It is difficult to convey the giddy joy I felt one day in Berlin—that gray grid of a city—upon opening an unsuspecting gate and feeling in my hand no ordinary doorknob, but iron in the shape of a Belgian endive. Its smooth curve fit elegantly in my hand, yet its form was so specific and silly. Three years later, I still look at pictures of it on my phone, longingly.
The gate, should you wish to track it down and feel the same small magic, is outside the Bröhan Museum, which collects Art Nouveau—as well as Jugendstil, the German (and, I’d argue, more beautiful) branch of the movement better known by its French name. Broadly speaking, the Germans leaned toward geometric abstraction and stylization, while the French favored facsimile, committed more firmly to oragnic forms. It was at this Bröhan gate that I realized I had perhaps been wrong to write off Art Nouveau, which I had long found sickly sweet—particularly in its tendency to merge women, nature, and domestic objects into those girl-tree-candelabra hybrids that set off feminist alarm bells in my mind.
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I was not the first skeptic. In fact, I soon felt validated if not smug when I learned that my unease echoed a famous argument between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who quickly became the angel and devil on my shoulders. Benjamin was firmly critical of Art Nouveau, while Adorno’s feelings could best be described as ambivalent.
Much like the slightly earlier Impressionist movement, Art Nouveau was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which was visible on the horizon—literally, in the form of trains and steamships and smog. It also came about at a time when Baroque art, with its fancy ornament and decadent drama, was having a moment of rediscovery in the French art scene. This was Art Nouveau’s wager: in the late 19th century, technology was taking over, and daily life was becoming more divorced from nature than ever before. Art Nouveau’s exponents seemed to say: Let’s bring nature inside, lest we forget it exists and ruin it all. The movement also wagered that, as nature was becoming in some ways a luxury, with crowds flocking to cities and crowding apartment buildings, one might mass produce the organic world in nonperishable form and give some to everyone. Looking at all the ruining we’ve done in the intervening century-and-a-half-ish, it is tempting to wish we’d had more reminders to appreciate the beauty that we were slowly destroying.
Which is why Adorno defended Art Nouveau. He saw the movement as expressing a genuine, utopian, and worthwhile desire to reconcile art, nature, and technology. He just didn’t think it did so successfully. In Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno clarified that he preferred modernist forms that did more than simply smooth over social contradictions. For Benjamin it was worse: Art Nouveau lied, and merely proved “the impotence of that generation in the face of technical progress.” It dressed up mass-produced doorknobs but did little to alter their means of production, or to break down the doors, offering instead a feeling of connection to nature that wasn’t real.
I SUSPECT THAT PRODUCING more leafy doorknobs would have done little to stave off climate disaster. But I admire the human longing they betray, the longing to belong in an ecosystem. Today, Art Nouveau is probably one of the best known and most popular artistic movements of all time. It helps for its popularity, but hurts for its critics that the style is pleasant and pretty.
Still, hoping to quiet the German men arguing in my head, I was pleased to discover that Art Nouveau is having a micro-moment. On view in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is one of the most iconic Art Nouveau designs, that green wrought iron Parisian Métro entrance, the one with curlicues and the sign that says METROPOLITAN. Designed by the Frenchman Hector Guimard at the fin de siècle, it features two sinuous flowers growing tall and thriving, with lights appearing where their buds would be. The Métro was the second subway system ever to exist, and the idea behind Guimard’s entrance was to soften the shock of the new by borrowing forms from the natural world.
Recently opened across the pond, in Prague, is a whole new museum dedicated to Alphonse Mucha, who was born in what is now Czechia in 1860 but spent a good deal of his career in France. The museum, run by the Mucha Foundation, is complemented by the touring exhibition “Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line,” which recently traveled from the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, to the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. I visited both the Mucha Museum and the traveling show, and initially, I winced at the idea of Mucha being “timeless”—his depictions of sensuous, nymph-y women, all doe-eyed, pouty-lipped, and impossibly long-haired certainly feel of their time. It didn’t help that the exhibition opened with a photo of Mucha with his studio mate Paul Gauguin, along with Gauguin’s teenage “mistress,” to quote the wall text, named Annah la Javanaise.
