When <i> Art Nouveau</i> Burst Upon the World . . . : The Germans called it <i> Jugendstil--</i> creating works in an energetic process

A rt Nouveau. The term is French and so is its archetypal style. Think Art Nouveau and you probably get an image of the vine-like lines of Lalique glassware or Hector Grimard’s Paris Metro stations. But in fact this late 19th-Century movement was vigorously international.

Belgians Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde shaped the original style of utilitarian art in Brussels, and their ideas quickly spread throughout an international community of artists eager to invent a new design vocabulary for the fast-approaching 20th Century. The English welcomed the continental import and tailored it to suit their indigenous Arts and Crafts movement, stressing truth to materials and a messianic belief in the superiority of hand work over machine-made products.

The Austrians called their version of the style Secessionstil (after an exhibition hall) and put a geometric edge on it. The Italian Stile Liberty (named for a London store that sold Art Nouveau designs) yielded little more than floral decorations, but Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi took off and ran with Art Nouveau in fanciful buildings that gave Barcelona its adventurous character.

In Germany, Art Nouveau was called Jugendstil (the style of youth) and it was philosophically attuned to the notion of growth as an energetic process. Artists typically visualized the concept in roots and tuberous forms.

As we see in “Art Nouveau in Munich: Masters of Jugendstil, “ at the County Museum of Art (through Feb. 19), German artists who tapped into the international movement had their sensibilities firmly planted in the motherland. Veering sharply away from the wispy, ethereal French Art Nouveau, they created a style that corresponds to the German national stereotype: chunky, substantial and practical. Though Jugendstil encompasses two simultaneous movements--one fluidly expressive and decorative, the other squared off and functional--the style in general has a Teutonic rigidity.

A facile definition? Not if you consider the fact that Jugendstil was touted with nationalistic fervor at turn-of-the-century trade fairs and that artists living in Munich--euphemistically called “the Athens of the Isar”--eagerly put a personal and national stamp on Jugendstil.

According to the exhibition catalogue, Art Nouveau burst upon Munich in the 1890s and “the first decisive examples” produced by German artists appeared in 1896. A magazine called Jugend, founded the same year, gave the new style its German name.

“Art Nouveau in Munich,” organized by Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger for the Stadtmuseum in Munich and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the first American survey of Jugendstil. The show consists of 148 examples of furniture, textiles, ceramics, metalwork, graphics and drawings on loan from the Stadtmuseum and other collections. Objects range from Gertraud von Schnellenbuhel’s elegant 24-light candelabra, created as an astonishing mass of curving lines, to production-line textiles and simple wicker furniture.

Strolling through the show, we see that Art Nouveau’s quintessential “whiplash” lines are abundant--in the river snaking through Otto Eckmann’s “Three Swans on Dark Water” tapestry and in the tendrils of hair symbolically entwining lovers in Peter Behrens’ woodcut, “The Kiss,” for example)--but these linear motifs are generally decorative trimmings and not sinewy skeletons. With a few notable exceptions, this functional German art appears to be created for people who sit down heavily, eat and drink heartily and adopt a decorative style as a moral imperative.

If a cupboard sprouts wings, if a bookcase has a topknot resembling driftwood and if a metal gate looks like a praying mantis, such flourishes do not detract from utility. Throughout the show we find peculiar-shaped furniture that could hold large supplies of linen, china, books and stationery. Even smaller items are aggressively functional. Here’s a silver fork that can double as a knife and another that works like a spoon. A pair of egg cups is tilted at an angle to expose the maximum area for cutting. The base of a knobby-kneed serving table is a wine cooler.

Harmonious room-like settings reveal that these individual products are part of an expansive social vision. The artists developed “the notion of a total environment,” said Martha Lynn, a decorative arts curator at LACMA. “Its purity could elevate your soul and make you a good person. If you drank from the right glassware, you could improve yourself.”

Lynn admits that the concept is a hoot but notes that our ideas haven’t changed all that much. We have only to flip through magazines catering to the upscale crowd to see what she means.

The bizarre appearance of Jugendstil art tends to divert attention from its more interesting social context. Faced with a terrified snake (in Carl Strathmann’s design for a plate), a batch of devils’ heads (in Thomas Theodor Heine’s cabaret poster) or an inkwell that resembles a Darth Vader helmet (by Wilhelm von Debschitz), who can get beyond the weirdly threatening quality of this art?

But it’s not the outrageous appearance that’s most important; it’s the way the work reflects the spirit of its time and foreshadows modernism, a seemingly antithetical movement.

Known as a purely decorative style--one of those whipped-cream periods when art was all fluff and no substance-- Art Nouveau amounts to more than the bibelots that now stock antique shops. It represents a move away from art based in history and a surge to the future. One way to do that was to create a more populist art. And the way to that was to turn it out on machines.

While the English revered hand-crafted art to an extreme, masters of Jugendstil were attuned to efficiency. They were willing to sacrifice finish and craftsmanship to mass production. This is more revolutionary than it sounds because many artists who joined the Jugendstil movement were formerly painters and sculptors, not trained in the crafts.

“The artists were interested in producing products for the masses that they could afford to buy, but I don’t think they were designing for what we call the underclass or even for people who shop at K mart,” said Lynn. “They were thinking more of the people who shop at Macy’s or Bullock’s, people who were informed about design.”

These ideas fed directly into the Deutsche Werkbund (founded in Munich in 1907) and into the utopian philosophies of the early 20th-Century’s best-known multidisciplinary movements: the Bauhaus in Germany, de Stijl in the Netherlands and the Russian Avant-Garde.

It may seem quaint to imagine that art could play an active part in creating a better world and improving people’s lives. After the death of Jugendstil, Germany was to witness an infinitely worse world--one that closed the Bauhaus and turned the lights out on human decency--but it took several decades for fashionable artists to declare that art has no social responsibility and that really all they are doing is creating products to sell.