The lasting fun of art nouveau

It was hard to convey the joy of the joy I felt one day in Berlin (it was a grey grid of a city), Upon opened an unsuspecting door without a normal door handle but an iron of Belgian power. Its smooth curves fit gracefully into my hands, but its form is so special and stupid. Three years later, I still see pictures of it on my phone.

The gate, if you want to track and feel the same little magic, right outside the Bruhan Museum, it collects new magicians of the Art Nouveau – and the branches of Jugendstil, the German (and, I think, more beautiful) are the movement that is known for its French name. Broadly speaking, the Germans tend to be abstract and stylized, while the French prefer fax, with carved tendrils climbing buildings looking completely realistic except carved by stone. It was at this Bruhan Gate that I realized that I might be wrong, and I have long found this to be a sick sweetness, especially because of its tendency to incorporate women, natural and family objects into those female hybrids that make the feminist wake-up call in my mind.

I’m not the first skeptic. In fact, I quickly felt verified when I learned that my anxiety echoed the famous arguments between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and they soon became angels and devils on my shoulders. Benjamin is critical of nouveau’s criticism, and Adorno’s feelings are best described as ambivalent.

Like the earlier Impressionist movement, Nouveau was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which was visible on the horizon – literally, in the form of trains, ships and smoke. At that time, Baroque Art, with exquisite ornaments and decadent dramas, rediscovered moments in the French art world. It was the bet of Art Nouveau: in the late 19th century, technology took over, and everyday life became more natural than ever before. Nouveau’s Art Nouveau index seems to say: Let’s bring nature indoors so we don’t forget it exists and destroy everything. The movement also bets that as nature becomes a luxury to some extent, crowds flock to cities and crowded apartment buildings, people may create an organic world in an immutable form for the masses and give them to all. Looking at all the destruction we have done over a year and a half, it’s easy to hope we have more reminders to appreciate the beauty we are slowly destroying.

That’s why Adorno defended Nouveau. He believes that the movement expresses a truly, utopian and valuable desire to reconcile art, nature and technology. He just doesn’t think it’s so successful. exist Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno clarified that he prefers the form of modernism rather than just being smoother than just being compared to social contradictions. For Benjamin, it was even worse: Art Nouveau lies, just as evidence of the “sunity of the generation facing technological advances.” It dressed up as a large number of door handles, but hardly changed its means of production or broke the door, but provided a sense of connection with nature, which was not real.

I doubt production More tree-shaded door handles will hardly avoid climate disasters. But I admire their betrayal of human desires, and their desires belong to the ecosystem. Today, Nouveau is probably one of the most famous and popular art movements of all time. It contributes to its popularity, but due to its critic’s style is both pleasing and beautiful.

Still, hoping to calm the Germans who argued in my mind, I was happy to discover that the new stars have micro-moments. Seen in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is one of the most iconic Art Nouveau designs, the entrance to the green wrought iron Paris Metro, a sign with structure and logo says Metropolis. Designed by Frenchman Hector Guimard in Finde Siècle,,,,, Its characteristic is that two curved flowers grow long and flourish, and the light appears in the buds’ location. The second subway system ever made, the idea of the Guimard entrance is to mitigate new shocks by borrowing forms from nature.

The pond, which recently opened in Prague, is a brand new museum dedicated to Alphonse Mucha, who was born in 1860 in what is now Czech, but he has spent many careers in France. The museum is run by the Mucha Foundation and is complemented by the touring exhibition “The Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line,” which recently arrived at the Museum of New Mexico Art in Santa Fe from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. I visited the Mucha Museum and toured, and initially, I shrunk the idea that Mucha was “timeless” – his portrayal of sensuality, nymph women, all eyes, lips like mouth, and impossible long hair would certainly feel their time. The exhibition opened a picture of Mucha together with his studio companion Paul Gauguin and Gauguin’s teenage Mistress, which didn’t help.

