The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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Art Nouveau

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The posters of Toulouse-Lautrec bear the seductive stamp

of Art Nouveau(French for “new art”), an ornamental style

The Symbolists Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century:

century. Art Nouveauartists shared with members of the

English Arts and Crafts movement a high regard for the

fine artisanship of the preindustrial Middle Ages, an era

that achieved an ideal synthesis of the functional and the

decorative in daily life. The proponents of the new style

also prized the decorative arts of Asia and Islam, which

tended to favor bold, flat, organic patterns and semi-

abstract linear designs. Acknowledging the impact of the

Japanese woodcut style, one French critic insisted that

Japanese blood had mixed with the blood of Art Nouveau

artists.

Art Nouveauoriginated in Belgium among architects

working in the medium of cast iron, but it quickly took

on an international reach that affected painting, as well

as the design of furniture, textiles, glass, ceramics, and

jewelry. The Belgian founder of the style, Victor Horta

(1861–1947), brought to his work the Arts and Crafts

Figure 31.16 VICTOR HORTA, Tassel House, Brussels, 1892–1893.

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