A short-lived, international “new art” that refused the historical styles and drew its forms from plants, waves and the flowing line, often in exposed iron and glass, with structure, ornament and furnishing designed as one.
Art Nouveau took its name from Siegfried Bing’s Paris shop, the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, opened in 1895, but it had many names and many centres: Jugendstil in Germany, Secession in Vienna, Modernisme in Catalonia, Stile Liberty in Italy. What its designers shared was the wish to invent a style of their own age rather than revive a past one, and the conviction, inherited from the Arts and Crafts, that architecture, furniture, glass and graphics should be conceived together.
The first mature buildings were in Brussels. Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (1893–94) opens behind a narrow stone front into a stair hall where a thin iron column branches like a stem, and the same whiplash curve runs through the mosaic floor, the painted walls and the balustrade. Horta, like Hector Guimard in Paris, took from Viollet-le-Duc the idea that iron should be shown and given its own forms. Guimard’s Castel Béranger (1895–98) and his cast-iron entrances for the Paris Métro (from 1900) spread the style to the street.
In Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí developed a far more personal architecture from the same impulse, with catenary and parabolic arches found from hanging models, and façades that ripple like water or bone (Casa Batlló, 1904–06; Casa Milà, 1906–12). In Vienna the Secession, founded in 1897, moved toward a more geometric manner: Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession Building (1897–98) with its dome of gilded laurel leaves, and Otto Wagner’s Majolikahaus and Post Office Savings Bank. In Glasgow, Mackintosh made a sparer, rectilinear version.
By 1910 the style was already fading, attacked as mere fashion, most famously by Adolf Loos, whose lecture on ornament was aimed at the Viennese designers. Yet its insistence on a new architecture for a new age, its frank use of iron and glass, and its idea of the building as a total work of art led directly into modernism.