Still, I forced myself to be with Mucha, partly because he was easily the most famous Art Nouveau artist and I was curious about what made him so widely resonate. I stayed, too, because some paradoxically, I also think some of the fires of Art Nouveau are misogynistic in its floral, family, and cunning aspects. (Feminist critic Rosalind Galt accepted such criticism in her 2011 book Beautiful). Art Nouveau is pursuing a flat hierarchy between high-end art and interior design at Gesamtkunstwerk, and most of the artwork it produces is beautiful, which is a pastel palette, which is why I suspect there is little to do with serious writing today.

With Mucha, I learned something – like they did when they opened their minds. For example, I learned that some women seem to like Mucha very much in his day because who doesn’t like being seen by such beautiful people? The artist’s first breakthrough came in 1894, when he made posters for star Sarah Bernhardt. She loved it so much that the show turned into a six-year contract: He made her theater posters, stages, costumes and jewelry. The first poster was inspired by her elegant, smooth movements on the stage and informing her typical rotating Q-shaped work. Mucha’s ripples effect has a large radius. In the exhibition, people discover everything from comic artists to psychedelic posters, obviously recreating their own style. It’s not difficult to see why: his drawings are completely graphic (making to be copied), but incredibly complex. The man can do better than most people.

Things about styles That is worth reflecting greater belief. For Mucha, people believe that art should be suitable for everyone, so the quality of graphics, repeatable prints and cute lines. The artist grew up in a family of grape-growing farmers in Bohemia and lived in a prison where his father was hired. Before moving to Vienna, then Paris, his father had already found a job as a stenographer, and his great-grandson, Marcus Mucha, now executive director of the Mucha Foundation, told me that he did not last long: He had been fired for painting. Soon he went to the art school and eventually joined the high-end Parisian ranks, but there he still firmly believed that his art was suitable for everyone. When he painted more comprehensively at the end of his life, rather than printings made throughout the city, he did this to make Slavic epic (1910-28), a huge series of 20 paintings depicting various Slavic customs and then threatened by imperialist acquisitions. He paid tribute to the Slavic people in Prague. Currently, Thomas Heatherwick is designing a building in the city and will soon be enjoying it forever.

However, this style betrays the idea and was introduced in the 19th century by one of the founders of Aois Riegl, a discipline of art history, which would inform the Viennese version of Nouveau. Riegl is called concept KunstwollenOr artistic will. In Art Nouveau, it is easy to see that ethics and aesthetics are the same ethics and aesthetics, and it is for this reason that he called the movement “a pioneer of modern art.”

I think the most beautiful belief from this era and spirit comes from William Morris. The British participated in the art and craft movement in Britain earlier, paving the way for the Art Nouveau ideal. Morris is a socialist designer and writer known for his lush plant wallpapers – the one he dreams of might even have a wall. Morris believes beauty is for everyone because he thinks art can remake the world – which can show us a better way forward, while also providing the nutrition and desire we need to achieve revolution. As imagined in his 1890 novel, in his socialist utopia News everywherethe craftsmen are very happy to do things, not for profit, but for joy. Then, this joy emanates outwards – objects are present every day, and then into a wider world. He is a vision of a world-building full of hope, but Morris never solves the central issue that plagued his mission: his wallpapers are still expensive, far beyond the reach of the people he most wanted to share with them. It would be another point for Benjamin to make those who could afford them would need a revolution than art alone could trigger.

However, the fun of art nouveau sometimes exudes great effects outward. Mucha was one of the first people to come when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. As Germanic hegemony attempted to erase them, most of his work was dedicated to celebrating Slavic traditions, and he publicly advocated Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Nazis finally released him, but he died of pneumonia shortly thereafter. It is unlikely that a Gestapo officer secretly preserved Mucha’s works after his house was looted, hiding them in his office simply because he loved them. After the career ended, he returned them, and now, they have their own museum.