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Art Nouveau: Nancy Boys. Season 2, Episode 35.
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This episode we kick off the Art Nouveau period.
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Transcript
Apologies and Schedule Disruption
00:00:15
Speaker
Ain't no shame, but there's been a chance
00:00:21
Speaker
All right, loyal listeners, welcome back to the show. Yeah. The American Craftsman podcast, if you forgot what you're listening to. What episode is this? This episode 35. And got to apologize for the last two weeks, you know, not having an episode last week and having sort of an out of norm format two weeks ago.
Sponsor Promotion: Bits and Bits
00:00:44
Speaker
I actually had COVID, unfortunately. Luckily I was fine, but
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah, put a wrench in the gear. Yeah, we were, you know, we couldn't obviously we couldn't record because I had COVID. Rob did not have COVID. So that would have been a bad idea. I guess we could probably could have tried to do it remotely, but you know, we would work. Yeah.
00:01:08
Speaker
So, yeah, you know, you got a little break from us, a little spring break, I guess. But we're back at it this week. We're getting into Art Nouveau. But before we get into it, better thank our sponsor Bits and Bits. So Bits and Bits, if you don't know, they manufacture router bits in their shop in Oregon, and they also sell router bits, namely white side router bits with their proprietary astro-coding.
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00:02:08
Speaker
bits and what the hell is that paraphernalia. They don't really sell the festival tool. Yeah. Yeah. I think they, they, maybe they have some, but mostly yeah. They're specializing in the accessories for the routers and the domino domino cutters, stuff like that. So, uh, if you want to say 15% site wide, use our coupon code American craftsman.
00:02:32
Speaker
That's substantial. Yeah. Help support the podcast and get yourself some nice router bits. So thanks bits and bits for sponsoring the show. Let's get into it.
Introduction to Art Nouveau
00:02:42
Speaker
Art Nouveau. I have to be honest. I knew nothing of Art Nouveau when we started it. You know, you have this conceptual idea like Art Deco and things like that.
00:02:55
Speaker
So, although I've learned a lot doing this podcast, this one was like almost every paragraph is brand new information. Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm excited. So, art nouveau, it means new art. It's French, I suppose, because we'll learn that's kind of where the term comes from. Right.
00:03:24
Speaker
And there's a surprising influence to Art Nouveau around 1880. You have the British Arts and Crafts movement. And that's William Morris. Yeah, yeah. And that was sort of like, you know,
00:03:42
Speaker
the reaction against the cluttered designs of the Victorian era and sort of the degeneration of handcraftedness and things like that. That was a big influence on Art Nouveau as well.
00:04:02
Speaker
The second main influence for the birth of Art Nouveau is Japanese art, which really, you know, as we learned, also had an influence on the arts and crafts movement. Particularly these wood block prints.
00:04:17
Speaker
that a lot of European artists were getting into in the 1880s and 90s. And here are some artists names you might have heard of. Gustav Klimt, maybe Emil Gal and James Abbott McNeil Whistler. Anything that's in blue is a link. So I know in the past I've made some notes where we didn't have examples of like what they were.
00:04:48
Speaker
But I tried to include, you know, more of those things so we could get an idea of like what their work was all about. I lost my mouse. Oh, there it was. It's in the top left. It doesn't want to go over. Oh, it doesn't. Get over there. Oh.
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, I found it curious that these were the two major influences that sort of burst Art Nouveau. It was an Austrian painter. Yeah. And I guess James Abbott McNeil Whistler is Whistler of Whistler's mother.
00:05:38
Speaker
Uh, he kind of looks like Mark Twain. Yeah, he does. There's Whistler's mother on the right. Is that a pain, a famous painting? Yeah. Um, but, uh,
00:05:52
Speaker
I'm an uncultured swine. Yeah, well, so am I. And these Japanese woodblock prints, they had a lot of flowers, floral and bulbous forms. And this word, this descriptive word whiplash, whiplash curves
00:06:13
Speaker
kept popping up over and over again. And once we get into looking at the furniture, you'll see what that is. But those are all key elements of what it would eventually become known as Art Nouveau. Yeah, I'm thinking of like Japanese chrysanthemums maybe in the the Sakura.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah. And if if you remember in the arts and crafts, the British arts and crafts movement, especially like they were into the flowers on the wallpaper and things like that. Morris was was one of the big guys doing that. What a nature inspired.
00:06:50
Speaker
So, this whole section is going to be structured a little bit differently than some of the previous ones because we don't really have like the manufacturing differences to go into, but there are a lot of
00:07:09
Speaker
unknown to me, artists and the work. And so that section is really long. So it's kind of like, you know, it's sort of, you know, probably like a two section thing that'll be divided up into four, you know, we'll split it. Right.
00:07:28
Speaker
And there's a lot of artists that were influential in Art Nouveau. It's a furniture style with art in the name. So it makes sense that it was so heavily influenced by the fine arts. Exactly. Yeah, that's a great point. You're always good at pinning this stuff out because that comes up later, you know, the high arts, the fine arts. And
00:07:55
Speaker
It was a pretty inspiring episode to research because of all this new information.
Influences and Key Artists of Art Nouveau
00:08:08
Speaker
They don't really know when, they can't really say when the first works of art that were officially known as Art Nouveau surfaced. Some say that it was patterned after the flowing lines and floral backgrounds found in paintings of Van Gogh. We've all heard of Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
00:08:33
Speaker
and there's lithographs from Toulouse-Lautrec such as the Moulin Rouge and that's from 1891. But most point to the origins in the decorative arts and in particular to a book jacket by the English architect and designer
00:08:54
Speaker
author Haygood McMurdo. It was called Ren's City Churches and I was careful to look that up and put a link there.
