Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is what happened when the 19th century looked at a straight line and decided it had suffered enough.

Lara Vinca Masini’s Art Nouveau is a splendid Thames and Hudson plunge into that lavish, curling, feverishly decorative moment when architecture, furniture, posters, glass, jewellery, typefaces, staircases, door handles and presumably the more ambitious soup ladles all decided to grow tendrils. It was modernity, yes, but modernity with hair. Modernity in a velvet waistcoat. Modernity standing in a railway station and quietly turning the ticket office into an orchid.

The movement had the heroic ambition to rescue everyday life from ugliness, which is admirable, although it did occasionally do so by making everything look as if it might be swallowed by a vine. Here are the whiplash lines, the sinuous women, the lilies, the peacocks, the dragonflies, the mysterious faces staring out from posters as though advertising absinthe, theatre tickets, or a very complicated emotional collapse. Here is a world in which a chair is not merely a chair, but an opportunity for wood to remember it was once alive and had opinions.

Masini guides the reader through the international spread of the style: Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Glasgow, Barcelona, Milan, and all those cities where respectable craftsmen and architects began behaving as though the right angle had personally insulted them. The result is one of the great visual outbreaks of the modern age: part elegance, part botanical incident, part industrial design discovering perfume. It is art for the age of machines, but with the machines politely hidden behind stained glass and a woman with impossible hair.

This is the charm of Art Nouveau. It is both progressive and deeply excessive. It wants the future, but it wants the future framed in wrought iron, surrounded by irises, and lettered in a typeface that looks slightly drunk. It is anti-boring with missionary zeal. Even a doorway becomes a manifesto. Even a lamp becomes a mood. Even a spoon seems to be having a private symbolic crisis.

A Thames and Hudson volume is, of course, the proper vehicle for this sort of thing: substantial, illustrated, confident, and faintly convinced that civilisation can be improved by printing enough good plates on decent paper. This 1984 edition brings the movement into book form with the necessary weight and visual seriousness, while still allowing the reader the quiet pleasure of thinking, “Good heavens, they really did put flowers on everything.”

This copy is in Good condition, which means it has survived its own decorative century and a few decades beyond without turning into a wrought-iron balcony or sprouting a peacock. Crappy Old Books offers it for anyone who likes their modernism before it got stern, square and emotionally unavailable.

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