Week 4: Art and Design at the Fin de Siècle

Met Timeline: Art Nouveau; Louis Comfort Tiffany; Nineteenth Century American Jewelry; Design 1900-25

Nature and Inspiration

Scientific Illustration

Note: although you're not responsible for this section on your exams, I highly recommend taking a look at the featured artists and their work. Animators, especially, may find inspiration from the wealth of images available at some of the linked sites.

Ernst Haeckel. See also Die Radiolarien (1862) and Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904)

Edward Lear. Eagle Owl ca. 1830. Lear's more famous for his "nonsense" poetry ("The Owl and the Pussycat" is the most famous), but he was also a superb watercolorist and natural history painter. See also the National Academy of Sciences page on "The Remarkable Nature of Edward Lear."

John James Audubon. Barred Owl, from Birds of America, 1840. The book link is to the University of Pittsburg's page on its copy of the book. The image link is to the Audubon Society's page. The Pittsburg site has beautiful zoomable images worth perusing.

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. The Planet Mars, 1881. This is from an exhibit from the New York Public Library's digital image collection on Trouvelot's astronomical Atlas. The blog BibliOdyssey also features a post on these images.

Arts and Crafts influences

William Morris. Jasmine and Golden Lily (drawng) wallpapers. From the Huntington Gallery exhibition The Beauty of Life: William Morris and the Art of Design.

C. F. A. Voysey. Apothecary's Garden and Bird and Berries wallpapers. Still in production (See a variety of Arts & Crafts and Aesthetic Movement wallpapers at Trustworth Studios).

Symbolism & Art Nouveau

A note on using museum websites: Museums frequently feel the need to update their web presence(s), and even more frequently change the substance of their exhibits. If a link below from a major museum (such as the Met, MoMA--the Museum of Modern Art in New York--or even the DMA) doesn't work, go to the main site (the index page) and look for the search engine. At the Met you can often find the object by doing an artist search on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (your best friend besides Stokstad in this class). Even if the object is no longer on featured display, it's usually in the database if it's ever been shown online. Feel free to ask me to find it for you, but it'll save you time if you do a simple site search first.

Beatrice, 1885

Ophelia, c. 1900-1905

Flowers in a Black Vase, c. 1909-1910. For DMA holdings, type "Redon" into the search window here.

Aubrey Beardsley For more Beardsley works, see The Savoy: The Art of Aubrey Beardsley.

The Climax, 1893 (From Salome by Oscar Wilde)

The Peacock Skirt, 1893 (From Salome)

The Toilet, 1896 (Illustration for Pope's The Rape of the Lock)

Alphonse Mucha (Czechoslovakia)

The Seasons, 1896 (his Hours are also featured on this page)

JOB, 1896

Moet & Chandon Cremant Imperial 1899

Fuchsia Necklace, 1905

René Lalique (France)

Dragonfly woman corsage ornament, c. 1897-1898

Peacock pectoral, c. 1898-1900

Necklace, ca. 1900

"Victoire" hood ornament, 1928 (DMA; if the link doesn't work, go to "view" "collections" and type "Lalique" into the search window.)

Victor Horta (Belgium)

Main Stair Hall on the Ground Floor, Emile Tassel House in Brussels, Belgium. 1893-97

Main Stair at Entrance Level, Victor Horta House in Brussels, 1893-97

View across Main Stairs at Upper Landing, Victor Horta House

Hector Guimard (France)

Sideboard c. 1900-1910 (compare with similar piece by Louis Majorelle in the DMA; if the link doesn't work, type "Majorelle" in the "search collections" window). The World Images Web Kiosk has many more photos of Guimard works. Type "Guimard" into the search window for a thumbnail list.

Entrance Gate to Paris Subway (Métropolitain) Station, Paris, France. c. 1900. There's a short audio presentation on this entrance right under the image. Great Buildings Online has a page on Guimard's Metro entries, with drawings and photos.

Porte Dauphine 1900 (entrance to Metro station; click on "Subway")

Side Table c. 1904-07. This and the Métropolitain image above are from the same page on MoMA's collection. There are several other examples of Guimard's work adjacent to these.

The entry corridor of the Hôtel Jassedé 1903 (scroll down)

Henry van de Velde (Belgium)

Hôtel Otlet lobby 1894

Book binding. 1895. Leather with inlay work.

Tropon, 1898

Antoní Gaudí and Barcelona
Sagrada Familia 1882 to 1926 (construction still in progress)

Interior photo (from Great Buildings Online. More photos here.)

