. InLalique's brooch the enamelled peacock's neck rises out of

///. 66 feathers of gold and moonstone. With jewellery we havemoved from Art Nouveau in two dimensions to Art Nouveauin the round. There was no reason why the principle of eternalundulations should not be applied to three dimensions. Allmaterials were indeed affected. In Victor Prouve's bronze bowl

67 Brown-glazed earthenware vase by Georges Hocnstchcl ot about 1901 : thecreamy overglaze is allowed to drip down at random

:^-ii

///. 6S Ni{fht of 1894 flowing hair takes the place of Mackniurdo'sor Obrist's stalks and leaves, Lalique's feathers and Oanach'stentacles. Every time what tempted the craftsman were naturalelements lending themselves to Art Nouveau sinuosity.

Ceramics and especially glass were ideal media for Art///. 67 Nouveau. Georges Hoentschel's dark brown earthenware vase

of c. 1 90 1 with the off-whites of its daringly accidental running-///. 6g down glaze is an example of the former; the brothers Daum's

bottle-shaped vase of 1893 with crocuses at the bottom and theglaze running down the high neck, and of course the famous

///. yo Favrile glass of Louis C. Tiffany are examples of the latter.Tiffany also began as a painter. He turned to decorative andstained glass, and in 1893 started a glass blowing department.The swaying, exceedingly attenuated forms of his vases andtheir subtle, never wholly calculated, shot colours made them a

///. yi pattern for Europe as well, and Karl Koepping's glass - Koep-ping again was a painter at first - is clearly in the first placeinspired by Tiffany's.

4

68 (below left) Bronze bowlby Victor Prouve (sec III. yj)

:

Ni^ht, 1894. Iri the flowinghair tiny figures are tossed asif on waves of the sea

69-71 Glass was drawn intothe shapes of Art Nouveau.Tiffany {bcloip centre, a. vase of1900) made it iridescent; thebrothers Daum, in a purplevase of 1893 called 'Sorrow-ing Autumn Crocuses'(below), combined crisply cutflowers with flowing dripsof molten glass. Koepping'swine-glasses are flowers(right), their bowls held be-tween leaves on frail stems

Ills. 74, 75

Wood is a less tractable material, and niiich Art Nouveaufurniture suffers from the conflict between its nature and theexpressive desire ofArt Nouveau. One way to avoid the conflictwas to confine the decoration to curves on flat surfaces. But asa rule, and most dedicatedly in France, the material was forcedto obey the style. France, in fact, is the country which in the endcarried on longest in Art Nouveau. There were two centres:Paris, of course, and Nancy. That a provincial capital should viewith the national capital was an improbable thing to happen inso metropolitan a civiHzation as that of the rising twentiethcentury. However, the case is matched by that of Glasgow.Nancy is the town of Galle and of a group of other craftsmen-manufacturers all at first affected by Galle's faith in nature as thesource ofornament. Louis Majorelle's is the most familiar nameafter Galle's. It is characteristic of the efforts needed to makeArt Nouveau furniture that he used to model his pieces in claybefore they were made of timber.

72 Simplicity and solidity: William Morris's ideals, represented by hisown patterns and Philip Webb's oak furniture (after 1858). The rush-seated chairs (see also III. g) were especially popular in the 1870s and after

73 Excess and artifice: dining-room of cedar by Eugene Vallin for a clientat Nancy (1903-6). The leather panels, ceiling and sideboard carvings are byProuve, the glass by Dauni, and the copper chandelier by Vallin himself

Art Nouveau like the Baroque made claims to the Cjcsamt-kunstwerk. Only rarely can one do justice to an individual piecewithout knowing of its intended context. That alone debarredit or should have debarred it from quantity production. Withthe vandalism typical of sons against th^ generation ot theirfathers, most ofthe Art Nouveau ensembles have been destroyed.It is lucky that the Musee de TEcole de Nancy could reassemble,even if not without alteration and reductions, a completedining-room by Eugene Vallin. This was begun only in 1903,

81

///. 73

74 Emile Galle's great Butterfly Bed of 1904, which again shows thefashion for insects, was his last work. He watched its completion from aninvalid chair and died in the same year

at a moment when the other leading countries were alreadymoving away from Art Nouveau. In looking at this room andtrying it out as a place to live in, one can understand why. Suchviolent expression tires one soon. Furniture ought to be abackground. Here we feel intruders. Also there is the constantclash between function and form - table legs awkwardly lumpyat the foot, doors and shelf recess ofbosomy shape. And fmally,one may well worry about wood made to perform ceramic ormetallic curves.