00:09:09
Speaker
Oh, oh, I can't. Oh, there we go. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is this book jacket in black and white is what many point to as like the first work of Art Nouveau designated artwork. It's it's kind of hard to describe. Yeah. It's reminiscent to me of those like early 1900s, like
00:09:38
Speaker
I mean, for lack of a better term, like sort of propaganda posters.
00:09:43
Speaker
Yeah, again, you hit something on the head because posters become like legitimate artwork during this time. It kind of reminds me a little bit of like when 60s pop culture came about and they were doing all that poster art and things like that. They seem to have borrowed from this. Yeah, period. This definitely has like a sort of a psychedelic look. Yeah. Yeah. Cervaceous lines. Look it up. Ren's City Church's book jacket.
00:10:13
Speaker
It's a lot of unexpected stuff in this. Yeah, Ren, W-R-E-N. Yeah, category. Like the bird. Carolina Ren. There you go. The design, the Ren's book jacket depicts serpentine stalks of flowers emanating from one flattened pad at the bottom of the page.
00:10:36
Speaker
and clearly reminiscent of Japanese style wood block prints. And Art Nouveau was the most conspicuous at international expositions. This is something we started talking about in the last one or two series, right? These expos that were happening. Like KBIS. Except they used to actually show good stuff. Now it's just a bunch of junk.
00:11:07
Speaker
Although there have been some, there have been some, what do you call the people who are detractors. There have been detractors of each style. That's true. You know, we've gone through it. But Art Nouveau enjoyed center stage at five particular fairs. The 1889 and 1900 Expos, Expositions, Universal in Paris.
00:11:35
Speaker
And there's a lot of French in this and my, my French is non-existent. So the pronunciations are going to be terrible. It's one of those languages like, like Portuguese. If you don't speak it, you have really got no chance. The 1897 Tovarine exposition in Brussels.
00:11:56
Speaker
where Art Nouveau was largely employed to show off the possibilities of craftsmanship with the exotic woods of the Belgian Congo. Yeah. You know, politics and, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's never far from these things, you know, world events.
00:12:18
Speaker
the 1902 Turin International Exposition of Modern Decorative Arts and the 1909 Exposition Internationale de l'Este de la France in Nancy. And that's in France.
Cultural Impact and Criticism
00:12:34
Speaker
There's a school of Nancy, which we will learn about.
00:12:38
Speaker
I'm a Nancy boy. Go to Nancy. It probably sounds different if you say it with a French accent. Um, but in, in English and American ease, it's Nancy. Um, so at each of these fairs, the style was dominant. The art nouveau style was dominant in terms of the decorative arts and architecture on display. And in turn in 1902,
00:13:05
Speaker
Art Nouveau was truly the style of choice of virtually every designer and every nation represented to the exclusion of any other. So by 1902, Art Nouveau is really in vogue. And this is kind of happening at the same time as Arts and Crafts, isn't it? Yeah.
00:13:31
Speaker
And we didn't really hear about that when we were doing the arts and crafts period. It seems like maybe in Europe, arts and crafts was going out of style in the late 1890s. And it was just really, I mean, it wasn't even coming into style in the US yet. Stickley was kind of, I guess, the forefather. And he, at that time, was still building reproductions and stuff, I think. It wasn't until the 19 teens that he really got into the
00:14:03
Speaker
first, first decade of the 1990s. Yeah, no, I think you're right on the money there. You know, it's, you could see the America is the US isn't even mentioned in any of this. And it's, it's kind of that way. Art Nouveau is really a European style. Yeah. But it, it does influence, you know, it does creep its way into the US. So it's part of the, you know, the American period as well.
00:14:22
Speaker
Well, maybe the late...
00:14:35
Speaker
So Siegfried Bing was a German merchant and he was a connoisseur of Japanese art and he was living in Paris and he opened a shop named La Art Nouveau in 1895.
00:14:51
Speaker
And a lot of people point to this is the, you know, seems obvious, the movement get its name. And because he became one of the main purveyors of the style and furniture and the decorative arts.
00:15:09
Speaker
And that's something that maybe we're getting away from, but the style and furniture and the decorative arts combined as one thing, you know, like furniture, wallpaper, color schemes. That was all
00:15:29
Speaker
you know, part and parcel of these movements. So before long, the store's name became synonymous with the style in France, Britain, and even the US. Art Nouveau's wide popularity throughout Western and Central Europe, however, meant that it went by several different titles.
00:15:52
Speaker
Each region, each country had its own name for Art Nouveau because I guess they translated it into the new art. Right. In German speaking countries, it was known as the youth style, Jugendstil.
00:16:14
Speaker
And it was taken from a Munich magazine called Eugend that popularized it. Meanwhile, in Vienna, home to Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner, Joseph Hoffman, and other founders of the Vienna secession, which was this offshoot of Art Nouveau at its beginnings, it was known as secession style. I'm not even going to... Secession steel.
00:16:44
Speaker
Go ahead and say it in German. Sesessian steel. Yeah. So I guess steel is style. That makes sense. Yeah.
00:16:57
Speaker
in the Spanish-speaking countries, like Spain, it was known as modernismo, modernisme in Catalan, and stile floriale, floral style, or stile liberty.
00:17:17
Speaker
in Italy. Steely Liberty, Style Liberty, was named after Arthur Liberty's fabric shop in London, which helped popularize that style. Interesting. It is. I mean, you can see how sort of helter-skelter these things happen in a way. Cattleman is another one of those languages. Good luck.
00:17:44
Speaker
Got X's and all kinds of crazy letters in there.
00:17:48
Speaker
In France, also called a modern style and occasionally style. This guy's name is Jumard after its most famous practitioner there. There was the architect Hector Jumard. And in the Netherlands, it was, it was usually called new cunced, new art. So yeah, art nouveau.
