Word: nouveau
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...opening of Le Voleur. (This is an apparently neglected film that resurfaced this summer at the Telluride Film Festival.) In the dark, eerie moonlight we watch the burglar, Belmondo, crowbar his way into a ritzy, turn-of-the-century mansion. You have never seen such gaudy art nouveau furniture as lies within this house. And Belmondo sees no reason to pamper the stuff; he cracks open cabinets and bashes his cane through display cases. "This is a dirty business," he confides to us in a voice-over. "But I have one thing going for me. I do it dirtily...
...time, today's audience will find in it the first stirrings of familiar Western styles. There is nothing alien about the playfulness of unguent jars shaped like animals with lolling tongues, or the alert grace of a gilded wooden statue of the goddess Selket, or the art nouveau traceries of floral patterns on a lamp and vase. A wooden seat is decorated with a leopard-spot design that has the startling freedom and bounce of Matisse's late cutouts...
LeRoy is best known for the improbably named Maxwell's Plum, an art nouveau extravaganza on Manhattan's East Side that has been S.R.O. since its opening in April 1965. Characteristically, he calls it "the longest-running show in town"-it caters to as many as 1,500 people a day. Plum is at once a singles nirvana and an excellent restaurant, though it is so constructed that the noise from the bar constantly blasts into the dining area-making it a good place to take guests to whom one has nothing to say. Last month Warner extended...
...Alphonse Mucha was a sculptor too, and nothing in this show epitomizes the art nouveau vision (or fantasy) of woman better than a bust he designed around 1899 for a Parisian jeweler. This astonishing object, whose form shifts like water in the twining reflections of silver flesh and gold hair, is perversely liturgical-a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame...
...Every Parisian male wanted to possess Cléo de Mérode, Liane de Pougy and their thespian sisters-the "great horizontals." But they were also votive objets de culte, focuses of sexual snobbery. In a like way, the most rarefied work of the art nouveau craftsmen was not accessible to a wide public. As the style spread through the decorative arts-furniture making, inlay, bookbinding, jewelry, glass-too much labor and fine material were devoured by it. It was, in very essence, elitist: the stylish style. But as Brunhammer rightly exclaims in the catalogue, "Thanks...