Although the term 'Art Nouveau' is popularly used to designate the curvy, whiplash style of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, historians are less than certain of its meaning. Even at the time that 'L'Art Nouveau' was first introduced into common usage by Parisian tastemaker Siegfried Bing, its meaning was controversial. Was Art Nouveau a style or a movement? If it was a style, how could it possibly include works as diverse as geometric planters, biomorphic architecture, and pottery ornamented with despondent female nudes? If it was a movement, what was its ideology? Although some early critics found that Art Nouveau's lack of stylistic unity was evidence of hopeless confusion, one significant apologist found that stylistic and thematic variety was very much the point. It was Siegfried Bing himself who made this important argument in favor of Art Nouveau as neither a style nor a movement but as an opportunity for self expression.
'The Art Nouveau field,' he explained in the American publication, The Craftsman, in 1903, was 'a free soil upon which any one could build according to his own desires.' He brought readers back to the late 18th century to explain the late 19th century's need for a new art, theorizing that the shock of the French Revolution (1789) had ushered in a period of utter stagnation that persisted into the 1860s and '70s. When artists awakened to the need for a contemporary art, it was because they realized that society had been transformed by industrialization, mass-production, the rise of the middle class, the beginnings of Socialism, the opening of trade with Japan, and marketplace competition with the United States. This was a new world and a new world required new art.
According to Bing, the initial movement began in England, under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and the ideas of John Ruskin, and was carried into practical affairs by William Morris. Later, the Belgians, led by Henri van de Velde, a professor of aesthetics from Brussels, devised the first truly modern formulas for the interior decoration of houses. Van de Velde, in fact, executed interiors for Bing's shop, L'Art Nouveau, which opened in Paris in 1895. The name of the shop was adopted as the name of a new art initiative. Bing prescribed no single style. The field was open to the ingenuity and taste of the artists. The vanguard returned to Nature for inspiration and tried to follow the essential principles of utility, simplicity, organic design, and truthfulness to construction and materials.
One wonders why Bing failed to mention the influence of Japan on the spirit of the new. It was an odd omission considering that as an importer of Asian objets d'art he had been the principal figure in creating the craze for Japonism in France. According to Gabriel Weisberg in The Origins of L'Art Nouveau: The Bing Empire (Van Gogh Museum, 2005), by the mid-1870s Bing had realized that there was money to be made in Japanese art. He later toured the distant nation and made a sweep of the best objects, launched a monthly journal titled Le Japon Artistique, and organized traveling exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States to expand the market for his merchandise. After nearly 20 years at the center of the craze for all thing Japanese, Bing decided to add a new element to his business: he would deal in new merchandise, produced in Western nations but inspired by Nature and the Japanese depiction of nature.
In any event, Bing tells us that artists from throughout Europe, but mostly from France, began working in the spirit of the new, using various materials, striving for forms and decorations suitable for the modern age. As their predecessors had done in centuries past, they cultivated their own genius rather than copying from familiar and trite styles. Bing gathered together a selection of their work (which he had been cultivating) in his newly decorated gallery on the Rue de Provence, Paris.
Weisberg tells us that for the opening of his new shop Bing commissioned a bedroom from Maurice Denis; a waiting room from Edward Vuillard; a salon with wall-decoration from Paul-Albert Besnard; a boudoir from the Australian Charles Conder; a smoking room from the Belgians Henry Van de Velde and Georges Lemmen; and a sitting room and dining room, also from Van de Velde. Ceramics, dishes, lamps, textiles and rugs based on the same deign principles completed the model rooms. According to Bing, the exhibition 'was powerful enough to create a large following of recruits, impatient to enroll themselves beneath the banner displayed by the vanguard.' He was careful to point out that all Art Nouveau artists were not equally talented. Although he did not mention names, he clearly referred to Carabin (and others like him) when he ridiculed those who 'designed tables supported by nymphs with soft, sinuous bodies, or by strange figures savage in their symbolism, with muscles swollen and writhing.'.
Faulting art critics for failing in their professional duty, Bing rebuked them for offering no guidance concerning the new art. Instead of distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful works, they randomly showed all efforts, leaving readers completely adrift. No one seemed to take the subject seriously, Bing complained, concluding that 'future judges will all acknowledge the indelible mark of our epoch, without it being necessary for all our artists to concur in an absolute identity of style.' Bing's future judges are today's art historians and they have partly fulfilled Bing's prophesy, acknowledging, even celebrating, the impact of Art Nouveau, but finding its definition persistently illusive. But all seem to agree on this: Art Nouveau artists wanted to quash the exhausted clichés of historicism by creating a new modern aesthetic. Since a desire to throw off the chains of tradition equals a desire for freedom, it is no surprise that these innovators adhered to no single style.
In theory, they strove for something entirely novel but in reality they had to look somewhere for inspiration. Quite openly, they relied upon a number of sources, reinterpreting, adapting, co-mingling, and sometimes even copying them to suit their aesthetic and technical needs. As Paul Greenhalgh has pointed out in Art Nouveau 1890-1914 (V & A Publications, 2000), the core sources that operated internationally were English -- the Arts and Crafts movement; European -- including Classicism, the Baroque, Rococo, Gothic styles and their revivals, regional folk art; and the exotic -- including the art of Islamic nations, China, Japan and the far flung colonies of European nations. In addition there were direct references to nature, ranging from the cosmic to the microscopic. And then there were various combinations, permutations, nationalistic, and personal variations. It has already taken several books to consider the entire field of Art Nouveau decorative arts. At the Jason Jacques Gallery, we focus primarily on the ceramics that were made between 1880 and 1915, the years that the new art -- whatever its name -- was emerging and at the height of its popularity.