00:18:16
Speaker
As I mentioned, it's numerous detractors also gave it several derogatory names. This is a good one. Style noodle style. I'll just use the English, the translations. In Belgium, they called it eel style.
00:18:43
Speaker
And in Germany, this is a good one. Tapeworm style, bondworm steel, or the bondworm steel. That sounds nefarious. Sounds like it comes from an Austin Powers movie, right? The bondworm steel. They all made playful reference to Art Nouveau's tendency to employ sinuous and flowing lines.
00:19:11
Speaker
So Art Nouveau, it can't be separated from graphics and design. It's all lumped together.
Design Characteristics and Prominent Designers
00:19:22
Speaker
And in some ways, it's actually, from my understanding of it, after reading and writing this stuff,
00:19:33
Speaker
It's kind of the driving force of the style, you know, all the print stuff. And once we get into the furniture designs,
00:19:46
Speaker
It's it's all over the place. Yeah. Well, I guess, you know, like when was the printing press invented, you know, where it wasn't like letter by letter blocks? I mean, it's like it's just becoming something that can be widely distributed with the turn of the the Industrial Revolution.
00:20:06
Speaker
That's another good point. So there's, you know, probably such a huge desire for people to put these things out because now they have this ability to just print off hundreds and thousands of copies of whatever. Right. Right. Especially, you know, several colors instead of just like a, you know, a two-tone thing. It became a big marketing thing where, you know, there was no print marketing before, really. It was, you know,
00:20:32
Speaker
You know, you're just like seeing into the future here because marketing is another thing that kind of becomes, you know, it's new. Marketing is new and it grabs onto Art Nouveau as a style. Let's see if I can conjure up some powerball numbers later. So, wait a second, back up just a little bit.
00:21:01
Speaker
Art Nouveau's ubiquity in the late 19th century must be explained in part by many artists use of popular and easily reproduced forms found in the graphic arts. All right. So, you know, that's a just a sentence to wrap up what we were discussing. Oh, it's 150 million. That's pretty low. But, you know, it's pretty high for us, isn't it? Yeah. Even taking home take home 30 each. Yeah.
00:21:30
Speaker
In Germany, the Jugendstil artists like Peter Behrens, I actually heard of him, and Hermann Obrist had their work printed on book covers and exhibition catalogs, magazine advertisement, and playbills. And this trend was not limited to Germany.
00:21:52
Speaker
The English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley again, I think I heard of him like Tim Beardsley. Yeah, true trade You know, he could maybe do some research like you did yeah and find that he's related. Mm-hmm
00:22:11
Speaker
He was perhaps the most controversial art nouveau figure due to his combination of the erotic and macabre. And he created a number of posters in his brief career that employed graceful and rhythmic lines. Interesting. Yeah.
00:22:30
Speaker
I did look this stuff up and if you click on his name, I think it takes you to his Wikipedia page and shows some of his work and you can see what they thought was erotic and macabre at the time. Send in a video to Tim.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah. Beardsley's highly decorative prints, such as the peacock skirt in 1894, were both decadent, decadent and simple. And they represent the most direct link we can identify between Art Nouveau and the Japan, Japan, Japan. How can you say that? Might be hoppinism. Hoppinism? Like the Japan, Japan and Spanish is hop on. Okay.
00:23:24
Speaker
and ukiyo e prince japanism just sounds yeah it sounds weird maybe it's japanism
00:23:32
Speaker
But again, there's that link straight back to the Japanese influence. Mm hmm. In France, the posters and graphic production of Jules Charret, Henry Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bernard. Wow, these these are tough names to say. Victor Prouvay. And a couple others. Say a feel. How come names that? They feel.
00:24:02
Speaker
Steinland and a handful of others popularized the lavish decadent lifestyle of the Belle Epoch roughly the era between 1890 and 1914 usually associated with the C.D. Cabaret district of Montmarte in northern Paris. So it's this was a
00:24:31
Speaker
you know, sort of a, because there's so many things I was unfamiliar with, try to summarize this, is there's sort of a lifestyle going on, I guess, right? This is all at the end of the 1800s, right, going into the 1900s. When did World War I start? Was it like, like, 1930s?
00:24:56
Speaker
I should know this. Is it oh, oh, seven or is it like eight or nine? Um, with the murder of Franz Ferdinand. Yeah. But there's kind of like this, this, um, you know, high point decadent life living, right? It says 14 to 18, but you know, we're talking about the precursors to the world.
00:25:23
Speaker
So 1914. So this all happens pre world war one. Um, and in all, while all this is happening, they also, what we mentioned was the poster becomes, I guess it was 1914. That is when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Okay. I don't know why I had that in my head as when it ended. Yeah. 19th tree of her size was 19. Okay.
00:25:55
Speaker
So yeah, 1918, it ended. So during this time, as we noted, the poster becomes high art. It goes from just something plastered onto a construction site wall. Remember going to the mall and they would have the
00:26:18
Speaker
like the tall thing with the posters in it that you could leaf through. And it'd be like the rock bands and stuff like that. Like wrestler or Spice Girls.
00:26:31
Speaker
When I was a youngin playing in the city, we would have to go out on these gorilla marketing things. Paste up the... Yeah, with buckets of wallpaper paste. That's funny. And we'd get like hundreds of your little flyer, like you're going to be playing at CVGVs, you know, Friday at eight.
