Collection: Art Nouveau & Belle Époque

Art Nouveau spread across Europe and the United States between roughly 1890 and 1910, the visual idiom of the Belle Époque. It set itself the explicit task of dissolving the boundary between fine and decorative art, treating jewellery, glass, ironwork, posters, and the building itself as parts of a single design language. The whiplash curve, the stylised flower, and the sinuous female figure became its shared vocabulary, applied with regional accents in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Glasgow, and Barcelona.

In Paris, the lithographic poster turned the style into a public art form. Alphonse Mucha built a career on it, beginning with his 1895 Gismonda poster for Sarah Bernhardt and continuing through theatre and product designs that became defining images of the moment, an enormous influence on illustration and graphic design for decades after. The Vienna Secession gave the idiom a more austere, geometricised version. Gustav Klimt made it a vehicle for symbolic portraiture and a layered eroticism, while Egon Schiele stripped its line of decoration and carried it toward early Expressionism.

British Aestheticism and the Glasgow School fed into the movement and drew from it in turn. The same years saw a rich production of book illustration, decorative ironwork, and stained glass that crossed national boundaries through international expositions and the illustrated press.

The prints gathered here document the period in its most public form, lithographic posters, decorative ornament plates, and figure compositions tied to theatre, dance, and modern advertising. The collection sits between the gallery's Post-Impressionism holdings, with which it shares a fascination for flat colour and expressive line, and the Art Deco & American Modernism selection, the geometric and machine age idiom that supplanted Art Nouveau after the First World War.