This excellent introduction to the proto-modernist cultural movement known as “Art Nouveau” is highly recommended for anyone studying the history of cultural modernism in Central Europe around 1900. Central Europe is not its main focus, but the book is most valuable for showing how Central European cultural modernism fits within a larger, indeed global, context.
Vienna 1900 does figure centrally, with discussions of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, but as a prime example of the wider phenomenon of Art Nouveau, not as something of unique import. Moreover, “die Wiener Moderne” is seen as a form of Art Nouveau, not as what later came to be known as “modernism.” Ashby is correct to see it that way.
Ashby's approach is clear and methodical. She makes clear that this introductory work is based largely on the works of other researchers, which are generously cited, but Ashby certainly has her own views and transmits them engagingly, with a whole host of memorable insights and examples.
She describes the origins of Art Nouveau in the Gothic Revival in nineteenth-century England, in the subsequent Arts and Crafts movement, and in Japonisme. This “discovery” of the refinements of Japanese art and culture, and especially its concentration on the natural world rather than the constricting traditions of nineteenth-century historicist art is shown to be key. In a short description of the career of Siegfried Bing, the Parisian art dealer, Ashby shows that his transition from a dealer in Japonisme to inventing the concept of Art Nouveau was no coincidence.
Art Nouveau was a response to the new, industrial age. This was viewed both as a threat to the world of natural beauty, but also, through technological advances, as an opportunity to provide new forms, and new spaces, a new art and architecture for a new world. The elaborate ironwork in the glass ceiling of Oxford's Museum of Natural History is the first of many insightful examples Ashby provides for the intertwining of technological advance with an embrace of the natural world as a source of ornament and style—Art Nouveau's central theme. Alongside the urge for the beautification of the public world, Ashby sees the balancing moment in Art Nouveau in the development of a realm of private beauty, aestheticism, which provided not an embrace but more of an escape from the industrializing world. Art Nouveau thus could include both the encouragement of innovation in traditional, artisanal handicrafts, as in the work of Charles Robert Ashbee, and also the aesthetic celebration of the natural world by way of technologically innovative, indeed industrial, methods, as in the stained-glass artwork of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building in Chicago is a work of Art Nouveau, and so is the highly ornamented, and hand-made Watts Cemetery Chapel in Compton, Surrey, England. It is a vast spectrum, but Ashby is persuasive that they are all part of the same cultural movement.
Art Nouveau was, furthermore, both a major medium of cultural nationalism and a transnational art movement. Its development of modern ornament from forms in nature, but also from “national” traditions based on folk art, allowed each nationalist movement to adopt its own modern visual vernacular. Hence, Ashby's somewhat ironic statement: “Nation-building was an international endeavour” (36). Ödön Lechner was inspired to create a Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts by his visit to the South Kensington Museum of Applied Arts in London, where Indian artifacts had a particular influence on what he saw as the suitable modern style for the “eastern” Magyar nation. Those Indian artifacts were themselves present in South Kensington because of the British imperial link, and an Indian “national culture” developed under British Advocates of the Arts and Crafts movement, such as John Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard's father) and Ernest Binfield Havell, who promoted the work of artists such as Abanindranath Tagore. Tagore was both the creator of an Indian national art, and an example of Art Nouveau.
Meanwhile, Art Nouveau could also be the epitome of cosmopolitanism. Fritz Waerndorfer's house in Vienna was, in the view of Ashby (and Elana Shapira), less a retreat from a hostile world than a “public statement” (199) in favor of the new design of the future. He employed not only two Austrians, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, but also two Scottish designers, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, to design his home's interior, images of which were splashed across the pages of The Studio. Ashby argues that the Mackintosh/Macdonald Music Room was actually the central space in the house, and remarks how the emphasis on the home as a center of aesthetic appreciation was derived not so much from any particularly Viennese need to seek refuge as from the writings of a central figure in the theory of Art Nouveau, Hugh Mackay Baillie Scott (200–2). There is much more to the Viennese Moderne than is encompassed in Central European history alone.
Many other aspects of Art Nouveau are intriguingly explored: the role of colonialism, exploitative imperialism, and the hitherto largely ignored role that women played in the “new art” movement. A particularly interesting chapter discusses the Belgian Congo's role in the substance, style, and, indeed, financial power of Art Nouveau in Belgium. However, while reading this account, it struck me that this is not a world in which Pablo Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon would have been at all welcome, or much understood. And yet Picasso's masterpiece, the first “modern” painting and itself a product of the encounter between European art and the art from colonized Africa, dates from 1907, when much of the work Ashby discusses had yet to be created. Picasso is not mentioned by Ashby, nor is Oskar Kokoschka or Adolf Loos. But then why should they? Ashby's subject is Art Nouveau, and these are figures with different trajectories, with different approaches to what the “new art” and architecture of the future needed to be. They were contemporaries of Art Nouveau, but going in a quite different direction, that of the “modernism” that Ashby mentions as superseding the “new art.” Art Nouveau, including the Vienna Moderne, was, it turns out, not so much “modern” as a form of “proto-modernism,” some of which led to later modernism, as in the work of Peter Behrens, some of which did not, left behind by other sources of what we now regard as our modern culture.
Ashby would be happy, I think, with this assessment of Art Nouveau, as she is quite aware of its limitations and inner contradictions—along with its great significance. She shows that a comprehensive understanding of the global Art Nouveau movement provides a context to the national and regional art movements within modern culture that greatly aids our understanding of them. Central European modern culture at the turn of the century, especially the Vienna Moderne, is a good case in point.
