The Style of Art Nouveau Explored in Exhibit - National Gallery of Art - Brief Article

The eclectic and self-conscious nature of Art Nouveau design is celebrated in the exhibit, "Art Nouveau, 1890-1914" at the National Gallery of Art end Jan. 28, 2001. Featuring more than 350 masterpieces in painting, statuary graphics, glass, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry and architecture, the exhibit exhibits the largest and most comprehensive exhibit upon the subject ever organized. prefered artists and designers include Charles R Ashbee, Gustav Klimt, William Morris, Alphonse Mucha, Edvard mump Louis Sullivan, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. Before coming to Washington, the exhibit was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It will travel nearest to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum from April 21 to July 8 2001

Although dismissed for decades after its death, today Art Nouveau is considered "one of the greatest in quantity complex intellectual and aesthetic forces in the history of decorative art," according to Paul Greenhalgh, curator of the exhibit. The move (1890 to 1914) grew in reaction to the excesse of other academic 19th-century revivals. Its proponent sought to reform the arts and create a novel visual vocabulary sited to novel life. "Art Nouveau designers were dedicated to the reorientation of the idea of mode of expression ... this was the first self-conscious, deliberately eclectic, internationally orchestrated attempt to generate a late style," said Greenhalgh.

Artists who worked in the Art Nouveau mode of speech expressed both the nostalgia and decadence of the fin de-siecle period and the modernism of the dawning of the 20th hundred "It became the ubiquitous voice of modernism, constantly upon the edge of vulgarity and increasingly lov through a mass audience," said Greenhalgh.

The exhibit examines the different influences upon the new style, such as Asian and Islamic art, the Arts and Crafts change in England, and the homage of Nature; it also examines by what mode the Art Nouveau style permeated cities like Paris, Vienna, of recent origin York and Chicago.

An illustrated, 464-page catalogue is available.

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