00:26:56
Speaker
like two o'clock in the morning yes on Thursday or Wednesday you know like one or two days before so you weren't papered over right yeah that's funny that was posters as low arth though yeah be like like six inches deep of posters on the walls yes yeah it's like the telephone poles that are just made of staples yes
00:27:23
Speaker
We had a staple gun too. Oh man. So posters became high on, um, and, um, we haven't really touched on furniture yet. We're still working on basically art nouveau as the almost like, um, uh, a consciousness, you know, a way of thinking, a way of, uh, looking at art in general.
00:27:52
Speaker
And like some of the other periods, I think Victorian was one of them. Architecture plays a big role in Art Nouveau. And I write this very serious sentence here. In addition to the graphic and visual arts, any serious discussion of Art Nouveau must consider architecture and the vast influence this had on European culture. Indubitably.
00:28:25
Speaker
in urban hubs such as Paris, Brussels, Glasgow, Turin, or Torino, Barcelona, Antwerp and Vienna, as well as smaller cities like Nancy and Darmstadt, along with Eastern European cities, Riga, Prague, Budapest,
00:28:47
Speaker
Art Nouveau architecture prevailed on a grand scale in both size and appearance and is still visible today in structures as varied as small row houses to great institutional and commercial buildings.
00:29:04
Speaker
It's big. I mean, when I started seeing pictures of the architecture, I recognized buildings from New York and things like that built in that style. In architecture, especially Art Nouveau was showcased in a wide variety of idioms. Many buildings incorporate a prodigious use of terracotta and colorful tile work.
00:29:28
Speaker
Uh, the French ceramicist, Alexandra, Alexandra. Now that has got an unfortunate name. Yeah. It must be big. Oh, because Alexander, the big, Alexandra Vigo, for example, made his name largely through the production of terracotta ornament for the facades and fireplaces of Parisian residences and apartment buildings. Um,
00:29:58
Speaker
Other art nouveau structures, particularly in France and Belgium, where Hector Jumard and Victor Horta were important practitioners, showed off the technological possibilities of an iron structure joined by glass panels. Oh, wow. Interesting. I didn't think that came in until like the twenties. Yeah.
00:30:23
Speaker
There's a lot of like, they did a lot of like iron gating and like that gold colored, I guess they're tiles or whatever, you know, blended in with the stonework.
00:30:46
Speaker
In many areas across Europe, local stones such as yellow limestone or rocky random cost rural aesthetic with wood trim characterized art nouveau and its residential architecture.
00:31:04
Speaker
In several cases, a sculptural white stucco skin was used. I always thought of that as art deco or that modern kind of, but maybe I was just wrong on what it was called.
00:31:28
Speaker
But Stucco was used a lot in Art Nouveau buildings, especially for exhibitions and such. Excuse me.
00:31:39
Speaker
Even in the United States, the vegetable the vegetal forms adorning Lewis Sullivan skyscrapers like the Wainwright building and the Chicago Stock Exchange are often counted among the best examples of Art Nouveau's wide architectural scope. There's there's a good I think that building is in Paris. Is that this this is like a dome with. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Like a freaking tree.
00:32:08
Speaker
Right. It looks like it's got like some Egyptian kind of influence in a way. Yeah. Greek. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of looks like a mausoleum or something. It does.
00:32:29
Speaker
And here we finally get to a little bit of Art Nouveau furniture and interior design. And this is sort of just a summarization. This first part is just kind of like a summarization of what Art Nouveau is, I guess, I was going to say was, but it still exists.
00:32:56
Speaker
Like the Victorian stylistic revivals and the arts and crafts movement, Art Nouveau was intimately associated with interior decoration, at least as much as it was conspicuous on exterior facades. So it's part of the building, the fabric of the building inside and out.
Decline and Transition to Industrial Styles
00:33:21
Speaker
Also, like these other styles of the 19th century, Art Nouveau interiors also strove to create a harmonious, coherent environment that left no surface untouched. It's like as soon as designers start getting into the mix, they want to get their hands on everything, right?
00:33:48
Speaker
Furniture design took center stage in this respect, particularly in the production of carved wood that featured sharp irregular contours, often handcrafted, but occasionally manufactured using machines. Furniture makers turned out pieces for every use imaginable. Beds, chases, dining room tables and chairs, armwars, sideboards, lampstands, basically
00:34:16
Speaker
any piece of furniture, you know, got the Art Nouveau treatment. The sinuous curves of the designs often fed off the natural grains of woods and was often permanently installed as wall paneling and molding.
00:34:40
Speaker
In France, the chief Art Nouveau designers include Louis Majorelle, Emile Gall, and Eugene Valline, all based in Nancy. Nancy boys. They were collectively known as the Nancy boys.
00:35:03
Speaker
There were some other guys that worked in Paris. There was Tony Selmeshyme, Edouard Colonna, and Eugene Galard also. Eugene Galard not to be produced with Emile Gall. Or Eugene Valin. Yeah, right.
00:35:25
Speaker
The latitude, specifically for Siegfried Bing's shop, remember, named L'Art Nouveau, which gave the whole movement its most common name. By a German in Paris. Yeah, a German merchant gave the movement its name.
00:35:50
Speaker
ironic, I guess. In Belgium, the whiplash line and reserved, more angular contours can be seen in designs of Kustoff, Surier Bovee, and Henry Van de Velde, who both admired the works of the English arts and crafts artists. This is an interesting little bit I came across.
00:36:16
Speaker
Italians Alberto Bugatti and Augustino Loro were well known for their forays in the styles there. And yes, that is the Bugatti. I think I cite it later maybe, or I just looked it up. He's either the father or the grandfather, probably the father of Bugatti automobiles.