One of the most daring cases is the music room by AlexandreCharpentier, a sculptor before he became a decorator. The

82

music-stand illustrated is a pure example of the three- ///. 76dimensional Art Nouveau curve, spatially ingenious andfunctionally dubious. Charpentier belonged to the Parisiangroup Les Cinq, soon (by the accession of Plumet) to becomeLes Six. They formed one centre of the crafts revival in Paris,the other was Bing's shop L'Art Nouveau, a more internationalcentre of course. Among the designers specially connected withBing, Eugene Gaillard in his later work showed one French way ///. yyout of the impasse of Art Nouveau. He said already in 1906 thatfurniture should express its function, that it should be in harmonywith the material and that curves should be used decorativelyonly. His furniture is indeed a return to the principles and formsof the most refmed French eighteenth-century furniture, evenif he never stooped to imitation.

75 (left) Louis Majorellc modelled his furniture in clay, and the freedomthus obtained is evident in his table (1902) of mahogany, tamarind andgilded bronze

76 (ri^ht) Alexandre Charpentier went further still in this swirling music-stand of hornbeam, part of an ensemble of 1901. Both designs would bemore suitable for metal or plastic

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After these French pieces van dc Vcldc's great desk of 1896///. jS is impressive in its radicaHsni and its tautness. There is neither

the elephantnie massiveness of ValHn's dining room norGaillard's half-concealed sympathy with the classic past. Vande Velde impressed Germany much when he first showed in1897. Indeed Germany started a little later than Belgium andFrance, but for a short time men of strong personality joinedArt Nouveau and produced outstanding work. Otto Eckmann,better known as a typographer and decorator ofbooks, designed

///. 7() furniture for the Grand Duke ofHessen about 1 898, surprisinglystructural, considering his free use of natural forms in the bookshe decorated. The solution of the seeming contradiction mustbe van de Velde. Richard Riemerschmid's chairs are more

///. So English in their inspiration, and he was indeed among those who,when he turned away from Art Nouveau, did so for social aswell as aesthetic reasons. The greatest ornamental originality in

77 The more chaste furniture of Eugene Gaillard, such as this rosewoodcanape of 191 1, paraphrases classic French furniture in Art Nouveaulanguage

78 A desk by Henri van de Velde, 1 896 - clean and functional in its generaleffect in spite of the opulent Art Nouveau curves

79, 80 Armchairs by Otto Eckmann (1900, left) and Richard Ricnicr-schmid (1903, right)

Germany was August EndelFs, as we shall see in another contextlater. What is known of his furniture has a curious plasticquality - plastic in the true English sense of the word - quite

///. Sj different from anything so far examined. The scrolls at the endsof the arms of the chair illustrated arc particularly convincing,both aesthetically and functionally.Only one other designer of furniture did likewise, and he was

neither German nor French nor English, nor indeed a furnituredesigner. Antoni Gaudi's chairs for the Casa Calvet of 1 896- 1 904

Ills. 81, 82 have the same qualities as Endell's but driven to an extreme.They arc Art Nouveau in that they shun the straight line, shunall relation to the past and also in that they are fanaticallypersonal. The bone-like formation of the elements is all Gaudi's.His most surprising furniture is that for the chapel of theColonia Giiell at Santa Coloma de Cervello on which he worked

///. 84 from 1898 till 1914. Here is one of the few cases of design tryingto do what painting was doing at the same moment, that is,scrapping all the agreed conventions of art. The brutality of

"4 Furniture with a genuine sculpturalquality - restrained in Endell's armchairof 1899 (III. 8j, ri^ht), completely free inGaudi's chairs for the Casa Calvet of 1 896-1904 (below left). Gaudi's benches for StaColoma deCcrwcWo (below , see also III. 106)stand like insects on their rough iron legs

