The Shock of the Nouveau

Art Nouveau blazed forth in both Europe and the United States a hundred years ago, and then swiftly lost favor--too curvaceous, ornamental and cluttered to fit evolving tastes of the time. Now a vast and vastly popular exhibition at the National Gallery of Art here is demonstrating once again that new respect for the old can push modernity aside.

“Art Nouveau 1890-1914” is the largest assembly of Art Nouveau paintings, prints, sculpture, furniture and jewelry ever put together. Organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, it showed there for four months before opening in Washington earlier this month. Attendance in London reached 250,000--a record for the Victoria & Albert. Now lines are forming in Washington: Four thousand people showed up on opening day, 21,000 the first week.

The exhibition offers a dazzling display of the masterworks of Art Nouveau: a Paris Metro entrance by Hector Guimard, a complete lunchroom by Charles Rennie Mackintosh of Glasgow, jewelry by Rene Lalique of Paris, glass lamps and screens by Charles Comfort Tiffany of New York, furniture by Louis Majorelle of Nancy, jewelry and sculptures by Czech-born Alphonse Maria Mucha, gilded paintings by Gustav Klimt of Vienna, an intricate elevator grill by Louis Sullivan of Chicago and scores more. More than 350 pieces make up the show.

Although Modernists derided Art Nouveau for many years, the style’s influence has persisted and can be discerned today. Paul Greenhalgh, head of research at the Victoria & Albert and curator of the exhibition, sees evidence of the influence in several elements of contemporary art, including the organic forms in the work of some contemporary designers, such as American glassmaker Dale Chihuly and Israeli furniture designer Ron Arad.

Greenhalgh also points out that Surrealism, whose early prophets like Andre Breton and Salvador Dali looked on Art Nouveau as a major inspiration, still plays a significant role in contemporary art.

The stunning design of the exhibition sets a mood that helps explain what the complicated style was all about. Greenhalgh does not hesitate to acknowledge that the National Gallery, with its financial resources and highly regarded design staff, has put together a show that displays the artworks even better than in London.

Mark Leithauser, the National Gallery’s director of design, calls the installation “the most ambitious architecturally” that the institution has attempted in the last 15 years. The carpets, the cases, the lettering, and the shape and color of the walls all have the feel of Art Nouveau.

A conscious attempt by artists, craftsmen and dealers to create a modern art for the nascent 20th century, Art Nouveau translates as “new art.” It sprang up in both major metropolises such as Paris and provincial centers like Nancy and Glasgow. The art was characterized by lavish decoration and ornamentation, models from nature like insects and tendrils, portraits of seductive women, and dark, decadent symbolism. Many of the artists, though far from all, loved to use whiplash curves and arabesques in their design. Others looked to geometry for inspiration.

Dealers played a vital role in drumming up business for the products. L’Art Nouveau, the Paris shop of the German-born dealer Rudolph Bing, in fact, gave the style its name.

*

Here, the show opens with more than 30 pieces that were shown for the first time at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. The style was at the zenith of its influence then, and the fair attracted 48 million visitors. Fairs, in fact, were a principal means through which the style spread from one country to another.

After the introduction, the exhibition explores sources: Celtic and Viking designs, 18th century French Rococo, Oriental and Islamic influences, the British Arts & Crafts movement, European symbolism, and the cult of Nature. Sometimes an Art Nouveau piece is displayed near its model. Antonio Gaudi, for example, using a Rococo clock as a model, produced an elaborate, wildly expressive clock for a wall in one of his renowned buildings in Barcelona; the exhibition unites the two timepieces.

One flight up lies the heart and soul of the exhibition: Rooms displaying the forms Art Nouveau took in eight different cities: Paris, Brussels, Glasgow, Vienna, Munich, Turin, New York and Chicago. Leithauser and his design staff worked hard to catch the different atmosphere of each city a century ago.

The walls of the Paris rooms, for example, have no right angles. Instead, Leithauser says, the designers tried to create “wonderful gentle, undulating forms,” much like the curves in Parisian Art Nouveau. The walls are painted gray, and the lighting is subdued to catch the mood of what it would have been like to sit outside in the twilight of a Paris evening a hundred years ago.

