ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

art movement of the last half of the 19th century that strove to revitalize handicrafts and applied arts during an era of increasing mass production.

The movement coalesced in 1861, when the English designer William Morris founded the firm of Morris, Marshall & Faulkner. Arguing that the true basis of art lay in the crafts, Morris and his followers attacked the sterility and ugliness of machine-made products; his firm promoted handmade textiles, books, wallpaper, and furniture. Around him grew a circle of other artisans, notably the architects Philip Webb (1831-1915) and C. F. A. Voysey (known for his "cottage" style), the cabinetmaker Ernest Gimson (1864-1919), the potter William De Morgan (1839-1917), and the designers Walter Crane and C. R. Ashbee (1863-1942). The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (founded 1888) and the magazines The Studio and Hobby Horse provided forums for the dissemination of the movement's ideas.

In Scotland, Glasgow became a center of the movement in the 1890s, under the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

In Vienna, it was the inspiration for the craft-oriented Wiener Werkstätt (Vienna Workshop).

In the U.S. it led to the establishment of notable craft workshops and exhibition societies, while the mission style in furniture and architecture carried arts and crafts ideals up to World War I.

A forerunner of Art Nouveau, with its emphasis on plain materials and surfaces, the movement contributed to 20th-century modernism.

ART NOUVEAU (French, New Art), European art movement popular around 1900, and named after Maison de l'Art Nouveau, a Paris shop opened in 1896 by the art dealer Siegfried Bing (1838-1905). The style found expression in a range of art forms-architecture, interior design, furniture, posters, glass, pottery, textiles, and book illustration; its main characteristic is curving and undulating lines, often referred to as whiplash lines.

Art Nouveau had its roots in the Arts and Crafts movement in England, which revived handicrafts and rejected mass-production techniques. Art Nouveau borrowed motifs from sources as varied as Japanese prints, Gothic architecture, and the symbolic paintings of the English poet and artist William Blake to create a highly decorative style with strong 15315o142p elements of fantasy.

The earliest examples of Art Nouveau are usually considered the work of the English architect Arthur Mackmurdo (1851-1942), particularly a chair designed in 1882 and an engraved frontispiece for a book (Wren's Early Churches) in 1883, both of which exhibit the sinuous lines that were to become Art Nouveau hallmarks. The fabric designs sold by Arthur Liberty (1843-1917) in his famous London shop (founded 1875) and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley-particularly those for the periodical The Yellow Book (1894) and for the English writer Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1894)-carried English Art Nouveau to its height. Annual shows of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, beginning in 1888, helped disseminate the style, and a new magazine, The Studio (founded 1893), helped spread it to Europe.

In Belgium, the style first appeared in the works of the architects Victor Horta and Henri van de Velde; their designs for townhouses proliferated, with elegantly twining wrought-iron staircases, balconies, gates, and wall decorations.

In France, the style was most evident in the work of the architect Hector Guimard (mainly the exotic Parisian subway entrances, 1898-1901), the glassmaker Émile Gallé (1846-1904), the furniture designer Louis Majorelle (1859-1926), and the poster artist Alphonse Mucha; it was also fashionable in interior decor, notably at Maxim's Restaurant in Paris.

In Munich, as the Jugendstil ("youth style"), and

in Vienna, as the Sezessionstil, it permeated applied art and illustration and peaked in the paintings of Gustav Klimt and the furniture and architectural designs of Josef Hoffmann.

In the U.S., the leading figure was Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose shimmering Favrile-glass vases and stained-glass lampshades were fantasies of iridescence.

In Spain, Art Nouveau had perhaps its most original practitioner, Antoni Gaudí; his highly idiosyncratic parks and apartment buildings in Barcelona with no straight lines give the impression of being natural organisms sprung from the earth.

Art Nouveau was in decline by 1910 and was succeeded by the sleekly elegant Art Deco . A renewed interest in Art Nouveau began in the 1960s; its role in the advent of modern art and architecture was also recognized.

