Collection: Jugendstil

Jugendstil is the German name for Art Nouveau, taken from the Munich illustrated magazine Jugend founded in 1896. The movement ran from approximately 1895 to 1910 across the German-speaking territories, with active centres in Munich, Berlin, Darmstadt, Weimar, and Vienna. It joined the Pan-European Art Nouveau project of dissolving the boundary between fine and decorative art with a particular German emphasis on craft, applied design, and reform of the printed book.

The principal figures were Otto Eckmann, the leading graphic artist of the movement, Hermann Obrist in Munich, the Berlin decorator August Endell, and Peter Behrens, who later founded modern industrial design at AEG. Henry van de Velde brought Belgian Art Nouveau into the German orbit. Bernhard Pankok, Richard Riemerschmid, Bruno Paul, Joseph Sattler, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Hans Christiansen extended the field across illustration, furniture, and applied arts.

The Darmstadt Artists' Colony, founded by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig in 1899, gave the movement a coherent institutional base, with Joseph Maria Olbrich designing its principal buildings. Jugendstil overlapped with the Vienna Secession across the southern German-speaking territories and fed directly into the early years of the Bauhaus and the Deutscher Werkbund.