This month an exhibition entitled Art Nouveau Bing: The Paris Style 1900 will open at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. The exhibit of about two hundred pieces, including posters, prints, furniture, and decorative art objects, explores the international influence of Siegfried Bing (1835-1905), one of the earliest supporters of Art Nouveau. In the following article, Professor Richard C. Flint focuses on one of the most popular and enduring aspects of Art Nouveau: the poster and print.
Surveying the last hundred years, one find certain decades that have left a particularly vivid imprint on the popular memory. The twenties and the sixties, with their vivid flamboyance, headiness, and aggressive outpourings of energy, are notable examples. So, too, are the final years of the nineteenth century, upon which the greatest number of epithets has been bestowed: "Gay Nineties," "Yellow Nineties," "Mauve Decade," "Belle Epoque," "Fin de Siecle." The ebullience of the 1890s reflected a sense of positivism and well-being that had been brought about by a continuing stream of material and social progress. Reveling in its opulence, the decade seemed intent on affirming its good fortune before succumbing to the impending uncertainties of a new century.
The most characteristic and pervasive visual mode of the 1890s was Art Nouveau. The term derived from the name of a Paris gallery and atelier established in 1895 by Siegfried Bing, a dealer and avid promoter of the new art.
In its emphasis on vivacity, efflorescence, and sensuousness, Art Nouveau epitomized the temper of the time. The style was primarily decorative in that it served to embellish and give expressive form to objects or structures having some prior purpose. International in scope, Art Nouveau was variously manifested in furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass fixtures, bookbindings, jewelry, architecture, and graphic design.
Reaction against Industrial Drabness
Through its manifold applications and contexts, the new style became conspicuously intermingled with daily life. Such a linkage was in fact part of its rationale. Art Nouveau arose largely as a reaction against the increasing drabness of industrialized society. Although one of the most heralded results of nineteenth-century progress had been mass production, and the factory system did indeed provide a greater number of commodities at a lower cost, the bland uniformity of machine-made goods rudely supplanted the traditional quality and diversity of individual craftsmanship as well as the touch of preciousness inherent in articles fashioned by the human hand. Mediocrity and vulgarity loomed as the ultimate by-products of the Industrial Revolution. As early as the 1860s, however, a segment of the European avant-garde had called upon art to boldly reassert the aesthetic values that were being subverted by the machine. A new visual vocabulary deriving from the organic, animate forms in nature began to evolve. Given motifs were expressed through flourishes of technical skill to emphasize the transformative and redeeming power of art. Art Nouveau was the sparkling culmination of this aesthetic movement.
To the general public, the new style became most readily apparent through the medium of the poster. Affixed to hoardings, show windows, and kiosks, posters drew the passerby into a direct, if short-lived,
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