ART NOUVEAU / Overview I / Lii

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GDT-101 / HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN / ART NOUVEAU / Overview i / lii

1 Japonisme 1

2 The Art Nouveau Style 10

3 Aubrey Beardsley 23

4 Toulouse-Lautrec 30

5 Alphonse Mucha 37

6 Conclusion 52

Japonisme

1872

Japonism (from the French Japonisme) is the influence of Japanese art, fashion and aesthetics on Western culture. The term is used particularly to refer to Japanese influence on European art.

1603–1867 Tokugawa period

This epoch was the final phase of traditional Japanese history.

• Shogunate rule • Feudal system • National isolation • Few external influences • No Western influence • Singular national style

1603–1867 Tokugawa period

Ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world” and defines an art movement of Japan’s Tokugawa period.

1800’S

Ukiyo-e

• Calligraphic linework • Abstraction • Simplification • Flat color • Silhouettes • Bold black shapes • Decorative patterns

1800’S Ukiyo-e

Landscape and interior environments were frequently presented as suggestive impressions rather than detailed depictions.

1800’S

Subjects often became emblematic symbols, reduced to graphic interpretations conveying their essence.

1868–1912 Meiji Restoration Restored Imperial rule in Japan under emperor Meiji Opened communication with Western societies and cultures • New government • Increased trade and communication • Economic expansion • Internal stability • End of the samurai • End of feudal society • Government military

1868–1912 Meiji Restoration

Western influence flooded and mixed with Japanese traditionalism.

• Flourishing cultural arts • East & West cultural collision • Reciprocal influences

HIROSHIGE AND VAN GOGH © KEVIN WOODLAND, 2015 · GDT-101 / HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN / ART NOUVEAU 10 / 52

The Art Nouveau Style

1890–1910

Borrowing graphic characteristics from Ukiyo-e, Art Nouveau was an international decorative style that saw its greatest achievements around the turn of the century.

1890–1910

The term Art Nouveau arose in a Paris gallery which opened in 1895 as the Salon de l’Art Nouveau.

In addition to Japanese art, “new art” by European and American artists was displayed and sold there.

1890–1910 Motifs

• Vine tendrils • Flowers (rose) • Flowers (lily) • Birds (peacocks) • Female form Art Nouveau’s identifying visual quality is an organic, plantlike line.

–MEGGS

Art Nouveau encompassed all the design arts

• architecture • dishes • furniture • spoons • product design • chairs • fashion • door frames • poster design • staircases • packaging • factories • advertising • subway entrances • teapots • houses

Early Modernism

• Victorians sought solutions through established historical approaches • “Modernists” adopted a new international ornamental style • Elegant motifs aligned with nature and often distinguished by free and graceful lines.

1868–1940 Peter Behrens

The German artist, architect, and designer Peter Behrens played a major role in charting a course for design in the first decade of the new century.

1908 Behren’s Apprentices

• Mies van der Rohe • Hannes Meyer • Walter Gropius

1910–1914 Henry van de Velde

• Belgian • Practiced in the Art Nouveau style • Architect, industrial designer, and graphic designer • Director, Weimar Arts and Crafts School

1872–1898 Aubrey Beardsley

A strange cult figure, he was intensely prolific for five years before dying of tuberculosis at age twenty-six.

1892-1896

Aubrey Beardsley was the enfant terrible of art nouveau, with his striking pen line, vibrant black-and- white work, and shockingly exotic imagery.

– MEGGS

1892-1896

“The black spot” was the name given to compositions based on a dominant black form.

1892-1896

“The black spot” was the name given to compositions based on a dominant black form.

1892-1896

“The black spot” was the name given to compositions based on a dominant black form.

1898 Aubrey Beardsley Tragically, during the last two years of his life, Beardsley was an invalid.

Toulouse-Lautrec

1864–1901

Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec had turned obsessively to drawing and painting after breaking both hips in an accident at age thirteen.

Further growth of his legs was stunted, leaving him crippled.

He became a master draftsman in the academic tradition after moving to Paris two years later.

Japanese art, impressionism, and Degas’s design and contour were big influences on him.

He haunted Paris cabarets and bordellos, watching, drawing, and developing a journalistic, illustrative style that captured the night life of la belle époque (the beautiful era), a term used to describe glittering late- nineteenth-century Paris.

Primarily a printmaker, draftsman, and painter, he produced only thirty-one posters, the commissions for which were negotiated in the cabarets in the evenings.

Drawing directly on the lithographic stone, he often worked from memory with no sketches and used an old toothbrush that he always carried to achieve tonal effects through a splatter technique.

Alphonse Mucha

1860–1939

Mucha’s distint illustrative approach involving beautiful young women surrounded by lush flowers set him apart as the preeminent practitioner of the Art Nouveau style.

1894 On Christmas Eve, Mucha was at the Lemerciers’ printing company, dutifully correcting proofs for a friend who had taken a holiday. Suddenly the printing firm’s manager burst into the room, upset because the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt was demanding a new poster for the play Gismonda by New Year’s Day.

– MEGGS

1894

• Mucha was the only artist available and receives the commission. • He used the basic pose from Grasset’s earlier poster for Bernhardt in Joan of Arc as his basis.

1894

• Elongated Grasset’s format • Added Byzantine-inspired mosaics as background motifs • Produced a poster totally distinct from any of his prior work

1894 Sarah Bernhardt, who had not been pleased with Grasset’s Joan of Arc poster or many other posters for her performances, felt that Mucha’s Gismonda poster expressed her so well graphically that she signed him to a six-year contract for sets, costumes, jewelry, and nine more posters.

– MEGGS

Mucha’s women project an archetypal sense of unreality.

– MEGGS

Exotic and sensuous while retaining an aura of innocence, they express no specific age, nationality, or historical period. His stylized hair patterns became a hallmark of the era.

1917

Mucha’s Slav Epic, a series of twenty large murals, depicted the history of his people.

After Czechoslovakia became an independent nation, Mucha’s time and work were centered there.

Conclusion

Although Mucha resisted the label of Art Nouveau, maintaining that art is eternal and could never be “new.”

–MEGGS