Collection: Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau was an international decorative and fine arts movement that flourished between approximately 1890 and 1910, during the European Belle Époque. The movement originated in Brussels in the early 1890s and spread rapidly to Paris, Vienna, Munich, Glasgow, and Barcelona, becoming the dominant decorative idiom of the period. Its central ambition was to dissolve the traditional boundary between fine art and applied art, treating architecture, jewellery, glass, ironwork, and graphic design as equal expressions of a single design language.

Art Nouveau is characterised by sinuous whiplash curves derived from natural forms, particularly plants and flowers, asymmetrical composition, and the stylised female figure. Designers championed modern materials, including iron, glass, and ceramic, in opposition to the historicism of nineteenth century academic decoration. The 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, attended by some fifty million visitors, marked the public peak of the movement.

The architect Victor Horta gave Brussels its canonical Art Nouveau buildings, while in Paris Hector Guimard designed the Métro entrances and Alphonse Mucha brought the lithographic poster to international visibility through his theatre commissions for Sarah Bernhardt. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec developed a parallel poster idiom for the Parisian cabaret. The glassmaker Émile Gallé and the jeweller René Lalique extended the style into the decorative arts.

The movement developed distinct regional variants. Jugendstil emerged in Germany; the Vienna Secession in Austria-Hungary, around Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele; Modernisme in Catalonia, with Antoni Gaudí as its central architect; and Stile Liberty in Italy. By 1914, the high cost of Art Nouveau craftsmanship and the rise of mass production had reduced its commercial viability, and the movement gave way to Art Deco and to early modernism.