Art Noueau

Art Nouveau

It was an international decorative style that thrived roughly during the two decades that girded the turn of the century. Its identifying visual quality is an organic, plantlike line. It can either undulate with whiplash energy or flow with elegant grace as it defined, modulates, and decorated a given space. Art nouveau is a transitional style that evolved from the historicism that dominated design for most of the nineteenth century. The Victorians sought solutions through established historical approaches, while the modernists adopted a new international ornamental style, using elegant motifs aligned with nature and often distinguished by free and graceful lines. The organic linear movements frequently dominate the spatial area and other visual properties, such as colour and texture. Forms and lines were often invented rather than copied from nature or the past, there was a revitalization of the design process that pointed toward abstract art. 

Art Nouveau

Cheret and Grasset

Cheret was convinced that pictorial lithographic posters would replace the typographic letterpress posters that filled the urban environment, but he could not convince advertisers of this. He simplified his designs and increased the scale of his major figures and lettering. He worked directly on stone, whereby an artist's design was executed on the stones by craftsmen. During the 1880s he used a black line with the primary colors. This allowed subtle overprinting an astonishing range of colors and effects. Stipple and crosshatch, soft watercolor-like washes and bold calligraphic chunks of color, scratching, scraping, and splattering. Typical composition is a central figure in animated gesture, surrounded by swirls of color, secondary figures or props, and bold lettering that often echoes the shapes and gestures of the figure. 

Grasset's design ideas were rapidly assimilated after publication, including the decorative borders framing the contents, the integration of illustration and text into a unit, and the design of illustrations so that typography was printed over skies and other areas. His formal composition and muted color contrasted strongly with Cheret's informally composed, brightly colored work. His flowing line, subjective color, and ever-present floral motifs pointed toward French art nouveau.

Cheret's design

Grasset's design

English Art Nouveau

Aubrey Beardsley was the enfant terrible of art nouveau, with his striking pen line, vibrant black  and white work, and shockingly exotic imagery. He sythesized Japanese block prints and William Morris into a new idiom. He reproduced retained complete fidelity to the original art. The flat patterns and dynamic curves of art nouveau yielded to a more naturalistic tonal quality, and dotted contours softened the decisive line of his earlier work. He learned how to indicate figures and clothing with minimal lines and flat shapes with no tonal modulation. 

English Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau comes to America

Beardsley's style as a stepping-stone to fresh graphic technique and a visual unity of type and image that moved beyond imitation. He made innovative use of photo mechanical techniques to produce repeated, overlapping, and reversed images. Type became a design element to be squeezed into a narrow of letters became the same length and formed a rectangle. 

American Art Nouvea

Innovation in Belgium and the Netherlands

Privet Livemont produced nearly three dozen posters and was strongly inspired by Mucha's idealized women. His major innovation was a double contour separating the figure from the background. Were often outlined by a thick, white band, which increased the image's impact when posted on billboards. They brought about an important artistic revival in the Netherlands that provided the seeds for future movements such as De Stijl, art deco, and what is now known as the Wendingen style. The original discoveries were taken over by those who only saw their superficial appeal and continued t exploit them as fashionable decorative styles, easy to manipulate and applicable to almost any goal.

De Stijl

The German Jugendstil movement

Full double-page illustrations, horizontal illustrations across the top of a page, and decorative art nouveau designs brought rich variety to a format that was about half visual material and half text. Large-scale ornamentation ranged from Peter Behrens's abstract designs inspired by ancient Egyptian artifacts to stylized floral designs. Behrens became widely known for large, multicolor woodblock prints inspired by French art nouveau and Japanese prints. He experimented with ornaments and vignettes of abstract design through two other publications.

Jugendstil Movement

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].