Art Nouveau

Although known as Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Modernista in Spain, and Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale in Italy, Art Nouveau has become the general term applied to a highly varied movement that was European-centred but internationally current at the end of the century. Art Nouveau architects gave idiosyncratic expression to many of the themes that had preoccupied the 19th century, ranging from Viollet-le-Duc's call for structural honesty to Sullivan's call for an organic architecture. The extensive use of iron and glass in Art Nouveau buildings was also rooted in 19th-century practice. In France bizarre forms appeared in iron, masonry, and concrete, such as the structures of Hector Guimard for the Paris Métro (c. 1900), the Montmartre church of Saint-Jean L'Évangéliste (1894-1904) by Anatole de Baudot, Xavier Schollkopf's house for the actress Yvette Guilbert at Paris (1900), and the Samaritaine Department Store (1905) near the Pont Neuf in Paris, by Frantz Jourdain (1847-1935). The Art Nouveau architect's preference for the curvilinear is especially evident in the Brussels buildings of the Belgian Victor Horta. In the Hôtel Van Eetvelde (1895) he used floral, tendrilous ornaments, while his Maison du Peuple (1896-99) exhibits undulating enclosures of space. Decorative exploitation of the architectural surface with flexible, S-shaped linear ornament, commonly called whiplash or eel styles, was indulged in by the Jugendstil and Sezessionstil architects. The Studio Elvira at Munich (1897-98) by August Endell and Otto Wagner's Majolika Haus at Vienna (c. 1898) are two of the more significant examples of this German and Austrian use of line.

Wagner continued to combine academic geometry with classical modified Art Nouveau decoration in his Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station (1899-1901) and in the Postal Savings Bank (1904-06), both in Vienna. Wagner's pupils broke free of his classicism and formed the Secessionists. Joseph Olbrich joined the art colony at Darmstadt, in Germany, where his houses and exhibition gallery of about 1905 were boxlike, severe buildings. Josef Hoffmann left Wagner to found the Wiener Werkstätte, an Austrian equivalent of the English Arts and Crafts Movement; his best work, the Stoclet House at Brussels (1905), was an asymmetrical composition in which white planes were defined at the edges by gilt lines and decorated by formalized Art Nouveau motifs reminiscent of Wagner's ornament. Josef Plecnik, a talented pupil of Wagner, began his career in 1903-05 with the office and residence of Johannes Zacherl in Vienna. This was in a Wagner-inspired style that Plecnik developed in the 1930s in a fascinating series of buildings, especially in his native city of Ljubljana, now in Slovenia. (See Vienna.)

In Finland Eliel Saarinen brought an Art Nouveau flavour to the National Romanticism current in the years around 1900. His Helsinki Railway Station (1906-14) is close to the work of Olbrich and the Viennese Secessionists. Close links existed between Art Nouveau designers in Vienna and in Glasgow, where Charles Rennie Mackintosh's School of Art (1896-1909), with its rationalist yet poetic aesthetic, is one of the most inventive and personal of all Art Nouveau buildings. In The Netherlands, Hendrik Petrus Berlage also created a sternly fundamentalist language of marked individuality that is best appreciated in his masterpiece, the Amsterdam Exchange (1897-1903). The exterior is in a rugged and deliberately unpicturesque vernacular, while the even more ruthless interior deploys brick, iron, and glass in a manner that owes much to the rationalist aesthetic of Viollet-le-Duc. (See Glasgow School of Art.)

In the United States the Art Nouveau movement arrived with Louis Comfort Tiffany and was especially influential on ornamental rather than spatial design, particularly on Sullivan's decorative schemes and, for a time, those of Frank Lloyd Wright. Decorative exuberance and the formally picturesque were elements of Stile Floreale buildings by the Italian Raimondo D'Aronco, such as the main building for the Applied Art Exhibition held at Turin, Italy, in 1902. These qualities, along with dynamic spatial innovations, were manifested in the works of perhaps the most singular Art Nouveau architect, the Spaniard Antonio Gaudí. His imaginative and dramatic experiments with space, form, structure, and ornament fascinate the visitor to Barcelona. With their peculiar organicism, the Casa Milá apartment house (1905-10;), the residence of the Batlló family (1904-06), Gaudí's unfinished lifetime projects of the surrealistic Güell Park and the enigmatic Church of the Holy Family were personal statements. Their effect, like that of most Art Nouveau architecture, was gained through bizarre form and ornament.