00:36:42
Speaker
I haven't seen any of like the new like the most recent Bugattis, but like thinking of like the Bugattis of whatever, five, 10 years ago, like the Veyron does kind of have that, you know, that real sleek and and curvaceous kind of look to it. Yeah. Yeah. Like it almost looks like something that would be in like a movie. As like a car in the future, you know what I mean? Right.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it's no coincidence, you know, that influence is there. It's in the blood. Many such designers move freely between media, often making them hard to categorize. Marjoral, for example, manufactured his own wooden furniture designs and opened up an ironworking foundry, which also produced many of the metal fittings for the glasswork.
00:37:36
Speaker
put out by the Down Brothers Glassworks. So these guys were getting into lots, sort of like us. Yeah. I mean, dabbling in all the, you know, although we're not confined to one style, you know, we sort of drift between what we like and what the, you know, the clients ask for.
00:38:02
Speaker
But we try and, you know, have our fingers in a multiplicity of mediums. Yeah. Mediums. Yeah. Where are we now? Art Nouveau furniture and interior design. Oh, I just read this. Did you? That's like the Victorian style. Art Nouveau was intimately associated with interior decoration as least as my bad cutting and pasting. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
00:38:32
Speaker
Painting and the high arts. Painting and the high arts. Here's more of Jeff's scene into the future. Few styles can claim to be represented across nearly all forms of visual and material media as starly as Art Nouveau.
00:38:51
Speaker
So it was a pretty sweeping movement. You know, it affected everybody. It's hard to think of like today because, you know, everything sort of, it's fair game for us today. People say they want an armoire. We don't necessarily think of a particular style. We have to ask, what style do you want it built in?
00:39:19
Speaker
where it seems like during this period, Art Nouveau was so present that if somebody came to you and said, I want an armoire, it was definitively going to be in this style. That's kind of weird to think about. Yeah. Being like a movement, a stylistic movement being that powerful.
00:39:47
Speaker
You know, the closest thing I could think of is white painted shaker. Oh, God. When that was. When that was the end thing, right? Wasn't it was still is. I know it's definitely calmed down. Yeah. I mean, there were there was just moved down a rung in the in the food chain. Right. But there was that time where everything that came in, no matter what it was,
00:40:15
Speaker
People want a white painted shaker. Shaker in quotations. Right. Right. There's flat panel doors.
00:40:25
Speaker
I sort of knew that as like cottage style. I don't know why. Yeah. That beach cottage kind of look painted white. White kitchen, man. Nothing worse. Yeah. Yeah. I can't imagine the fingerprints on the corners of the cabinets. I guess, you know, you got to clean them. Don't bump into anything either. Yeah.
00:40:52
Speaker
I've always wanted to go back into these places, you know, on, it'd be interesting sort of study, for lack of a better word, to log the lifespan of one of these installations and check it out. You know, how does it look? How does it operate year two, year five, year 10? And then like, when is it ready for replacement?
00:41:23
Speaker
You're talking about just like a box store kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so you can get a real idea of its value in a sense. We're like thereof. Right. Right. Um, but I guess people are so transient nowadays, they figure they're going to move by the time they use up there. Yeah.
00:41:43
Speaker
Right? I mean, I've been in my house for like 20 years. I never thought I'd be there 20 years. Well, I plan on being here for 30. I have a mortgage burning ceremony. Yeah. Unless I hit that power ball later today. Yeah. It's just, I guess I didn't give it much thought.
00:42:07
Speaker
but because I was never really one to look that far into the future. But if you would have asked me when I moved in, are you gonna be here in 20 years? I would have said, nah. I guess, because I'd never really been anywhere more than a couple of years up till that point. But it's funny how things work out, isn't it? For those that don't know from listening to our
00:42:37
Speaker
earlier podcast, we have a shop behind the house. Now I had no idea that the property was owned B3, which means like a business use when we, when we bought the house, I was just looking for a place where I could have like a little hobby shop. Cause I was, I was still planning to be a teacher.
00:43:01
Speaker
Um, and I worked a couple of years once I decided to, you know, do the woodwork. I even worked a couple of years in the basement and I didn't find out we were zone B three until I went to, for the permits to build the shop. I was like, Oh hell. You got to see that this, this property used to have a use variance. So.
00:43:24
Speaker
Might be able to get a, get that bag. I think so. I mean, I think what you have to, what I had to do is I had to go around to everybody that was in 200 feet of my property line and notify them of my hearing with the township. So they would have a chance to come in and object. Which is kind of a nerve wracking experience.
00:43:53
Speaker
Hey, I brought you a cake. And by the way, you're having this hearing. Right. Because it's shocking how many people, well, you know, see, you're lucky because you got in-laws across the street and you got the highway. So there's nobody over there. Yeah. I only got about one, two, three. But aside from my in-laws, four houses. Right. And I had the food town. Yeah.
00:44:22
Speaker
So, I mean, there weren't that many people, but I was still surprised at how far 200 feet went. Like when you go to that back corner where we put all the, the sawdust, like all those houses on the other block back there a bit, because they're so close together.
00:44:41
Speaker
Where were we? Few styles claimed to be rep... Oh, we were talking about how all-encompassing Art Nouveau was. And then we digressed from there. We went down the painted...
00:44:57
Speaker
So besides those who work mainly in the graphics and architecture and design, Art Nouveau had a lot of prominent artists in painting, Klimt. He was known for Hope II and The Kiss, both 1907 and 1908. I got a link to The Kiss because I wasn't familiar with it.
00:45:26
Speaker
That's what I thought. Didn't talk to me as Art Nouveau at all. But that's what he was well known for.
00:45:42
Speaker
It says Art Nouveau painters were few and far between. Klimt counted virtually no students or followers. So I guess he switched to the Art Nouveau style.
00:45:58
Speaker
Man, these names, this is, I apologize for this. Egon Scheele, a painter, went in the direction of expressionism, and Prouvay is known equally well as a sculptor and furniture designer. Do you know of any of Prouvay's work? No. No, me either.
