Designing Change

...The city enjoyed an unparalleled era of consumerism for the middle classes, who were rich but restless under an oppressive and decaying empire...

...If, arriving at the Vienna room, one is not at all surprised to find Klimt an icon of art nouveau, that is because of the brilliant planning that went into this exhibit...

...Recognizing this fusion, the organizers of Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 have wisely confined themselves to artifacts constructed during the quarter century before World War I. Showing in Washington from October 8 to January 28, the exhibition also wisely imitates the movement's dictum that there are "no castes among the artisans of art...

...So, too, the exponents of art nouveau at the end of the century often claimed "that there are no castes among the artisans of art, that there are no mean and plebeian arts...

...A little room claiming symbolism as a precursor to art nouveau is unconvincing, but the rooms on the cult of nature swell with examples—mostly by the French...

...The Paris room is predictably various and lush, dominated by an entrance to the Paris subway, wonderful posters, jewelry, and magnificent furniture...

...Electric lamps formed of naked bronze maidens in a swirl of bronze scarves...

...The catalogue for Art Nouveau, 18901914 is a model of what such a book should be...

...After a room of Celtic and Viking revival (which inspired Georg Jensen and Louis Sullivan), the next few rooms show sources for art nouveau, beginning with eighteenth-century French rococo, where we see the first of the exhibit's running leitmotif of enchanting, weird clocks—this one a wall clock by Antonio Gaudi...

...You can see the low end in the cheap commercial imitations that still stock the flea markets and junk stores of America...

...But Islamic influence seems otherwise to have made for preposterously bad art nouveau...

...Of course, to get there, we had to suffer through innumerable bronze nudes doing the scarf dance and consult a large number of strange clocks...

...Oak chairs with undulating arms and legs...

...The New York display contains another weird clock, made of black-stained oak with green-glass inserts and a clock face that leers at the viewer while a disk behind the hands declares it belongs to the automobile club of Clarence, New York...

...But there is, in fact, more to this rich and satisfying exhibition than a slurry of such generalities...

...Late nineteenth-century Brussels saw great art nouveau buildings erected and furnished by Victor Horta and Josef Hoffmann (recreated by magnificent photographs...

...A loose school of architectural and interior design extending from the facades of houses to the shapes of dessert forks, art nouveau was a movement that satisfied the taste of a newly prosperous and cosmopolitan middle class for elegant domestic stuff...

...A corsage ornament in which gold, silver, and tourmaline decorate enameled molds of two head-bashing blister beetles seems not "organic" so much as sybaritic...

...Tobacco jars in the shape of misshapen barn owls...

...The legs of the desk end in little gilt booties about to dance across the room, like the dish that ran away with the spoon...

...In the Paris room is Toulouse-Lautrec's Divan Japonais where, although fully in naturalist "real space," the silhouette, "flat-patterning," and elongated figures all show the influence of Japanese wood blocks...

...For such an ambitious undertaking, Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 seems small...

...On celluloid, she performs a scarf dance so sappy but evidently so impressive to her contemporaries that she seems to have single-handedly inspired the modern treasure trove of bronze lamps of naked women swirling scarves as the defining artifact of the middle-brow "antique" store...

...And an exquisite Lalique gold, enamel, and ivory pendant of an anemone "in which the uprooted flower has drooped right over, and only one petal, drained of color, remains clinging to the flower head" is a poignant memento mori, to be sure, but disturbing when rendered in such expensive materials...

...Islam's influence on art nouveau thus produced furniture that looked as if a book in Arabic had been cut up and made into furniture, seen particularly in the unpleasantly weird furniture by Carlo Bugatti in the Turin room...

...and even the carpet casts a malevolent eye at you as you traverse it...

...But Whistler, let alone Beardsley and Wilde, was too much for English arbiters of taste...

...This is one of the things that makes it difficult to pin down the specific designs and period that constitute art nouveau...

...The anteroom holds a corsage ornament (to be placed on the bodice of a dress) some nine inches wide and ten inches long from Rene Lalique, so insidiously beguiling that it has been much reproduced in advertisements for the show...

...At the center of the Chicago room is installed a huge dining table, chairs, and lamps in prairie style made for the Robie house by Frank Lloyd Wright...

...Loie Fuller has a lot to answer for...