Still, I forced myself to stay with Mucha, in part because he is easily the most famous Art Nouveau artist, and I was curious what made him resonate so widely. I stayed, too, because, somewhat paradoxically, I also think some dismissals of Art Nouveau as unserious for its floral, domestic, crafty sides are misogynistic, too. (The feminist critic Rosalind Galt takes such criticisms to task in her 2011 book Pretty). Art Nouveau flattened hierarchies between high art and interior design in pursuit of a Gesamtkunstwerk, and much of the art it produced is pretty with pastel palettes—which is part of why, I suspect, there is little serious writing on it still today.
Staying with Mucha, I learned some things—as one does when they leave their mind open. I learned, for example, that some women seemed to like Mucha quite a lot in his day, because who wouldn’t enjoy being seen and drawn so beautifully? The artist’s first breakthrough was in 1894, when he made a poster for the starlet Sarah Bernhardt. She loved it so much that the gig turned into a six-year contract: he made her theater posters, stage sets, costumes, and jewelry. That first poster was inspired by her elegant, flowing movement onstage, and would inform his quintessential swirling, Q-shaped compositions. The radius of Mucha’s ripple effect was large. In the exhibition, one finds everything from manga artists to psychedelic posters clearly riffing on his style. And it’s not hard to see why: his drawings are totally graphic—made to be reproduced—and yet incredibly intricate. The man knew better than most what a line could do.
THE THING ABOUT STYLES is that the worthwhile ones embody bigger beliefs. For Mucha, the belief was that art should be for everyone—hence the graphic quality, the reproducible prints, and the lovely lines. The artist grew up in a family of grape-growing peasants in Bohemia and lived above the jail where his father was employed. Before moving to Vienna, then Paris, his dad had gotten him a job as a stenographer, and as his great-grandson Marcus Mucha, now executive director of the Mucha Foundation, told me, he didn’t last long: he was fired for drawing all the time. Soon he was off to art school, eventually joining the echelons of fancy Parisians, yet there, he remained committed to his belief that art was for everyone. When, near the end of his life, he dedicated himself more fully to painting over making prints that could be wheatpasted around the city, he did so in order to make The Slav Epic (1910–28), a monumental series of 20 paintings depicting various Slavic customs that were then under threat by Imperialist takeover. He made this homage back in Prague, intending it for the Slavic people; currently, Thomas Heatherwick is designing a building in the city where it will soon be on permanent view.
But this idea—that styles betray beliefs—was introduced in the 19th century by one of the founders of the discipline of art history, Aois Riegl, in writings that would inform the Viennese version of Art Nouveau. Riegl called the concept Kunstwollen, or artistic will. In Art Nouveau, it is easy to see how ethics and aesthetics are one in the same, and it is for this reason that he called the movement the “precursor of modern art.”
The most beautiful beliefs stemming from this era and ethos come, in my opinion, come from William Morris. The Englishman’s involvement in Britain’s slightly earlier Arts and Crafts movement helped pave the way for Art Nouveau ideals. Morris was a socialist designer and writer best known for his lush botanical wallpapers—patterns he dreamed might someday even line tenement walls. Morris believed beauty was for everyone, because he believed art could remake the world—that it could show us a better way forward while also providing the nourishment and desire we’d need to realize revolutions. In his socialist utopia, as imagined in his 1890 novel News from Nowhere, craftsmen take pleasure in making things, not for profit but for joy. That joy then radiates outward—into everydayy objects, and then into the wider world. His was a hopeful, world-building vision, but Morris was never able solve the central problem that plagued his mission: his wallpapers remained expensive, far beyond the reach of the people he most wanted to share them with. Making them affordable would have required a revolution larger than his art alone could spark—another point, I’m afraid, for Benjamin.
And yet, the pleasure of Art Nouveau did at times radiate outward to extraordinary effect. In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Mucha was one of the first people they came for. He had devoted much of his work to celebrating Slavic traditions at a time when Germanic hegemony sought to erase them, and he had openly advocated for Czechoslovak independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Nazis eventually released him, but he died of pneumonia shortly afterward. In an unlikely twist, one Gestapo officer secretly preserved Mucha’s works after his house was ransacked, hiding them in his office simply because he loved them. He returned them after the occupation ended, and now, at last, they have their own museum.