00:46:19
Speaker
Instead, Art Nouveau was arguably responsible more than any style in history for narrowing the gap between the decorative or applied arts to utilitarian objects and the fine or purely ornamental arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, which traditionally had been considered more important. This is a terrible sentence.
00:46:48
Speaker
What am I trying to say here? More important, pure expressions of artistic talent and skill.
00:46:55
Speaker
I think there's supposed to be a common, a common cure. So it narrowed the gap between the decorative or applied arts to utilitarian objects. Um, so it like, you know, like you, have you ever heard of Phillip stock, Philippe stock? He like, he made those that orange juicer and things like that. Then it's familiar. S T A R C K E.
00:47:20
Speaker
I don't remember how he spelled his name. He was big in like the 80s in New York, like his stuff. But like taking a household utensil and making it a piece of art. So Art Nouveau did this more than any other movement.
00:47:40
Speaker
I probably could have summarized that sentence a little bit better. You know, when you're writing something in your head, you think it makes sense. Oh, yeah. And I must have read this like three or four times, but. Well, you start to glaze over. That's what happens.
00:48:02
Speaker
Here's what I put in parentheses. It's debatable, however, as to whether that gap has ever been completely closed. Of course it hasn't. Sometimes it goes too far. Yes. You know, the, the, it makes the thing less usable. Right. There's actually a really good series on, on YouTube. Who does it? I forget the channel, but it's a guy, he's like a product designer.
00:48:27
Speaker
And they take typically, it might be, I forget who does it, but I think it's a cooking channel. They take kitchen objects, like whatever, it could be a juicer. So they take like six juicers and he actually examines them and sees how they work, if they work well. Like he'll use his left hand to test the ergonomics of it and stuff like that. It's pretty cool. And you see, sometimes it goes too far. Like it looks really nice, but it doesn't work for shit.
00:48:57
Speaker
Mm hmm. Excuse me, it makes me think of like, like, do you say it? Oxo, you ever see those kitchens? Yeah. Like they have a definitive style. Yeah. Like all their stuff always looks kind of the same. I just got a new oxo pepper mill. Oh, there you go. My old oxo pepper mill rug.
00:49:17
Speaker
Where are we? So Art Nouveau's reputation for luxury was also evident by its exploitation by some of the best known glass artists in history. The only one I ever heard of, of course, was Tiffany. Yeah.
00:49:36
Speaker
And Tiffany actually was cited in the arts and crafts as well, I guess, because these it's it's a time period and he's jumping in between what's popular. And, you know, he's influenced in his own creations and designs by both these movements. But Emile Gall, the Dial Brothers, I guess they're I think they're Belgian or German and Jacques Groubert,
00:50:05
Speaker
They all were first known for their Art Nouveau glass and its applications in many utilitarian forms.
00:50:17
Speaker
Gall and Dom's first firms established their reputations in vase designs and art glass. They pioneered new techniques and acid etched pieces whose sinuously curved shapely surfaces seem to flow between translucent hues effortlessly. Unlike my pronunciation seashells by the seashore. I'm surprised I don't have more pictures here.
00:50:49
Speaker
This is a long. Yeah, there's there's no there's no break here. That's why I got you. I think I think where that blue is, there might be might be the end of end of the road for us in this. So this episode, yeah.
00:51:14
Speaker
So, where were we? Both Tiffany and Jacques Groubert. They had trained in Nancy with the Down Brothers. The Nancy School. They became specialists in stained glass. It celebrated the beauty of the natural world in large scale, luminant panels. And in jewelry, Renee Lalique. You've heard of Lalique.
00:51:39
Speaker
No, no. Lewis Comfort, Tiffany and Marcel Wolffers created some of the most prized pieces of turn of the century, of the turn of the century, producing everything from earrings to necklaces to bracelets, broaches, thereby assuring that Art Nouveau would always be associated with
00:52:03
Speaker
Oh, God. Vindice clay luxury. What is the error of the Faberge egg? Yes. Despite the hope that its ubiquity might make it universally accessible. Where am I going with this? I don't know. We're like we're almost halfway through the. Slow down.
00:52:31
Speaker
See what uh, well we got coming up later developments From Vener Verkstadt or Deco Is there a thing in there where it's an episode two? Oh, okay There's 26 pages here. Yeah, you got 12 pages on the first episode Well, it is what it is Listen buckle up for some out of off-kilter times deal with it
00:53:01
Speaker
scroll back too far. There we go. How much can one man write?
00:53:12
Speaker
So we're talking about Art Nouveau as a influence on all design, not just furniture, but as a, this all encompassing thing and retailing and corporate identity become something that didn't exist up until this point in time.
00:53:33
Speaker
Art Nouveau rises to prominence at the same time that retailing expands and is attracting this really massive audience for the first time. I don't really touch upon the growing middle class or anything like that. We did that in previous episodes.
00:53:55
Speaker
But it's featured prominently by many of the major urban department stores, which is a brand new thing established in the late 19th century, including La Samaritaine in Paris, Wertheims in Berlin, and
00:54:16
Speaker
The Maja scenes reuni in Nancy. Oh, Nancy. Now, Nancy, I'd never heard of this city, but it it's it's a pretty prominent place in the development of Art Nouveau. Furthermore, it was marketed aggressively by some of the most famous design outlets of the period, beginning with Siegfried Bing's L'Art Nouveau in Paris.