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85 Porch of the crypt of Sta Coloma de Cervello, by Gaudi (i 898-1 914).The materials are rough stone, brick, cement, columnar basalt (pillar on theleft), and tiles laid edge to edge in the vaults. Details were devised on thespot rather than at the drawing-board

the iron undercarriage of these benches, especially the feet,and of the seats themselves, goes indeed beyond Art Nouveau.Gaudfs architecture poses even more urgently the problem

of how far Art Nouveau as a term with an analysable, usefulmeaning can be stretched. That he is first and foremost Gaudi

///. 31 there can be no question. The ironwork of the Casa Vicens///. 1 og and the portal of the Palau Giiell have already demonstrated

that. But that his views and those of Art Nouveau coincided inmany ways is patent.However, there is a greater problem involved here. It has

been denied by more than one scholar that Art Nouveau

88

86 Gaudi covered the writhing benches that surrounded the (iiiell Parkwith brilHant chips ot tile, creating a restless, pla\ hil landscape

89 (ni^ht) Thefac^adc of the

Atelier Elvira,Munich, by August

Eiidell. The largereliefs in red andturquoise stucco,

window shapes andtwisted glazing-bars set the flat

surface in motion

87 In the Ateher Elvira (1896,destroyed in 1944) August Endellwas obviously influenced byHorta's stair (III. 88 below); thestaircase seems to float up likethe stem of some water-plantsurrounded by tendrils, withan unexpected accent in the spikyspray of the light fixture

88 In the staircase of no. 6 ruePaul-Emile Janson (1892-3),in Brussels, Horta exploited

both the strength of iron - inthe supporting column - and

its malleability, in the free-flowing lines of the handrail and

'capital' which are repeated inpaint and mosaic

90

architecture exists at all. It has been argued that Art Nouveauwas no more than a decorative fashion, lasting hardly morethan ten years and hence not deserving the attention it hasrecently been given. None of these contentions can be main-tained. It might be worth looking at a number of exteriors andinteriors of buildmgs in a systematic order culminating inGaudi. The best start is Endell's Atelier Elvira in Munich,unfortunately not preserved. A flat facade is made Art Nouveauprimarily, it is true, by means of a huge abstract ornament of acrustaceous kind, but surely not only by this. The asymmetricalfenestration, the tops of the windows and doorway like loopcd-up curtains and the glazing bars all play their part. And whenyou entered the house, a stair hall received you in which allthe forms undulated, and not only those applied to the walls.

///. Sg

III. S?

91

90 Horta, the leading Art Nouveau architect of Belgium, built the HotelSolvay for a wealthy client between 1 895 and 1900. The fa

91, 92 Inside, thestair again has

Horta's brilUantironwork (even thestuds are part of thedesign), and stainedglass (below) in the

same mood

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///. 88

llh 90, 93

93 Horta's own house, inthe rue Americaine,Brussels (1898-9): ironsupports curl like tendrilsaround the balconies, andthe pillars leaf out as inhis earHer stair (III. 88)

The handrail of the staircase, the newel post and Hght fittingrocketing up from the post - all this is architectural, that is,three-dimensional and articulating inner space. That thefamous and at the time publicized staircase in Horta's house inthe rue Paul-Emile Janson was the pattern is evident, and thatstaircase with its slender iron pillar also is genuinely architectural.Admittedly exteriors were not often up to the novelties of theinteriors - as had been the case of the Atelier Elvira - but if onelooks at the facade of Horta's own house of 1898-9, or theformer Hotel Solvay of 1 895-1900, one sees again the samespindliness of iron supports, the same play of pliable irondecoration round them and the same sense of transparency asinside.

