Late 19th-century developments

Although known as Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Modernista in Spain, and Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale in Italy, Art Nouveau has become the general term applied to a highly varied movement that was European-centred but internationally current at the end of the century. Art Nouveau architects gave idiosyncratic expression to many of the themes that had preoccupied the 19th century, ranging from Viollet-le-Duc’s call for structural honesty to Sullivan’s call for an organic architecture. The extensive use of iron and glass in Art Nouveau buildings was also rooted in 19th-century practice. In France bizarre forms appeared in iron, masonry, and concrete, such as the structures of Hector Guimard for the Paris Métro (c. 1900), the Montmartre church of Saint-Jean L’Évangéliste (1894–1904) by Anatole de Baudot, Xavier Schollkopf’s house for the actress Yvette Guilbert at Paris (1900), and the Samaritaine Department Store (1905) near the Pont Neuf in Paris, by Frantz Jourdain (1847–1935). The Art Nouveau architect’s preference for the curvilinear is especially evident in the Brussels buildings of the Belgian Baron Victor Horta. In the Hôtel Van Eetvelde (1895) he used floral, tendrilous ornaments, while his Maison du Peuple (1896–99) exhibits undulating enclosures of space. Decorative exploitation of the architectural surface with flexible, S-shaped linear ornament, commonly called whiplash or eel styles, was indulged in by the Jugendstil and Sezessionstil architects. The Studio Elvira at Munich (1897–98) by August Endell and Otto Wagner’s Majolika Haus at Vienna (c. 1898) are two of the more significant examples of this German and Austrian use of line.

Wagner continued to combine academic geometry with Classical modified Art Nouveau decoration in his Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station (1899–1901) and in the Postal Savings Bank (1904–06), both in Vienna. Wagner’s pupils broke free of his classicism and formed the Sezessionists. Joseph Olbrich joined the art colony at Darmstadt, in Germany, where his houses and exhibition gallery of about 1905 were boxlike, severe buildings. Josef Hoffmann left Wagner to found the Wiener Werkstätte, an Austrian equivalent of the English Arts and Crafts Movement; his best work, the Stoclet House at Brussels (1905; designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, 2009), was an asymmetrical composition in which white planes were defined at the edges by gilt lines and decorated by formalized Art Nouveau motifs reminiscent of Wagner’s ornament. Josef Plečnik, a talented pupil of Wagner, began his career in 1903–05 with the office and residence of Johannes Zacherl in Vienna. This was in a Wagner-inspired style that Plečnik developed in the 1930s in a fascinating series of buildings, especially in his native city of Ljubljana, now in Slovenia.

In Finland, Eliel Saarinen brought an Art Nouveau flavour to the National Romanticism current in the years around 1900. His Helsinki Railway Station (1906–14) is close to the work of Olbrich and the Viennese Sezessionists. Close links existed between Art Nouveau designers in Vienna and in Glasgow, where Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s School of Art (1896–1909), with its rationalist yet poetic aesthetic, is one of the most inventive and personal of all Art Nouveau buildings. In The Netherlands, Hendrik Petrus Berlage also created a sternly fundamentalist language of marked individuality that is best appreciated in his masterpiece, the Amsterdam Exchange (1898–1903). The exterior is in a rugged and deliberately unpicturesque vernacular, while the even more ruthless interior deploys brick, iron, and glass in a manner that owes much to the rationalist aesthetic of Viollet-le-Duc.

In the United States the Art Nouveau movement arrived with designer Louis Comfort Tiffany and was especially influential on ornamental rather than spatial design, particularly on Sullivan’s decorative schemes and, for a time, those of Frank Lloyd Wright. Similarly, in Italy decorative exuberance and the formally picturesque were elements of Stile Floreale buildings by Raimondo D’Aronco, such as the main building for the Applied Art Exhibition held at Turin, Italy, in 1902. These qualities, along with dynamic spatial innovations, were manifested in the works of perhaps the most singular Art Nouveau architect, the Spaniard Antoni Gaudí. His imaginative and dramatic experiments with space, form, structure, and ornament fascinate the visitor to Barcelona. With their peculiar organicism, the Casa Milá apartment house (1905–10), the residence of the Batlló family (1904–06), Gaudí’s unfinished lifetime projects of the surrealistic Güell Park and the enigmatic church of the Holy Family were personal statements. Their effect, like that of most Art Nouveau architecture, was gained through bizarre form and ornament.