00:54:46
Speaker
which remained a bastion of the dissemination of the style until its closure in 1905 shortly after Bing's death. Oh, wow. Wasn't open very long. Yeah, that store is 10 years and it's like the sort of the birthplace of the movement. Yeah. Um, that said, his store was far from the only store in the city to specialize in art nouveau interiors and furniture. Um,
00:55:17
Speaker
I don't know when the first department store opened in America. Might've been something like Macy's or something like that, or I don't know. Woolworth, Woolworth. Was Lord and Taylor, did that used to be a department store? Yeah, yeah. Farmins, that's more like a pharmacy. Yeah. First department store.
00:55:46
Speaker
Well, it was Macy's in New York. Used to be something different, wasn't it? I don't think so. It had a different name. Like it was a different business before, you know, I'm talking about the Macy's, like the Thanksgiving Day Parade Macy's. Yeah, yeah. I think it used to be something else, wasn't it? Are you thinking of Sears and Roebuck or Macy's? I don't know. Wow. In 1826, Lord and Taylor opened its first store. Wow.
00:56:16
Speaker
History of Macy's, 1877. R.H. Macy. So it was called R.H. Macy. Yeah, 1902. I had no idea Lauren Taylor was that old. Me neither. Now, Lauren Taylor's just us clothes.
00:56:39
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I guess they sell, well, they sell cosmetics and stuff like that. Or do they, yeah, they don't sell any type of home. Oh, I don't think so. I've never been in one, but I think they're, they're more like, uh, we have one in the mall, you know, growing up and I thought it was just clothes and stuff. And they had, you know, makeup and, and like a jewelry. Like Nordstrom's or something like that. Yeah. Lord and Taylor building, million dollar corner, Herald square.
00:57:09
Speaker
Interesting. All right. So the U.S. had department stores at this time. Have you ever been in Macy's on 34th? No, I've, uh, I don't think I've ever even been in like Manhattan proper. Oh, wow.
00:57:38
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure when that store on 6th Avenue was built, but. You know, that's the, you know, it's in 1902. I don't know when the when Macy's Herald Square opened. Right. I don't know if it was built, you know, the building was maybe the building was there before, but yeah, that's the that's the Santa Claus Macy's. Yeah. And what's the name of that movie? Miracle on 34th Street. Yeah. Yeah.
00:58:08
Speaker
All right, so Art Nouveau is big. It's at the same time as these department stores are popping up and tons of people are shopping now. Everybody's got a little extra money in their pocket because of industrialization.
00:58:27
Speaker
And in Italy, you have Liberty and Company. That's the big store. They became synonymous with the style. And many Art Nouveau designers made their names work exclusively for these particular retailers before moving in other directions.
00:58:45
Speaker
Architect Peter Behrens, for example, designed virtually everything from tea kettles, to book covers, to advertising posters, and exhibition pavilions interiors, utensils, furniture, even becoming the first industrial designer, when in 1907 he was put in charge of all design work for AEG, which is Algermane Electrastats,
00:59:14
Speaker
Gesellschaft. That's the German German General Electric. Yeah, AG store, I think. So what happens after Art Nouveau? If Art Nouveau quickly took Europe by storm in the last five years of the 19th century,
00:59:36
Speaker
Artists, designers, and architects abandoned it just as quickly in the first decade of the 20th century. Isn't that funny? Like throwing a match into a fire. I mean, we just spent like 45 minutes talking about how all-encompassing Art Nouveau was. And then it just, you know, they dropped it like a hot rock. Flash in the pan. Yeah.
01:00:06
Speaker
Although many of us practitioners had made the doctrine that form should follow function central to their ethos, some designers tended to be lavish in their use of decoration and the style began to be criticized for being overly elaborate.
01:00:23
Speaker
So they just took it too far. Yeah. Arts and crafts sort of elbow on its way back. In a sense, as the style matured, it started to revert to the very habits it had scorned and a growing number of opponents began to charge that rather than renewing design, it had merely swapped the old for the superficially new.
01:00:47
Speaker
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. And the man plays on. Won't get fooled again.
01:01:02
Speaker
That's what happens. Even using new mass production methods, the intensive craftsmanship involved in much art nouveau design kept it from becoming truly accessible to mass audiences as its exponents had initially hoped it might. That's one thing I did remember.
01:01:25
Speaker
Nobody could afford it. In some cases, such as in Darmstadt, lax international copyright laws also prevented artists from monetarily benefiting from their designs.
01:01:44
Speaker
little glimpse into the future there, you know, cheap knockoffs and people stealing original designs. Now there's, you know, fast fashion and fast furniture. It's all, you know, you, all you need is a look in your head and you can get it for next to nothing somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It might not be the real thing, but it's close enough for most people.
01:02:07
Speaker
Yes. Art Nouveau's association with exhibitions also soon contributed to its undoing. To begin with, most of the fair buildings themselves were temporary structures that were torn down immediately after the event closed. Jesus.
01:02:28
Speaker
Wow, what a waste. I mean, you can imagine the amount of work that went into that. But more importantly, the expositions themselves, though held under the guise of promoting education, international understanding and peace, instead tended to fuel rivalry and competition among nations due to the inherently comparative nature of display.
01:02:54
Speaker
So it wasn't all popcorn and lollipops or whatever that phrase is. Sugar and spice and everything nice. Many countries, including France and Belgium, considered Art Nouveau as potential contenders for the title of national style.
01:03:14
Speaker
before charges of Art Nouveau's foreign origins or subversive politics, political undertones. Because in France, it was variously associated with Belgian designers and German merchants and was sometimes the style used in socialist buildings. How dare they term public opinion against it.
01:03:39
Speaker
with a few notable exceptions where it enjoyed a committed circle of dedicated local patrons. By 1910, Art Nouveau had vanished from the European design landscape. Wow, I had no idea it was so fleeting. Me either. From Weiner, Workstatt to Art Deco. Okay, that's the title here.
