Spanish Architecture: Art Nouveau

You may remember the post about art nouveau. The style began in France but it spread to other places, including Spain. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Art Nouveau buildings were created in Spain.

Like the buildings in France, Spanish Art Nouveau buildings included curving lines and decorations, and mosaics and stained glass. The shapes imitated nature so they were not usually symmetrical.
One example is the Parque Guell (sounds like: par-kay gwel) by Antonio Gaudi (shown above). Below is a second example, also by Gaudi. It is the Casa Batllo.
They remind me of cartoon castles or bakery cakes. Quite different from the Mudejar style buildings and the Churrigueresque architecture.

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Create Your Own Art Nouveau Doll House

I won’t give you step by step instructions on how to make your own Art Nouveau doll house, but I will give you guidelines.

First, glue shoe boxes together to form rooms. You can make your doll house many stories tall or one long floor. Use extra cardboard to make a roof at the top. Let the glue dry. When you look at the room I made, you’ll notice that I used the box top to lengthen the floor. You can do this to your rooms as well. Just make sure to glue everything together.
Go look at the furniture pictures in my post on Henry van de Velde. Then, do a google image search for “Art Nouveau furniture.” This should provide all the inspiration you need. To make my chair and lamp, I used pipe cleaners. Pipe cleaners are good materials for this because much of the Art Nouveau furniture has twisty, curvy lines that are easy to make with pipe cleaners. I made my desk out of card board, construction paper, and pipe cleaners. The lamp shade is little piece of tissue paper that I decorated with crayon. It’s supposed to look kind of like a Tiffany lamp.
You can spend as much time as you want on your doll house. Maybe design and create one room a day for a week. Don’t forget to make a kitchen, living room, dining room, and a few bedrooms. Also, staircases are a great way to make the room itself look “Art Nouveau.” If you really want to get creative, try wallpaper the insides of your rooms with decorative paper or wrapping paper. You could even paint the “walls” if you make sure to do it well in advance of gluing your boxes together and arranging your furniture.

Have fun with this! I would love to hear from anyone who tries this project.

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Art Nouveau: Henry van de Velde

Yesterday I posted about Art Nouveau in Paris and I mentioned Henry van de Velde who designed furniture for Siegfried Bing’s art gallery. Van de Velde was not from France but rather Belgium. It is not surprising that Bing would choose a foreign artist to design for his art gallery; he was an importer/exporter of art, after all.
Van de Velde was born in 1863. He studied painting from 1881 to 1884 and was influenced by such artists as Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a painting by van de Velde and the one shown below was all I could dig up on google. In 1892 he stopped painting altogether, turning his attention, instead, to interior design.
He designed and built his own house and several more prominent buildings, including the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo. You can see pictures of many of these buildings by clicking here.

What is especially important about van de Velde (as far as Art Nouveau) is that he was the first designer to use curved lines in an abstract style. This style is basically the definition of Art Nouveau.
Van de Velde did not design in the Art Nouveau style for his whole life. Art Nouveau went out of fashion around 1910 and he lived for another 42 years. As he evolved, he taught art to others, thus spreading his vision to a new generation of artists.
The furniture shown throughout this post was designed by van de Velde. Notice the curving lines and the elements drawn from nature.

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Siegfried Bing and Art Nouveau in Paris

Art Nouveau, which I posted about all last week, began in Paris thanks to art dealer, Siegfried Bing. He was born in 1838 in Germany but moved to France in 1854 with his family. When his brother died, Siegfried inherited the family business which he developed into a hugely successful import-export business.

By importing Japanese art into France and exporting French artworks to Japan, Bing spread different artistic styles. This allowed artists to be influenced by works that they wouldn’t otherwise have come into contact with. This is how Art Nouveau began.

In 1895 he opened a gallery, the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, where he showed works by Art Nouveau artists, though they weren’t yet called that. The building was a sight to behold. The interior included furniture designed by Henry van de Velde and stained-glass windows by Tiffany.

An important development that allowed architects to venture into Art Nouveau was the creation of new building materials, such as steel, iron, and concrete. By using these materials, architects could build delicate, intricate facades rather than just building walls to protect the insides of their buildings. This helped the development of architectural Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau was an artistic style that could be applied to all aspects of life. You could live in an Art Nouveau house with Art Nouveau furniture, decorated with Art Nouveau paintings and sculpture. When in Paris, if you keep your eyes open, you will see buildings in the Art Nouveau style. If you need some direction, visit Peter Olsen’s post on ceramic buildings in Paris. Even if you aren’t planning a trip to Paris, check out the amazing photos he has posted.

Also on Peter’s blog is an excellent post on Hector Guimard and his famous Paris Metro entrances. In my first post on Art Nouveau, I included a poor photo of one of these entrances that I took when I went to Paris. Peter has many beautiful images on his site that you should rush to look at, lest you believe that my photo does justice to Guimard’s work.