...This may be because art nou-veau was devoted to working with the organic forms in nature—while Islam eschews depiction of "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth...

...Clocks designed more to accost you than to give you the time...

...The room devoted to Japanese and Chinese influences is especially riveting, so well organized that one can directly compare the folk or East Asian originals with the artifacts they inspired...

...Notable is Henry van de Velde's handsome bronze-plated candelabrum, the arms of which twist and then turn firmly into sconces for candles...

...Japanese design influenced not only art nouveau but almost all (anti-establishment) painters of the late nineteenth century...

...War I, this style of design swept across Europe and America—taking its title from an avant-garde shop in Paris that its owner, Siegfried Bing, named HArt Nouveau: The New Art...

...What they were typically aiming at was the creation of a style that would, in some sense, skip over the commercialized products of the middle class by uniting (or rather, reuniting, as they would insist) arts with crafts: the highest aesthetic seriousness of modern artists with the craftsmanship of the old-fashioned, lower-class artisans...

...Here also is an "orchidized desk" made of carved and inlaid mahogany, gilt bronze, and glass—the last in the form of orchid-shaped glass lamps that grow out of the back of the desk...

...There are also a couple of creepy pieces by Rupert Carabin in which a woman's bottom forms the sadistic seat of a chair and two women submissively struggle to hold up a table, "suggesting," we are unfortunately assured by the catalogue, "that the boundaries between the arts had been reduced...

...Edited by Paul Greenhalgh and produced by the Victoria and Albert Museum, it runs to 464 pages, with twenty-nine wide-ranging articles and hundreds of illustrations, most of them in color...

...It comprised— to quote the superb catalogue of the exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery's East Wing in Washington, D.C.—scenes in which "snakes twisted into ingenious knots for stair balusters threaten you as you ascend...

...Nonetheless, from 1890 until its fading as a distinct school during World Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...

...The dragonfly was a favorite motif of art nouveau designers, and here the viewer will see not only a table supported by dragonflies but also a matching chair...

...Arresting in the first few rooms is a suite of furniture from Siegfried Bing, made of gilded beechwood and sitting on a silk carpet against a silk-on-satin wall covering (it would be infra dig to call it wallpaper), all rendered in pale grays, golds, and greens...

...An upper-level exhibit shows art nouveau in its urban centers: Paris, Brussels, Glasgow, Vienna, Munich, Turin, New York, and Chicago...

...Such cutting-edge design may seem implausible for a city known today for beer and bureaucracy, but at the end of the nineteenth century, Brussels was at the heart of the Belgian empire, basking in wealth unknown since the Spanish rule of the Low Countries had collapsed in the seventeenth century...

...Whistler and Toulouse-Lautrec are particularly well represented in the exhibition...

...Fortunately, the following rooms are charming (although the boxy exhibition space of the East Wing is ill designed to show this kind of material...

...Going far beyond the exhibit itself, the catalogue is beautifully written, beautifully illustrated, and beautifully indexed...

...When Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London earlier this year, the British reviewers tended to see in the exhibition only the hackneyed, fin-de-siecle themes attributed to its late Victorian and Edwardian age: "degeneracy, progress, nature, eroticism, mysticism, and consumerism...

...Most familiar are William Morris's patterns, Whistler's Variations in Violet and Green, and Aubrey Beardsley's delicately suggestive illustrations...

...From this perspective, art nouveau does not represent so much fin-de-siecle, Oscar-Wildean decadence as a cru-cial—perhaps the decisive—step in a decades-long attempt to rid western culture of the public grandiose and monumental...

...In such works lies, perhaps, grounds for the charge of decadence frequently leveled against art nouveau...

...It was left to France and Belgium to bring art nou-veau to its apotheosis...

...But even at its most original, the style represented what early critics called "chaos in design...

...Unfortunately, the anteroom of the exhibition, open to passers-by and attempting to set the tone for the exhibition, contains such creations as an overwrought Italian chimney piece, heavily carved with poppies, sunflowers, and two kneeling naked women who pop out in high relief to smell the posies...

...By embracing the whole of visual culture— from subway entrances, to table settings, to advertising posters, to public buildings—it leveled the hierarchies of art and expanded its range: Art nouveau made both Mickey Mouse and the Chrysler Building imaginable...