94 Auditorium of Horta's Maison du Peuple (designed in 1896 as a vast socialcentre) : the iron framework is fully exposed, but softened by Horta's genius for

curving metalwork

Altogether, the role of iron in Art Nouveau is interestingenough to deserve a paragraph. Iron is a decorative as well as astructural material. Viollet-le-Duc had recognized that andsuggested its use in both capacities in the same buildings. He ///. 32was the fountain head. Then, and independent ofhim, iron andlater steel, externally in conjunction with glass, became themost technically suitable material for the factory, the warehouseand the office building. The quality which recommended it wasthat it lent itself to the unmitigated grid. This was an argumentin itselfnot ofan aesthetic nature, though the twentieth centurydiscovered the aesthetic possibilities of the grid. But ArtNouveau must retain the credit for the discovery ofthe aestheticpossibilities o{ iron and glass - even if these qualities havenothing to do with those of the grid. Art Nouveau adoredlightness, attenuation, transparency and o{ course sinuosity.Iron meant thin members and ductility; iron and glass usedexternally produced the same transparency obtained internallyby iron alone. Horta's Maison du Peuple of 1896-9 was the Art Ills. g4, 93

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Ncnivcau version of the American office building - bothdependent on iron, but in exactly opposite ways, hi Americathe steel controls structure and thereby appearance, though thefa(;"ades are of stone cladding the steel; in the Maison du Peuplethe iron frame is visible, and iron provides the music playinground the frame and embroidering on the eternal Art Nouveau

///. 93 theme of the curve which also is that of the fa^ rpi

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96 Sehring's Tictz Department Store in Berlin of 1898 included vast walls ofiron-framed glass; the masonry sections are conventicMial neo-Baroque

In France the architect with the keenest sense of the poten-tiahties of the new materials was Hector Guimard. It was a fineshow of a sense of topicaHty that the Paris Metro allowed himfor the relatively new purpose ofa metropolitan underpavementrailway to design exclusively in the new material. The general

Ills. 97, gS tenor is indeed as light as befits the introduction to fast transport.But the details are bossy and bony - more similar to Alfred

///. gg Gilbert's of more than ten years before than to anyone else's.However, the refusal to entertain straight Hues anywhere andthe sense of inventiveness all through place them firmly in ArtNouveau. Guimard's magnum opus, the Castel Beranger of1897-8, on the other hand is in its facades not Art Nouveau.

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97, 98 The entrances designed by Hector Guimard for the Pans Metri> are todayprobably the most insistent survivors from the age of Art Nouveau. Builtbetween 1899 and 1904 thev are still t-fTec rive signposts

99-100 Guimard'sornament is as distinctiveas Horta's

99 (left) Detail of a Metroentrance by Guimard, alight in amber glass set ina strange organic bud-shape of green-fmishedcast iron

100 (opposite) Terracottapanels in the entrance to

the Castel Beranger,Guimard's block of flats

in Paris (1897-8); thoughthe forms are still un-

mistakably 'Belle Epoque'they have no basis in

nature

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I0I-2 Two details from Gui-mard's Castel Berangcr:(right) an eroded-looking sea-horse shape of cast iron; and(left) the glass-brick wall ofthe staircase, set in an ironframe, foreshadowing longbefore Bruno Taut's GlassHouse (III. 180) a favouritemotif o[ the twenties andthirties

Itsjumble ofmotifs is original, even forcedly so, but it is angular,static, solid and conventional in many details. The ironwork ofthe main doors on the other hand and the terracotta panels inthe entrance are Art Nouveau and the latter are, moreover,most daring in their demonstration of pure abstraction. Ararely-seen iron detail from the top of the house reminds one ofanother architect who ventured into pure abstraction, Endcll inhis Elvira 'rocaille'. In fact even some of the dragon connota-tions are the same. Yet more amazing historically is the wall ofthe staircase at the back, a wall of heavy double-curved glasspanels of alternating shapes whose very irregularity of surfacedoes what in the terracotta panels had to be done by thecraftsman's will.

Guimard's delight in materials and unexpected cflects to beobtained from them and even some of Ciuimard's forms are the