SEZESSIONSTIL (Ger., "secession style"),

term applied to work in the Art Nouveau idiom produced in Vienna in the last decade of the 19th century by members of an avant-garde group known as the Wiener Sezession. Chiefly involving architecture and the applied arts, Sezessionstil was influenced by the geometric style of the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Its main proponents were the Austrian architects Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, and Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867-1908), who designed the building that housed the exhibitions of the Sezession (1898-99). A journal entitled Ver Sacrum (1898-1903) was associated with the movement.

STIJL, DE (Du., "the style"), Dutch movement in the arts, started in Amsterdam in 1917 and dedicated to abstraction based on a quest for harmony and order. Among the founders of the movement were the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, who also established its journal, De Stijl (1917-32). Their canvases were abstract compositions in pure primary colors combined with straight lines in black, gray, and white. De Stijl principles also influenced the decorative arts, and architecture in particular-as in the austere clarity of the Schröder House (1924) in Utrecht by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, and the Workers' Housing Estate (1924-27) in Hook of Holland by Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud.

BAUHAUS, famous German school of design that had inestimable influence on modern architecture, the industrial and graphic arts, and theater design. It was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar as a merger of an art academy and an arts and crafts school. The Bauhaus was based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that art should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. It also depended on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. Thus, classes were offered in crafts, typography, and commercial and industrial design, as well as in sculpture, painting, and architecture. The Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style , was marked by the absence of ornament and ostentatious facades and by harmony between function and the artistic and technical means employed.

In 1925 the Bauhaus was moved into a group of starkly rectangular glass and concrete buildings in Dessau that were especially designed for it by Gropius. In Dessau the Bauhaus style became more strictly functional with greater emphasis on showing the beauty and suitability of basic, unadorned materials. Other outstanding architects and artists who were on the staff of the Bauhaus included the Swiss painter Paul Klee, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, the Hungarian painter and designer László Moholy-Nagy (who founded the Chicago Institute of Design on the principles of the Bauhaus), the American painter Lyonel Feininger, and the German painter Oskar Schlemmer.

Gropius resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, and Hannes Meyer (1889-1954) replaced him. Meyer held the position until 1930, when the school came under the direction of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who moved it to Berlin in 1932. By 1933, when the school was closed by the Nazis, its principles and work were known worldwide. Many of its faculty immigrated to the U.S., where the Bauhaus teachings came to dominate art and architecture for decades and strongly contributed to the architectural style known as International Style.

ART DECO, style of design popular in the 1920s and '30s. It was used primarily in furniture, jewelry, textiles, and interior decor. Its sleek, streamlined forms connote elegance and sophistication. Although the movement began about 1910, the term Art Deco was not applied to it until 1925, when it was coined for the title of the seminal Paris design exhibition, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.

Art Deco grew out of a conscious effort to simplify the elaborate turn-of-the-century

Art Nouveau style, to make it more responsive to the new machine-age ideals of speed and glamour. Two of Art Deco's earliest practitioners were the couturier Paul Poiret (1879-1944) and the jeweler and glassmaker René Lalique; their designs featured delicate unconstricted, flowing lines. Further important influences were the Russian ballet producer Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with its Oriental stage decor and exotic colors; King Tutankhamen's tomb (opened in 1922), which created a vogue for Egyptian motifs; and cubism, with its elegantly geometric aesthetic. Leading designers of the 1920s and '30s were Jacques Émile Ruhlmann (1879-1933) in furniture, Jean Dunand (1877-1942) in lacquerwork, Jean Puiforcat (1897-1945) in silver, and Lalique in jewelry.

Art Deco became steadily more geometric and linear as objects were increasingly mass-produced and as the U.S. supplanted France as the spiritual center of the movement. It found expression in objects as diverse as locomotives, skyscrapers, roadside diners, radio cabinets, jukeboxes, and advertising displays. Principal European monuments of Art Deco were Ruhlmann's Paris exhibition rooms, Le Pavillon d'un Collectioneur (1925), and the grand salon (c. 1930) of the French liner Normandie, with lighting and decor by Lalique. Primary examples of Art Deco in the U.S. are the interior of Radio City Music Hall (1931) in New York City, designed by Donald Deskey (1894-1989); and William van Alen's (1882-1954) Chrysler Building (1930, New York City), with its sleek aluminum-banded facades and arched and pointed spire.

Art Deco declined after 1935 but has enjoyed a significant revival since the 1960s.