Casa Milà 1905 to 1910. More photos.
The Glasgow School and The Four
Ladies' Luncheon Room from Miss Cranston's Ingram Street Tearooms, c. 1900, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald

The Dew, beaten tin in a wooden frame

Opera of the Winds and Opera of the Seas, 1903

Secession

The Vienna Secession is worthy of a course in itself, and the library has two films called Vienna 1900 (the longer one is the best); here's a website that provides a sense of the scope of the era: Vienna 1900, but see the annotated links on the right for more information.

Josef Maria Olbrich: Secession Building, Vienna, 1898

Poster for the Darmstadt Artists' Colony, 1901; and a study for Olbrich's house in Darmstadt.

Gustav Klimt, Poster for the 1st Secession exhibition, 1898

Pallas Athene, 1898

The Beethoven Frieze, 1902; details: Praise to Joy, the God-descended; Unchastity, Lust and Gluttony

The Three Ages of Woman, 1905

The Kiss, 1908; detail

Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, 1907 and article from the BBC on its recent sale. Here's a link to the Neue Gallerie in New York, where the painting is now on exhibit. Click on "collection" for the image and some commentary.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room

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Additional Resources

New and/or Noteworthy

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has opened a new exhibition called Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí; it features works representative of the periods we'll be studying for the rest of the quarter, and introduces you to some artists you've never heard of but might find intriguing. Also at the Met: Louis Comfort Tiffany at Laurelton Hall, with some spectacular examples of Art Nouveau in the US.

Here's a useful and nicely designed timeline of the period, with illustrations from the Tate exhibit on Klimt.

See also these Links to Symbolist Art & Poetry.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts exhibit on Modernism includes many of the artists and movements from this section.

Art Nouveau

About the best source you can look at for information on Art Nouveau, its context, and some of the images I showed is the National Gallery of Art's page on Teaching Art Nouveau.

The Art Nouveau Worldwide Server is a clearinghouse of web information on the movement. Images can elsewhere be found under a number of names (Art Nouveau is the French term), including Jugendstil ("young style" in German) and Secession in Germany and Austria, Nieuwe Kunst ("new art") in the Netherlands, and Liberty Style in England. See especially the National Gallery of Art's Anatomy of an Exhibition: Art Nouveau 1890-1914. Click on "Introduction" to get to a good summary of the movement.

Art Nouveau (What used to be called Art Millennium, and is now simply "History of Art" used to have a page on this topic; it's still under construction, but look for the Styles and Movements, then Art Nouveau).

QDesign, a New Zealand design company, offers a tidy history of the "new art" on its History of Industrial Design: Art Nouveau page. Note: a search for Jugendstil on Google will link you with many sites--most of which are in German. Feel free to look at these, using the "translate this page" option--but keep in mind that machine translation works badly at best. The only thing you can expect to accomplish is a general idea of what the page is about--and please do NOT quote these articles as sources unless you can actually speak German and know what they're really saying.

The Victor Horta Museum in Brussels is housed in his former studio.

Paris Metro Entrances from Great Buidlings Online

Art Nouveau in England can be seen in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, among others.

As usual, the Artcyclopedia can help you locate Art Nouveau artists such as Alfonse Mucha.

Senses Art Nouveu Belgium is a company with a links page with good sources.

Here's an "explore and learn" page from the Met on Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Gaudi and Barcelona

Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia is the home site of Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Familia church. See also Great Buildings Online's page on the church (scroll down) for some good photos.

The Glasgow School & The Four

The work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald, provides a link between the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and the Continental craftsmen/designers of the Secession and Jugendstil. His design for a House for an Art Lover was created for a Secession exhibition (I have a small portfolio of the designs).

See the Glasgow School of Art page on Mackintosh, The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, and the Armin Grewe Mackintosh pages for further information and images. The Mackintoshes have become a cottage industry in Scotland, and a Google search will find you more web pages than you can get through in a day.

The Victorian Web page on Mackintosh.

Recommended viewing: The Fall and Rise of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the Kelley Library. VHS ID 1703

See also Charles Rennie Mackintokintosh, A Modern Man, VHS ID 1427

The Secession and Jugendstil

Newly discoverd: iklimt, a website devoted to the work of Gustav Klimt. This is a nice example of how interactive media can enhance the enjoyment of art.

One of the most influential movements in Europe at the turn of the century was the Vienna Secession, and you can find further information at the following sites: The Secession Building featured an exhibit devoted to Beethoven's life and work. Gustav Klimt's contribution was the Beethoven Frieze. For more on Klimt, see the WebMuseum page on his work. A website called The Art Bin (an e-zine) devoted an issue to Vienna Around 1900--The Turn of a Century with lots of links to external sites. A good site on Secession architecture can be found on the Digital Archive of Architecture page. Another Secession artist, but one whose work is essentially Expressionist, is Egon Schiele.

A page on the Darmstadt artists' colony where Olbrich was a resident.