///. 100

III. 102

III. Sg

III. 101

103

Ills. 103-3

103 Plan of the ground floor of the Casa Mila by Gaudi, begun in 1905.This remained flexible till the last, with partition walls inserted only afterthe building was complete

only causeway by which we can safely reach Gaudi. There arefew other communications, and his originality might indeednot have become quite so extreme if it had not been for hisworking in the comparative isolation ofBarcelona and workingfor a clientele nationally disposed in favour of fantasticalarchitecture. Indeed the extremes of Plateresque and Chur-rigueresque are hardly less bewildering than those of Gaudi.These he must have known, but they do not seem to haveinspired him. On the other hand he must have been impressedby the Mohammedan style of southern Spain as well as that offolk building in Morocco. And he must also have seen in thejournals how Art Nouveau triumphed in France, and some ofthe interior details in his two blocks of flats, the Casa Batllo andthe Casa Mila, are indeed entirely French Art Nouveau, justas the use of concrete trees - leafless ofcourse - in the Giiell Parkis a conceit of Hennebique's, the French concrete fanatic. Still,his overwhelming originality remains, but - at least in the CasaBatllo and the Casa Mila, both late works, begun in 1905 - it isan originality within the framework of Art Nouveau.

104 Detail of the fac^adc of Gaudi's Casa Mila, of dark, pitted stone- deliberatelywave-like, with seaweed balconies

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What after all is it that startles one in these fa(;:ades as oneIlls. 104, 103 comes upon them unprepared in the Paseo de Gracia? A whole

fac^ade in a slow, sluggish and somewhat menacing flow - likelava, some people have said; as if carved out by the sea, sayothers; like the face of a long-disused quarry, yet others. Sohere is undulation, and here is the affinity with nature'structurized', as van de Velde once called it. Here also - andthis needs saying now at last - is that disregard for functionaladvantages that did such disservice to Art Nouveau in buildingsand furnishings everywhere. Balcony railings which stab at youand consistently curved walls against which no one's furniturewill stand satisfactorily are only two examples. What elevatesthese two late Gaudi buildings above those of other architectsof the same moment is their restless force, their sense of massesin motion and their single-mindedness. The plan of the Casa

///. 1 oj Mila to which reference has already been made is ultimate proofthat Art Nouveau principles could be applied to space as well asline and volume.The placing of Gaudi within European Art Nouveau is

relatively easy as long as one confmes oneself to his work after1903. But three years earlier he had started on the Giiell Parkand five years earlier on the chapel ofSanta Coloma de Cervelloon an industrial estate also belonging to his patron EusebioGiiell. In the chapel there are no undulating lines; all is sharp,

///. 1 06 angular, aggressive. But all is also in its own idiom as unexpectedas the houses in the Paseo de Gracia. Ifone looks for comparisonsone is reminded rather ofGerman Expressionism of the 1920s -in its wildest Dr Caligari dreams - than of Art Nouveau. As faras Art Nouveau was opposition to the past and opposition tothe order of right-angles, Santa Coloma of course qualifies.As far as Art Nouveau was a challenging show ofindividualism,it also qualifies. And that is perhaps enough. The little building,abandoned before it was completed, is in its interpenetration ofouter and inner spaces bolder than anything Frank LloydWright had done or was ever to do in pursuit of spatialconfluence. The walls are a seemingly arbitrary zigzag, though

105 At the Casa Batllo (1905-7) Gaudi refaced an older building with colouredtiles, adding the rippling stone entrance and bay-windows and spiky, sinisteriron balconies, and finishing with a steep roof o{ tiles grading from orange to

blue-green

an axiality from entrance to altar is preserved. But the approachis wholly asyni metrical, and even the round piers inside do notcorrespond left with right. Moreover, supports are set atraking angles, they are built up here of brick, there of stones;they are roughly shaped or frankly shapeless, and they carry ribswhose details seem to have been decided not at the office,

Ills. 83, 106 beforehand, but on the spot, as work went on.This is indeed true of the very similar structures connected

with the Giiell Park as well. Here also you fmd twisted supportsset diagonally, fairly normal but leaning Doric columns,stalactite vaults, quite apart from the dead trees of concrete, andquite apart from the enchanting back of the long seat runningall along the open space at the top where nannies sit and children

///. 86 play. This back, writhing and drooping like a serpent or someantediluvian monster, is yet gay, by virtue of its deliciouscolours, bright, happy colours, any number of them and inhaphazard relations. The seat is faced with faience and tiles, andhere as well as on the roofs of his houses and indeed on the

///. 108 pinnacles of his great church, the Sagrada Familia, broken cupsand saucers, broken floor tiles and wall tiles and chips of all kindsare used. Again Gaudi is closer to Picasso there than to the otherpractitioners of Art Nouveau.