...There is, in the United States, for example, a continuous aim in modern design that fuses the arts-and-crafts movement (Gustav Stickley), the art nouveau of the Chicago school (Louis Sullivan), the prairie style (Frank Lloyd Wright), the New York school (Tiffany & Co...

...Jewelry is scattered throughout the exhibition...

...Anthropomorphized beds, bureaus, and chairs...

...Islamic influences and their art nou-veau consequences give us the flasks that one would have thought absolutely unique to Tiffany's individual style...

...the door knocker becomes a grinning satyr...

...Made of gold, enamel, chryso-prase, moonstones, and diamonds, this "dragonfly woman" has wings as long as her body, a blue-green enameled face and breasts, and a thorax so long— almost a foot—and so highly decorated that it can only be called phallic...

...Where the French used art nouveau to frame subway entrances and to design furniture, the Scots turned a more restrained version into a signature architecture for Glasgow (the reconstruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's ladies' tea room is not to be missed), and the Viennese used it to produce flamboyant decoration—especially by the painter Gustav Klimt...

...Only the New York room is disappointing, being devoted largely to Tiffany's work (the examples of his jewelry and lamps here are beautiful, but slight...

...Ceramic snakes entwining puce-colored vases...

...Earlier in the nineteenth century, arts-and-crafts designers such as William Morris and the pre-Raphaelite painters in Eng-land—indeed, designers all over the western world—had turned to folk themes, nature, and hand crafting...

...But the movement was, in its way, a curiously middle-class (and commercialized) revolt against the commercialized middle class—and in it, the enlightened middle class found at last its own style of design with which to oppose the aristocratic styles it had inherited from the upper classes...

...There is a dislocation—a sort of bohemian-bourgeois quality—projected from such jewelry as a Tiffany hair ornament in platinum, enamel, opals, and garnets of a pair of blown dandelion heads hovered over by dragonflies...

...Of all influences, Japanese art was particularly powerful, because its flattened planes and distorted perspectives gave to the new art just the look of the "other" that it especially valued, struggling as it was to escape the conventional art of the academy and the public building based on a (highly corrupted) classical model...

...Arrayed on the walls are artifacts from Louis Sullivan's work for the Chicago Stock Exchange, transforming Celtic interlacing into the expansive spirit of Chicago and the Midwest—just as George Elmslie does with a teller's wicket, the interlacing of which sprouts luxurious verdure, transforming the bank employee into a spirit of the woods...

...In the course of inspecting the rooms, one has received an intense course in the style...

...The exhibit ends with an American glow...

...By 1900, art nouveau was recognized as the style that had made attacking stuffy hierarchies in the arts its main motivation, taking its inspiration from nature rather than from the buildings of men, whether classical or gothic...

...Patterns, furniture, utensils, jewelry, and painting are related to native traditions...

...Presented side by side, without segregation, are paintings and posters, sculptures and ceramics, glass and textiles, furniture and jewelry, and architecture...

...Framing the anteroom are three of the bronze winged-vampire female frames on which Rene Lalique used to hang his jewelry in his Paris shop—flanked by vitrines showing off an awful table setting of fifteen white Sevres figurines of women doing a scarf dance...

...Averting one's eyes from this kitsch, alas, only results in the final kiss of kitsch at the dead center of the anteroom's back wall: an icky-pooh leaded-glass screen of grapes and gourds (they might be attenuated pears) by Louis Comfort Tiffany...

...In the room devoted to English arts-and-crafts and aesthetic movements are some enchanting knickknacks made for Liberty & Co.—the London shop on Regent Street, which advocated the new art—especially another charmingly weird clock, in silver and lapis, by Archibald Knox...

...This was the era in which the "new art" of the movie, the electric light, and the telephone had just arrived, and the exhibition even includes a short cinematic clip of the American dancer Loie Fuller, who took France by storm at the Paris World's Fair in 1900...

...Handles on teapots and drawers that make grasping them an act of daring...

...art deco (the Chrysler building), and the International Style of many New York skyscrap-ers—though each of these saw itself as a reaction against its predecessors...

...After seeing this exhibition and reading the catalogue, one realizes that art nouveau, too often dismissed as decadent, lightweight, and self-indulgent, was the launching pad for modernism in art, architecture, and decoration...