The Snobbish Style

By ROBERT HUGHES

It was not so long ago--a matter of 20 years--that art nouveau was considered a minor style, deservedly forgotten. Those tendriled doorknobs and flowing pedestals, that panoply of rare materials (zebrawood, pate de verre, lapis lazuli, champleve enamel), that air of hothouse elegance, glazed and nuanced--what did such things amount to but decoration? And what was decoration but a sin against the purity of modern art?

The life of art nouveau was short, about two decades; its climax was the turn of the century, in 1900. But in that brief time the look of Western capitals--and especially their bourgeois interiors--was utterly transformed by architects led by Victor Horta and Hector Guimard, designer of the Paris Metro entrances; poster artists like Privat Livemont and Alphonse Mucha; designers of jewelry like Rene Lalique; glassmakers and ceramists like Louis Comfort Tiffany, Emile Galle and Felix Bracquemond. A new style of luxury art, the last great mannerism, had been found. Because of a hostility to "applied" as against "high" art, and because Cezanne and the post-impressionists were its contemporaries, art nouveau was long dismissed by those who believed that cultural history is only or mainly written in paintings.

But history follows trade. The popularity of art nouveau, revived in the '60s, has provoked an enormous curiosity about the style. What was the taste of 1900? Where did it originate? Was it, after all, as effete as we were told? No exhibition, now or in the near future, is likely to satisfy that curiosity better than "Art Nouveau: Belgium/France," which opened last week at the Art Institute of Chicago. Organized by both the Art Institute and the Institute for the Arts at Houston's Rice University (where it was shown last spring), it is a collective effort of numerous curators, headed by Yvonne Brunhammer from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. It contains more than 700 items by scores of artists--a brilliant array of objects, most of which have never been on display in the U.S.

"Symbolism is the thought of 1900," Art Historian Victor Beyer suggests in the catalogue, "while art nouveau is its gesture, its spasm." Even at this distance, one can sense how liberating the gesture must have seemed: an escape from the thick, relentlessly overstuffed world of Second Empire Paris into an imagery of free movement and rhythmic arabesque. The art nouveau line--whiplike, airy, eddying back on itself--was common to high art as well. A good example is Gauguin's portrait of the painter Roy, 1889, with its serpentine forms of background and hair (see color page).

Dragonflies and Chic. Such serpentine curves had been discovered by the French in Japanese art: the first shops for japonaiserie had been set up in Paris in the 1870s. Moreover, the designers of the Belle Epoque seized on the reverence for ephemeral nature in Japanese art, importing a fresh iconography of fugitive things: mist, shivering grasses, winding shoots, morning glories and insects. Nowhere is their passion for the impalpable better expressed than in the dragonfly lamp, each wing vibrating with red and amber glass, designed for Tiffany by Clara Driscoll around 1900.

In a sense, art nouveau invented female chic in the popular arts. Not since the 16th century mannerists had there been such a plethora of delicately icy women as now appeared on that new form, the advertising poster. Mucha, a Czech emigre who became Sarah Bernhardt's court artist, and followers like Privat Livemont helped change the sexual prototypes of the 19th century before they launched a million psychedelic posters in the late 20th.

But Alphonse Mucha was a sculptor too, and nothing in this show epitomizes the art nouveau vision (or fantasy) of woman better than a bust he designed around 1899 for a Parisian jeweler. This astonishing object, whose form shifts like water in the twining reflections of silver flesh and gold hair, is perversely liturgical--a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siecle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame sans Merci--enigmatic as a sphinx, cruelly indifferent as a Byzantine empress, wearing the features of the Divine Sarah and the aggressive glitter of a vintage Cadillac fender.

It reminds one how fused by the current of high artificiality the aesthetic and sexual fancies of the time were apt to be. Every Parisian male wanted to possess Cleo de Merode, Liane de Pougy and their thespian sisters--the "great horizontals." But they were also votive objets de culte, focuses of sexual snobbery. In a like way, the most rarefied work of the art nouveau craftsmen was not accessible to a wide public. As the style spread through the decorative arts--furniture making, inlay, bookbinding, jewelry, glass--too much labor and fine material were devoured by it. It was, in very essence, elitist: the stylish style. But as Brunhammer rightly exclaims in the catalogue, "Thanks be for the snobisme that broke through the barriers between the arts and gave us such a profusion of fine works!" As it is in Proust, snobbery is often the essential subject of art nouveau. There is plenty of costly jewelry made today; but what modern design by Bulgari or Tiffany does not look gross or commonplace beside a piece like Lalique's swan pendant of 1898? In those cool, exquisite loops and featherings of enamel one sees a vanished sensibility: distanced, calm, perfectly judged, and soon to be destroyed by the tensions of a new century.

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