Art Nouveau [antikvár]

Crumble away, society!' This was tlie cry of Des Esseintes, the hero of J.K. Huysmans' novel A Rebours (Against Nature) published in 1884, who had grown weary in his pursuit of pleasure and was fading away in sheer ennui. All the elaborate diversions which he had devised to sustain himself in an ugly, modern world had failed. In his despair, he uttered the plea of the anarchist. Eleven years later Henry van de Velde, a Belgian architect and designer, and a pioneer of Art Nouveau, wrote: Art Is beginning anew because society is beginning anew.' To most of those who created Art Nouveau, and to many of those who consumed its products, the style represented If not a revolt then at least a protest against established values. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, old morals, old laws and old institutions were under attack from a handful of visionaries, socialists, sceptics, writers and artists. The New Spirit was the title of a book of essays by the English critic Havelock Ellis, published In 1890, in which he reviewed the progress of the literary and philosophical assault on the old culture. The emphasis on New' reflected the Impact of the theory of evolution expounded by Charles Darwin and supported by anyone who claimed to hold advanced opinions. It became important to be an originator not an imitator, an individual not one of the crowd. CREATING A NEW ART The name Art Nouveau' was an expression of the need felt by some artists to lead humanity to a new artistic Utopia where architects and designers would no longer copy old styles, but would instead create an ever original art. They were less aware of the contradiction inherent in their dream than the restraint imposed on them by the existing institutions of the artistic establishment. In most European countries all matters artistic were run by some sort of academy which represented the official taste of the royal court or the republican state. The styles favoured were those of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, which had over the centuries acquired an artistic authority matching their order and clarity, qualities which rulers generally find agreeable. In Paris, Emperor Napoleon 111 permitted artists whose works had been excluded from the official Salon of 1863 to show them in public at a Salon des Refusés. Edouard Manet exhibited Déjeuner sur i'herbe which showed a party of two men and two women having a meal and a chat beside a river. But the women were désbabiiiées-, citizens and Emperor were disgusted. The experiment of the Salon des Refusés was never repeated. The female nude, asserted the guardians of public morals, was acceptable in a classical, historical or religious setting, but not as a human being alive today. The Royal Academician J.C. Horsley, addressing the Church Congress in 1885, had less liberal notions: Is not clothedness a distinct type and feature of our Christian faith? All art representations of nakedness are out of harmony with it.' Such an opinion invited ridicule; Oscar Wilde, for one, jeered. He described the presence at one of Lady Windermere's receptions of several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists'. The Austrian painter Josef Engelhart claimed that the first skirmish in the long campaign fought by the more advanced Vien- 7