Ills. 107, 108 The Sagrada FamiHa spans Gaudi's whole hfe. He dedicatedhis powers more and more to it and in the end to the exclusionof anything else. For Gaudi was an unquestioning Catholic.Religion was the centre of his life, and the aestheticism ofmuchof Art Nouveau experimenting is totally absent in him. In1884 he was put in charge of a neo-Gothic buildmg only justbegun. He continued it in that style and gradually turned freerand bolder. As one looks at the great facade ofthe south transept,one can watch the process of liberation. Below there are stillthree tall gabled portals on the French Gothic cathedral pattern,and it is only the decoration encrusting it that is transformedinto rockery and naturahstic leaf-work. The towers are withoutprecedent, but they were only started in 1903. And as forthe pinnacles, once again, it seems impossible to believe that

108

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io6 In the crypt of Santa Coloma dc Cervello, begun in 189S, Ciaudi'sdelight in variety of planes, textures and materials is obvious; his engineer-ing instinct led him to the structurally efficient angles of walls and supports.He also designed the benches (see III. 84)

they can be the work of craftsmen working from architect's ///. loSdrawings.

Gaudi was not an architect in the sense in which the professionhad estabhshed itself in the nineteenth century and was goingto be run in the twentieth. He was not a professional manworking in an office. He was essentially still the medievalcraftsman whose fmal decision could only be taken as he watchedover the execution o{ what he had perhaps sketched out onpaper but never made final, hi him one ideal of William Morrishad come true. What he built was 'by the people for the people'and no doubt 'ajoy for the maker', i.e., the actual mason, as well.

107, 108 (followin

109 Gaudi's Palau Giicll (1844-9), two arches with massive ironwork inthe Catalan tradition. Gaudi used parabohc arches - the shape of the future -both decoratively and structurally

It is of importance to say this ; for recently Gaudi has beenhailed as a pioneer of twentieth-century structure, a forerunnerof Nervi. But whereas, in the field ofnew shapes and materialshe points forward indeed, his use of complicated models toexperiment with strains and stresses is not that of the engineer-architect of our age at all. On the contrary, it is still that of theindividualist-craftsman, the outsider, the lonely, do-it-yourselfinventor.

And in this extreme individualism once again Gaudi waspart of Art Nouveau. For Art Nouveau was an outbreak ofindividualism first and foremost. It depended for success entirelyon the personal force and sensibility of a designer or craftsman.What could be communicated of it, is what ruined it so quickly.The style of Schinkel, the style of Semper, the style of Pearson,

112

the style of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts could be taught and usedwith impunity by the rank and file. Commercialized van deVelde and Tiffany is a disaster. Commercialized (iaudi washardly attempted. This individualism ties Art Nouveau to thecentury at whose end it stands. So does its insistence on craft andits antipathy against industry. So fmally does its delight in theprecious or at least the telling material.But Art Nouveau straddles the boundary line between the

two centuries, and its historical significance lies in those of itsinnovations which pointed forward. They are, as has been saidin these pages more than once, its refusal to continue with thehistoricism of the nineteenth century, its courage in trusting itsown inventiveness, and its concern with objects for use ratherthan with paintings and statues.

no Entrance to the Giiell Park, begun in 1900. The stairs, flanked bypavilions, surrounded a serpent fountain; they lead to the Market Hall withits Doric colonnade

Ill In Britain a style of chaste straight Unes rivalled and indeed took theplace of the sensuous curves of Continental Art Nouveau. This desk byMackmurdo dates from 1886

114

CHAPTER THREE

New Impetus from England

It is in its concern with objects for use that Art Nouveau wasmost decisively inspired by England. The n>essage of WilliamMorris was heeded everywhere. In other ways the relationsbetween the Enghsh and the Continental developments of the1 890s are more complex. They deserve more than one closelook. The situation, it must be remembered, was that in the1 880s Morris's art of design had reached its richest, mostbalanced maturity. A synthesis between nature and stylizationwas achieved which has never been outdone. At the same timein architecture Webb and Shaw had, at any rate in the field ofdomestic building, defeated Victorian pomposity and re-introduced a human scale and sensitive or at least te