Art Deco

also called STYLE MODERNE, movement in the decorative arts and architecture that originated in the 1920s and developed into a major style in western Europe and the United States during the 1930s. Its name was derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited. Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion. Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares, but, in either case, the intention was to create a sleek and antitraditional elegance that symbolized wealth and sophistication.

The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a "streamlined" look; ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials, which frequently include man-made substances (plastics, especially bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). Though Art Deco objects were rarely mass-produced, the characteristic features of the style reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects (e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements).

Among the formative influences on Art Deco were Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Decorative ideas came from American Indian, Egyptian, and early classical sources as well as from nature. Characteristic motifs included nude female figures, animals, foliage, and sunrays, all in conventionalized forms.

Most of the outstanding Art Deco creators designed individually crafted or limited-edition items. They included the furniture designers Jacques Ruhlmann and Maurice Dufrčne; the architect Eliel Saarinen; metalsmith Jean Puiforcat; glass and jewelry designer René Lalique; fashion designer Erté; artist-jewelers Raynmond Templier, Jean Fouquet René Robert, H.G. Murphy, and Wiwen Nilsson; and the figural sculptor Chiparus. The fashion designer Paul Poiret and the graphic artist Edward McKnight Kauffer represent those whose work directly reached a larger audience. New York City's Rockefeller Center (especially its interiors supervised by Donald Deskey), the Chrysler Building by William Van Alen, and the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon are the most monumental embodiments of Art Deco. Although the style went out of fashion during World War II, beginning in the late 1960s there was a renewed interest in Art Deco design.

GEORGIAN STYLE, neoclassical style of architecture and interior design, popular in Great Britain during the reigns of the first four Georges, or from about 1715 to 1820. The Georgian style developed from the Roman Palladian style used by the 17th-century English architect Inigo Jones, and was largely employed in domestic architecture and in planned sections of towns, such as the Adelphi section of London designed by the 18th-century Scottish-English architect Robert Adam, the Circus and the Royal Crescent built by the English architects John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger (1728-81) in the resort town of Bath, and the whole of New Town in Edinburgh. Among the finest examples of the style used for a public building in the second half of the 18th century is Somerset House, London, designed by the English architect Sir William Chambers. The Customs House, the Four Courts, and other Georgian buildings that give Dublin its 18th-century character were designed by the English architect James Gandon (1743-1823). The style was superseded in England by the Greek and Gothic revivals of the 19th century. In colonial North America, the influence of the Georgian style was minimal before the American Revolution. By 1785, however, the style had become extremely popular in a native version called the Federal style. This evolved into a monumental neoclassical style exemplified by Thomas Jefferson's elegant designs (1817-26) for the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. This version of the Georgian style remained popular for public buildings in the U.S. well into the 20th century.

PRE-RAPHAELITES, a group of 19th-century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against Victorian materialism and the outworn neoclassical conventions of academic art by producing earnest quasi-religious works inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian painter and architect Raphael. They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Rome in 1810 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, and its central figure was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Other members were his brother, William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), an art critic; painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt; art critic Frederick George Stephens (1828-1907); painter James Collinson (1825?-81); and sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner (1825-92).

Essentially Christian in outlook, the brotherhood deplored the imitative historic and genre painting of their day. Together they sought to revitalize art through a simpler, more positive vision. In portrait painting, for example, the group eschewed the somber colors and formal structure preferred by the Royal Academy. They found their inspiration in the comparatively sincere and religious, and scrupulously detailed, art of the Middle Ages. Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its blend of archaic, romantic, and moralistic qualities, but much of it has been criticized as superficial and sentimental, if not artificial. Millais eventually left the group, but other English artists joined it, including the painter and designer Edward Coley Burne-Jones and the poet and artist William Morris. The eminent English art critic John Ruskin was an ardent supporter of the movement. Examples of Pre-Raphaelite painting include Millais's The Carpenter Shop (1850, Tate Gallery, London) and D. G. Rossetti's The Wedding of St. George and the Princess Sabra (1857, Tate Gallery).

In literature, the Pre-Raphaelites may be considered a recurrent phase of the romantic movement. In looking back to the Middle Ages, the school paralleled both the Oxford movement in the Anglican church and a Gothic revival led by the English architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. For a time in 1850 the members published a periodical called The Germ, in which some of Rossetti's earliest literary work appeared.