Art Nouveau to the Machine Age
A curators view of a new gallery for the museum.
As part of the renovation and reinstallation of the Museum’s galleries of nineteenth-century European art in 2019-2021, four galleries were planned to feature decorative arts and design. Two, opening in 2021, will focus on the transnational connections within and between European and Asian nations, peoples, and cultures; opened in early 2020, a third features works related to the Arts and Crafts movement, and the fourth encompasses “Art Nouveau to the Machine Age.”
Some 40 pieces of furniture, objects and groups of objects in the Art Nouveau gallery trace the birth of modern design in the work of artists who rejected the historical styles of the past and presented themselves as completely modern. The term Art Nouveau was derived in part from and popularized by the Maison de l'Art Nouveau ("House of the New Art"), a contemporary art gallery the Franco-German art dealer Siegfried Bing opened in Paris in 1895. The artists and designers whose work Bing showed were inspired by nature, their styles emphasizing curving lines and shapes in sinuous, abstract compositions. These compositions were incorporated into the designs of buildings as well as in the forms and surfaces of furniture, textiles, lighting, ceramics, glass, jewelry, and posters. Combining architecture and decoration to create a total work of structural and interior design became a distinguishing feature of Art Nouveau.
While the ideas for this new style took hold first in France and Belgium, the movement soon became international. Modernists in Germany and Austria created variants of Art Nouveau that came to be called Jugendstil (“Style of Youth”) after Jugend, the title of an avant-garde periodical of art and literature founded in Munich in 1896, and Secession, after the breakaway exhibition society founded in Vienna in 1897 by Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser and others. Earlier nineteenth-century European design reformers had privileged handcraft, vernacular traditions, and local and natural materials in opposition to what they viewed as the shoddy products of commercial industrialization. However, Art Nouveau designers made no particular distinction between handicraft and machine production, using mechanization, new materials, and new techniques to produce works of the highest quality. After the turn of the century, designers in Germany began to insist that the objects they made should reflect the machines used to produce them, developing a mechanistic style of regular geometric forms with simple silhouettes and smooth finishes. Relying on industrial materials like glass and steel, this new abstract aesthetic ushered in the so-called Machine Age.
The idea of a gallery featuring Art Nouveau works has a long history at the Philadelphia Museum of Art although this is the first time it has actually been realized. In 1929, just before the Great Depression, then Museum director Fiske Kimball published a plan of the Museum’s proposed second floor galleries illustrating the grand sequence of historical period rooms he envisioned there. Following a group of French eighteenth-century rooms, Kimball intended to conclude with an Art Nouveau interior, but failed to convince the committee of Museum Trustees to purchase the contents of a shop designed by the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha for the Parisian jeweler Georges Fouquet that he was hoping to buy. (The shop interior was subsequently acquired by the Musée Carnavalet in Paris). Art Nouveau ceramics and glass had been acquired by the Museum from the great international exhibitions held around the turn of the century, including the remarkable dragonfly vase made by Emile Gallé (1905-46) on display in this gallery that was purchased in 1904 at The Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis. Europe’s most technically advanced glass artist, Gallé created realistic effects by applying the sculptural dragonfly to the surface of the vase, its eyes glinting from gold and silver foil backing and its engraved wings mottled with ash.
In 1948 and 1949, the widow of French architect Hector Guimard (who had died in New York during the war), dispersed his collection among several museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art - which received an armchair, metalwork, and Mme. Guimard’s framed, embroidered wedding handkerchief on display in this gallery. Best known for his fantastical cast iron and glass entrances to Paris subway stations that relied on standardized components, Guimard was Paris’s leading proponent of Art Nouveau. In 2004, the Museum was able to acquire a glazed stoneware fireplace that Guimard had originally designed for his most important architectural project, a block of apartments in Paris known as the Castel Béranger. The stalk -like shapes adorning this fireplace are typical of his abstracted, natural forms. In order to create the impression of an interior, installed behind the fireplace is wallpaper that reproduces one of the papers Guimard designed for the Castel Béranger apartments.
Art Nouveau advertising posters spread the style across Europe, advanced by the development of color lithography and the repeal of censorship restrictions in Paris that allowed posters anywhere except on churches, polls, and areas designated for official notices. Two recent poster acquisitions are featured in the gallery: Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s famous poster Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat) for Rodolphe Salis’s cabaret of the same title in Montmartre; and Franz von Stuck’s publicity poster for an exhibition by Secession artists in Krefeld, Germany. Like Steinlen, Stuck’s flat, simplified contours and limited use of color were to have a lasting influence on the development of modern poster design.
Other recent acquisitions on display in the gallery include the gifts and promised gifts of an exceptional collection of French ceramics inspired by the Japanese art and design that flooded Europe after 1854 when Japanese ports were reopened to foreign trade. These include plates from the Fleurs et Rubans (Flowers and Ribbons) Service designed by Félix Bracquemond. In his many ceramic designs, Bracquemond borrowed heavily from the woodcuts of Katsushika Hokusai, which he is said to have first discovered as packing material in a crate of imported Japanese ceramics. A masterwork of the Japoniste style from the same collection is the dish made by Albert-Louis Dammouse. Known for his bold experiments with ceramic bodies and glazes, particularly that of high-fired stoneware, Dammouse developed a personal style characterized by the use of bright colors and the realistic depiction of plant forms. Like other French Art Nouveau designers, Dammouse was inspired both by direct observation of nature as well as by the shapes, decorations, and subjects he discovered in Japanese works of art. Other ceramics on display are two white porcelain figures- a dancer and a piper - from a grand table centerpiece, known as the Jeu de l’Echarpe (Dance of the Scarves). These were inspired not by Japanese examples, but by the sinuous movements and voluminous costumes of the American dancer Loie Fuller who performed in Paris at the turn of the century.
The Art Nouveau and Machine Age gallery has provided a welcome opportunity to feature works that have been acquired but never put on display. These include two posters, Privat LIvemont’s advertisement for Raja, a popular Belgian coffee and tea company and Mihaly Biro’s poster of the Humanic shoe factory which span the distance from Art Nouveau to early modern design. With his swirling linearism and opulent decorative style of 1900, Livemont personifies the exoticism of the Rajah brand name with a central female figure adorned in snake and elephant jewelry. A quarter of a century later, the shoe factory poster adopts a radical, new language of form that understands typography as a medium of communication in its own right, as Biro reimagines the factory constructed as the name of the manufacturer who occupies it – Humanic.
The gallery offers comparisons in other mediums between Art Nouveau and early modern design. Paul Follot’s silver-plated Art Nouveau coffee and tea service combines plant forms and decoration in a dynamic whole. Spouts and handles appear to grow organically from the bodies of the tray and vessels, their movement echoing the tray’s spray of stylized flowers. By comparison, Bruno Paul’s brass candelabra is machine-like in the way the arms can be swiveled on the shaft to form a three-dimensional structure and suggests the rational, rectilinear direction his work would take. Finally, Guimard’s cherrywood armchair offers a telling comparison to Mies van der Rohe’s chrome-plated steel armchair and stool in style as well as in material and construction. As evident in the carved cresting rail of his chair, Guimard modelled his design on natural plant forms but abstracted them, while Mies – who had trained in the office of Bruno Paul - designed his chair as an entirely abstract, rectilinear composition that announced the pure formalism that remains a feature of modern design to this day.
