Word: nouveau
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...brief heyday around the turn of the century, the tendrilous international style of art nouveau swept over Europe, dominating the design of everything from the Paris Metro stations to ordinary knives and forks. The inevitable reaction against it was particularly violent, and the whole movement was dismissed as a rather ludicrous, if temporary, aberration. Artists like Alphonse Mucha, if remembered at all, seemed as dated as gaslight and their work as decadent as Oscar Wilde's sun flower. But lately art nouveau has been getting a new look. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art had a big show...
...noble aim, this idea that man-made things should follow nature's masterpiece and that all objects, whether a ring or a house, should have an organic relationship to each other. But to live with art nouveau came to be like living in a world of peacock tails; it was not so much art as an empty, if dazzling, embellishment. In the end, Mucha himself turned away from it and spent the last years of his life in the Castle Zbirov in Bohemia, working on a series of academic pictures portraying the history of his people...
...boasts a priceless collection of French paintings and a U.S. heiress for a wife. Because the Bavarian aristocrats have traditionally been less exclusive than Prussia's patricians, Munich today is one city in which the rival elites come together. Munich's jet set, composed of the nouveau riche and the ancient upper crust, shuttles between St. Moritz and Egypt's resort of Helwan. Its reigning beauty is the statuesque blonde daughter of Banker Miine-mann, "Antschi," who hurtles around town in an eggshell-colored Ferrari; however, many families with "von" in their names still prefer to drive...
...switched from blue story to Bluebeard in mid-project. The film is mean to ladies in more ways than murder. Its closeups of fading Film Queens Danielle Darrieux and Michele Morgan constitute a photographic invasion of privacy. One corpulent beldam, a doomed weekend guest at Landru's Art Nouveau rookery near Paris, eats raspberries from Landru's hand and ends up with jam dribbling wretchedly down her chins...
...years since these exercises were performed, the avant-garde seems to have gone somewhere else. Surrealist painting seems to have joined the art nouveau lamp shade in the attic; surrealism in writing has fared worse. Sample Miller...