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Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born in Austria to a poor, immigrant gold engraver. Klimt’s brother became a gold engraver like his father and Klimt began his career paintings murals and ceilings in buildings. His decorations and ornamentations grew in popularity and he remained in steady work. He would continue to develop his style of ornamentation throughout his life and it would become increasingly organic looking, in the Art Nouveau style. When Klimt was 30 both his father and his brother died and he had to provide for their families as well as for himself.

As Klimt dealt with the loss of his father and brother, his personal style of painting began to change. No longer did he want to paint straight-forward, historical pictures. He wanted to symbolically explore themes of psychology and he wanted to paint more pictures of women. He was very interested in the human body, particularly the female body. Five years after the deaths, in 1897, Klimt joined the emerging Vienna Secessionists and even acted as president for a time.

During his years with the Vienna Secessionists, Klimt did paint many images of women. He also painted landscapes like the one shown below, Houses on Unteracht on Attersee Lake. In the 1890s he began taking yearly vacations to the Austrian lake, Attersee, with a female of his acquaintance and her family. It was this area that inspired his landscapes.
Beginning in 1894, Klimt’s work grew increasingly controversial. He took a few commissions for public works and did not produce what the patron or public felt was appropriate to be displayed. For example, three of these works showed Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence as nude women. After this, Klimt stopped taking public commissions.
In 1908 Klimt left the Vienna Secession movement and his art moved into a new phase. It was marked by widespread use of gold leaf. These are the paintings most people are familiar with, including The Kiss, shown above. As was always the case, Klimt worked slowly and carefully on each painting. This began even more important in this late phase because he had to apply tiny bits of gold leaf to his paintings.
One final interesting fact about Klimt is that his Adele Bloch-Bauer I (shown above) sold in 2006 at auction for more money than any other painting ever had before: $135 million!

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The Vienna Secession

Yesterday you read about Art Nouveau and the characteristics of art done in this style. Perhaps it would make more sense to post on the movement in Paris where artists most closely adhered to the definition of the style I gave yesterday but my interest has wandered to the Vienna Secession. This was basically the Art Nouveau movement as it happened in Austria.

In 1897 a group of artists in Vienna, Austria had had enough of mainstream art. They were tired of looking at and painting realistic scenes in the same style that had been used throughout history. They wanted something fresh. They wanted to use symbols in their art. They wanted to be able to paint idealized images in bright colors. So this group of artists separated from the Association of Austrian Artists and began their own society, called the Vienna Secession.

I told you yesterday that the Art Nouveau style was characterized by curvy, organic lines and that the art was often inspired by natural objects like Emile Galle’s Hand Surrounded by Algae and Shells. Because the members of the Vienna Secession were reacting against the more traditional artists of their area, they felt it was more important to have artistic freedom than to all create art in the same style. Their motto was, “To the Age its Art, to Art its Freedom.” The phrase was carved into their building and they felt free to create art as they pleased.

Below are paintings by several prominent members of the Vienna Secession. Notice the differences in styles between Richard Gerstl’s Self Portrait Laughing, Gustav Klimt’s The Tree of Life, and Oskar Kokoschka’s Bride of the Wind.

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Introduction to Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau was a popular art movement from around 1880 to 1915 which developed differently in many places around the world. For this reason, it would be complicated to explain the history of the movement in just one blog post. Today, you’ll get just an introduction to what makes Art Nouveau Art Nouveau.

The Art Nouveau style was applied not only to painting and sculpture but also to architecture, furniture, jewelry, fabrics, and all types of materials used for interior and exterior design. You can even find silverware done in the Art Nouveau style. One of the most famous Art Nouveau designs is the metro entrance created by Hector Guimard that can be seen all over Paris. The image shown below isn’t great but you can see that the post seem to grow like the stems of flowers and spread out into careful placed stalks. The design has even been copied and used elsewhere, including in places in Chicago.

The most distinguishing aspect is the overall look of an Art Nouveau object. Usually it consists of curvy lines with smooth surfaces. The object will look as if it has grown from nature. Often, the artist will use natural objects for inspiration such as seashells, flames, trees, flowers, and animals.

Furthermore, Art Nouveau was extremely closely linked to Symbolism, a movement in which artists tried to show truth using unrealistic or fantastical objects. This could include religious icons or mythical creatures.
The glass sculpture shown above is a hand which rises out of a sea and is covered with seashells and algae. In fact it’s called Hand, Surrounded by Algae and Shells by Emile Galle. As was often the case with Art Nouveau pieces, this sculpture has symbolic meaning. The hand represents mankind which is in harmony with nature. This is apparent by the way the waves and algae and shells and hand are all made of complimentary materials and all run together smoothly. The hand, however, is in danger of being overtaken by the sea, the power of nature, just as people as a whole are in endangered by the power of nature. While we are usually in control, there is always the possibility that a hurricane or tidal wave or storm will take away that control.

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