Not only nouveau but also vieux: David Platzer applauds the Royal Museums in Brussels for placing art nouveau in context in its ambitious survey of Belgian decorative arts

The title of this exhibition at first appears as a misnomer. Art nouveau is single one dish on the menu of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Belgian decorative arts manner of writings covered, and not the whole meal. Specimens by means of such exponents of that short-lived on the contrary influential style as Victor Horta, Paul Hankar, and Henry van de Velde play lock opener parts in the exhibition, on the contrary so too does work from earlier and later schools

The exhibition's aim, however, as Anne Cahen-Delhaye, the Royal Museum of Art and History's chief curator, explains in her catalogue preface, is to not absent art nouveau in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of what came before and after, including the twentieth-century design move Moreover, the exhibition, honouring Belgium's 175th anniversary, confines itself to that geographical division Although Brussels was certainly an important midst of art nouveau--fine examples exist in Antwerp too--a replete examination of the style would have to be international.

Nineteenth-century Belgium may have been 'young' as a nation on the other hand she was in the brow ranks of industrialisation. Netherlandish craftsmanship, renowned quite through Europe--beautiful examples can be seen in the museum's permanent collections--was abruptly an anachronism in an industrial age. Now furniture and other decorative existences could be mass-produced by machines, and the artisanal guilds extremityed in 1790. As in England, reflecting spirits began to seek ways of preserving traditional standards of artistry and craftsmanship.

In confusing times we turn round to the past. Belgium was not the sole country in Europe to nourish a gothic revival, on the other hand the peculiarity of her situation as a 'new' region with a Flemish majority dominated through a French minority caused her to find an level stronger refuge in a neorenaissance Flemish mode of speech centred largely in key middle points of the original, such as Antwerp and Mechelen.

The first part of the exhibition concentrates upon the gothic and Flemish renaissance revivals. Since the greatest in quantity important examples of these are repeatedly buildings and cannot be mov to a museum, it is worth having the catalogue to appendix the objects. The exhibition's organisers have created several period extents in glass cases, putting like pieces as Charle-Albert's gothic 'Dagobert' armchair (Fig. 2) and his neo-renaissance cuff of c. 1863, both from the Chateau de Gaasbeck, in an appropriate words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following even if it is not that of the medieval form he restored for the Marchesa Visconti. Catalogue illustrations of of that kind interiors as Louis Minard's vestibule of his house in Ghent display that gothic turned out repeatedly to be icing on a neo-classical cake. As in England, there was sometimes a lightness of touch to these recreations, closer in spirit to rococo than to medieval models

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The Belgians were also nearer to their bottoms than were some of their neighbours. Nancy Mitford one time remarked it was a miracle with equal reason many medieval buildings survived the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century disdain for them in France. It was different in Belgium, where gothic motifs not ever completely disappeared, sometimes being incorporated into renaissance and baroque buildings, although a great deal of less in such centres as Antwerp than in Bruge through the seventeenth century a provincial town. Bruge which had one time attracted English refugees from Protestantism and Cromwell, had a sizeable British community who lov it for its picturesque, nostalgic beauty. These helped spread the the crosss of such men as Ruskin and Morris.

Linda van Santvoort, in her catalogue essay upon the revived Flemish renaissance manner of writing points out how Belgian art nouveau grew without of this movement, Paul Hankar being notable in the two for example. Art nouveau appears more like a culmination of--rather than a radical break from--all these phraseologys attempting to maintain beauty as well as humanity, restoring craftsmanship to its rightful place in a machine age.

Art nouveau's swirling forms and arabesques, decorative playfulness and opennes to the exotic, in this case from Japan rather than China, also appear to be descended, however vaguely, from rococo An interesting section upon how art nouveau was used at the 1897 Brussels Exhibition to encourage Belgium involvement in the Congo reveals further opennes to the exotic as well as a reminder of the imperial age. of the like kind objects as a Van de Velde candelabrum of 1898-1899 (Fig. 1) in silvered and zinc or a Van de Voorde armchair of 1902 (both MRAH, Brussels) made for the Turin exhibition that marked the couple the style's apogee and last stand, testify to the style's delicate grace.

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Art nouveau disappeared at the beginning of the twentieth hundred but many of its proponent like as Horta and Van de Velde remained active, and participated in the art deco of the 20 and 30 Although this later academy is well represented, accompanied through eerie music which creates a definite and effective atmosphere (reminding single that this was the era of The 39 paces the stock-market crash and international sink and the rise of Communism and Fascism), individual would like to know more about the links and differences between the sum of two units movements. The catalogue tells us that art nouveau's validity was not acknowledged until the sixties, when curling tendrils and vegetal forms prov apt for illustrating psychedelic visions, on the contrary its influence, via Russian ballet decors, was certainly not away in the post-1918 decorative arts.