To foster this, the National Gallery has set down eight park benches in the Paris rooms. While visiting London last March, Leithauser discovered that an auction house was selling a pair of Guimard iron supports for a park bench. Leithauser says he persuaded “an anonymous benefactor” of the National Gallery to bid enough to purchase the supports. Cast-iron reproductions were made, wooden slats fitted over the supports, and eight park benches fashioned. The benches look so Art Nouveau that some visitors hesitate to sit down for fear they are molesting the exhibit.

The Vienna room is another striking example of the successful work of the design team. Leithauser, who has worked for the National Gallery for 26 years and served as its director of design for the last four years, says his team was striving for the elegance of a Vienna that was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a century ago.

To achieve this elegance, a jet-black carpet covers the floor; long, straight black lines etch white walls. Glassware and silverware of turn-of-the-century Vienna are displayed inside bowed glass cases, and the lettering of the exhibits is in the font developed by the Vienna Workshops, the main producer of Austrian Art Nouveau.

*

Among the array of talent in the show, two artists, Guimard and Mackintosh, stand out because of their spectacular pieces. Guimard’s Metro entrance dominates the Paris rooms, its cast-iron twisted into the shapes of tendrils and plants. Guimard created 141 entrances to the Metro, which was completed in time for the opening of the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. Despite some foolish dismantling over the years, 86 still stand on their original sites, now classified as historic monuments.

The owners of the Metro entrance exhibited here, Robert and Arlene Kogood of Washington, have donated it to the National Gallery, and it will go up in the museum’s sculpture garden after the show closes in Tokyo next summer. The eight Guimard bench reproductions will be placed in the garden as well, as extra seating.

The National Gallery has also reassembled the entire Ladies Luncheon Room Mackintosh designed for Kate Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms. Mackintosh set off the rectangular starkness of his tables and chairs with murals of ethereal femmes fatales largely done by his wife, Margaret Macdonald.

The furniture and walls of the room were found in a Glasgow storehouse several years ago and assembled for a traveling Mackintosh exhibition that reached the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1997. To the chagrin of Mackintosh admirers in Glasgow, the room was taken apart afterward and returned to storage by city officials. The Art Nouveau exhibition puts the room on view again for the first time in three years.

The styles of Guimard and Mackintosh illustrate the great variety within Art Nouveau. In his architecture and design, Guimard was lavish with twisting, sensuous, feminine curves and botanical forms. He idealized nature and sought inspiration there. Mackintosh, by contrast, used curves, vegetation and the likeness of women only to accentuate the straight, geometric lines that became the hallmark of his work.

Yet both Guimard and Mackintosh are looked on as giants of Art Nouveau, both believed in the importance of decoration and sought to create a new kind of art for the new 20th century. And the reputations of both suffered from neglect after the fad faded.

Unable to win any more architectural commissions, Mackintosh left Glasgow in 1914 and died in 1928 as a neglected watercolorist. Guimard, whose American wife was Jewish, took refuge in New York on the eve of World War II and died there in relative obscurity in 1942. Novelist Andre Malraux, the French minister of culture, refused to halt the destruction of a Guimard building in the late 1960s, deriding it as “nasty stuff.” Now, both Mackintosh and Guimard are untouchable icons in their hometowns.

The success of the exhibitions both in London and the United States should boost the value of Art Nouveau antiques. The Victoria & Albert’s Greenhalgh, curator of the exhibition, which leaves Washington at the end of January and goes to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in April for its final stop, believes it is too early to tell the exact effect of the show’s popularity on the market.

“But it’s bound to raise prices,” he said in a recent telephone conversation from London. “I would guess there will be a major auction after the Tokyo show. And it will likely include some of the pieces in the exhibition.”

Greenhalgh is now organizing an exhibition of Art Deco, one of the styles that succeeded Art Nouveau in popularity. That show will open at the Victoria & Albert in 2003. An American tour is expected to follow, but the sites in the United States have not yet been selected.

*

Stanley Meisler was a longtime foreign correspondent for The Times.