Word: nouveau
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Nothing about the exhibit seems to fit among the musty antiquities of Assyrian Hall in the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Eye-popping red, blue and yellow paints are splashed inside the glass showcases; a lettered wheel whirls out breezy explanations in art nouveau type. Topping off the extravaganza is a large wall map, lit up by flickering red neon tubing. It is the kind of show that conservative diggers dismiss with a scornful epithet: "Pop Archaeology...
Almost any photograph of a Northern European city street scene taken around 1900 shows how decisively art nouveau (or its German version, Jugendstil) permeated the Mauve Decade. As the first art style since the Industrial Revolution to integrate every phase of design, its florid, free-flowing lines ornamented buildings and posters, park benches and Metro stations, Tiffany glass and Liberty silks. Yet few styles have had a shorter life. It achieved its purplest popularity between 1895 and 1900, was fading fast by 1914. With the advent of the machined precision of the 1920s Bauhaus modernism, handcrafted art nouveau became...
Only in the past decade have European connoisseurs begun to reappraise the movement's significance and restore its masterworks. In many cases, furniture and stained-glass are long gone; World War II and the postwar building boom have leveled many buildings. Yet those art-nouveau monuments that remain are now recognized as well worth the trouble and expense of renovation (see color pages...
Belgium, when art nouveau was in flower, boasted one of its veritable orchids, Architect Victor Horta. Although four of Horta's buildings have been redesigned, destroyed by fire or demolished, the 66-room manse that he did for Baron van Eetvelde, Belgium's first Governor of the Congo, is preserved much as Horta left it. Moreover, in the annex of the hotel lives Architect Jean Delhaye, a kind of one-man Belgian fin de siècle society who is directing the reconstruction of the home Horta built for himself in Brussels, so that it can open next...
Cache in the Shaft. Most original ol the art-nouveau architects was Spain's Antoni Gaudi, but recognition was slow in coming. Two decades ago, Art Historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his Pioneers of Modern Design, relegated Gaudi to two footnotes in the appendix. Eight years later, Pevsner recanted, saying, "He is the only genius produced by art-nouveau." Gaudi, who urged that "we must not imitate or reproduce Gothic but continue it," based his studies on Catalan architecture and plant forms in nature. The results, scholars now recognize, intuitively anticipated many of today's shell structures, including...