01:04:08
Speaker
Art Nouveau's death began in Germany and Austria, where designers such as Peter Behrens and Joseph Hoffman and Koloman Moser began to turn towards a sparer, more severely geometric aesthetic, as early as 1903. Moser, that's right, I wonder.
01:04:32
Speaker
That year, many designers formally associated with the Vienna secession founded the collective known as the Weiner Werkstadt, whose preference for starkly angular and rectilinear forms recalled a more precise, industrially inspired aesthetic that omitted any overt references to nature. Sounds like a little bit like Bauhaus. Yeah, there you go. German.
01:05:01
Speaker
Viner Birkstadt sounds very familiar. Yeah. Yeah. I think work start is like workstation or something like that. Um, this reification of the machine made qualities of design was underscored in 1907 by two key events.
01:05:20
Speaker
The installation of Behrens as AEG's chief of all corporate design, from buildings to products to advertising. Again, making him the first industrial designer in the world. And the founding of the German Werkbund, the formal alliance between industrialists and designers that increasingly attempted to define a system of product types based on standardization.
01:05:49
Speaker
Wow, so this is a real movement away from nature inspired, florid design to almost like a stark utilitarian sort of simplicity.
01:06:08
Speaker
Yeah. And it's kind of what we think of with German design too, isn't it? Um, so we're moving away from, uh, something centered in France, more or less the something centered in Germany, those Nancy boys out in France, the school of Nancy.
01:06:31
Speaker
So, combined with a newfound respect for classicism, boy, there's such a strong reaction to Art Nouveau, isn't there? I mean, it just shoots people back into the opposite direction.
01:06:46
Speaker
Inspired in part by the world's Colombian exposition in Chicago in 1893, and given an official blessing by the city beautiful movement in the US, this machine inspired aesthetic would eventually develop in the aftermath of World War I into the style that we now belatedly call Art Deco. So before this, I would have thought Art Deco and Art Nouveau were the same things.
01:07:15
Speaker
I always thought Art Deco came, I maybe didn't know about the timeline, but Art Nouveau, more curvaceous and Art Deco to me, more straight lines. You're exactly right. I thought they were the same name for the same, you know, two different names for the same thing, but they're not. That building that we looked at before in Paris with the big tree, to me that looked almost Art Deco. Aside from the rounded,
01:07:41
Speaker
You know, but those straight sort of monitors on the top of the building with the to me that looked very Art Deco.
01:07:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I always think of with Art Deco, the very angular, boxy kind of... Like the Empire State Building. Yeah, yeah. Chrysler Building is another great example. So, its distinctly commercial character was expressed most succinctly at the Exposition Internationale
01:08:12
Speaker
There are decorative industrial modern in Paris in 1925, the event which would in the 1960s give Art Deco its name. So Art Deco wasn't named till well after its prominence as a style.
01:08:37
Speaker
It kind of comes out of Art Nouveau. It's influenced by this German aesthetic, machine made, and becomes Art Deco. So postmodern influences of Art Nouveau, despite its brief life,
01:08:57
Speaker
Art Nouveau would prove influential in the 60s and 70s to designers wishing to break free of the confining austere and personal and increasingly minimal aesthetic that prevailed in the graphic arts. The free flowing uncontrolled linear qualities of Art Nouveau became an inspiration for artists such as Peter Maxx, you know him, right? Nope.
01:09:24
Speaker
You know like the Beatles yellow submarine. Yep, that's Peter Mac. Okay And so I could see that influence definitely. Oh, yeah so Peter Max who's evocation of dreamy psychedelic alternative experience recalls the imaginative ephemeral and free-flowing aesthetic world of the turn of the century and
01:09:51
Speaker
always recognized from the start as an important step in the development of modernism in both art and architecture. Today Art Nouveau is understood less as a transitional bridge between art periods as it is an expression of the style, spirit, and intellectual thought of a certain time frame.
01:10:12
Speaker
centered around 1900. In its search to establish a truly modern aesthetic, it became a defining visual language for a fleeting moment of the age.
01:10:26
Speaker
Well, so I guess that kind of summarizes why we had this long meandering episode where we didn't really have our, for us, our traditional formatting, you know, was
01:10:45
Speaker
Art Nouveau was almost like a a way of thinking about things. Yeah. And less, you know, while we have this movement, this reaction from that was against although there was the reaction against the Victorian ideal, which kind of kicked it off.
01:11:13
Speaker
it didn't really follow the same footsteps as a lot of our other periods of furniture. And it didn't have like one or two main guys, which drove it that we're used to, you know, we're kind of, we've been going through and there've been, you know, Sheridan and Chippendale, and they kind of come out with this way of looking at furniture and building it. And then everybody imitates that.
01:11:43
Speaker
This kind of opened up thought and it was just more expressive, I guess. It was sort of everybody who was within any type of, you know, the creative world. Yeah. And one thing we're going to see as we get into looking at the furniture and some visual examples,
01:12:13
Speaker
symmetry was really not part of our nouveau.
01:12:23
Speaker
I guess this is where we're going to leave our first episode. Yeah, we better not talk too much because we better save it for we're about halfway through. Yeah, we're halfway through. Yeah, we got three more episodes. So yeah, we'll leave you at that. If you want to help support the podcast, you can join the Patreon. You can leave us a review on Apple Apple Podcast. I don't know if Spotify Spotify might have reviews. Maybe get yourself some vesting.
01:12:51
Speaker
If you have any questions about vesting, you can always message us on Instagram. Use our code American Craftsmen over there and you can use it at bits and bits as well. So thanks guys. Thanks for listening. Yeah. We'll see you next week.
01:13:20
Speaker
Ain't no shame, but there's been a chain