814 Cm. 20 • Responses to a Changing World
Georges Seurat s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884).
strated Gauguin’s influence. Munch’s The Scream (1893) evokes the viewer’:
alarm and fear, because the subject’s scream seems to fill the entire can
vas. In Munich, which along with Dresden was the center of the Germar
expressionist movement, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866
1944) had by 1910 moved expressionism even farther away from surface
reality, portraying the inner being in a simplified form with lines, dots, ant
intense colors.
Art Nouveau, a sinuous decorative style offering a synthesis between tra
ditional and modern art, also reflected the anxiety and moodiness of the
fin de siecle. Art Nouveau evinced contemporary fascination with psychia
try. Charcot, the French neurologist, had opened up the unconscious te
investigation through hypnosis. The dreamlike flowing forms and shapes o
Art Nouveau, then, complemented the growing awareness of the contour
and fluidity of the mind and its dreams and fantasies.
Although drawing upon past decorative traditions in furniture, jewelr)
glasswork, and ceramics, Art Nouveau also influenced architecture, seen ii
the houses and sweeping entrances to subway stations that Hector Guiman
(1867-1942) designed in Paris, and in apartment buildings and the begin
nings of a cathedral undertaken (and still unfinished) in Barcelona by Anto
nio Gaudi (1852-1926).
Leading cultural figures in France identified Art Nouveau’s style with the
republic, seeing in its highly crafted luxury products something that wa
very French. At the same time, it could be associated with the conservative
republic because the style’s rococo origins were rooted in an aristocrats