Art Nouveau

Curving lines, plant forms, compositions that refuse symmetry. Architecture, glass, jewelry, posters — everything drifted the same direction at once. The name means new art. The phrase itself had already appeared in a Belgian magazine in the 1880s, but it was a single shop that turned it into a style's name: in 1895, Siegfried Bing opened a gallery called Maison de l'Art Nouveau on the Rue de Provence in Paris. The shop's name became the era's name. And Bing himself had been an importer of Japanese art since the 1870s. Starting in 1888, he published a magazine — Le Japon artistique, in French, English, and German, the English edition running as Artistic Japan — that carried ukiyo-e's flat color fields and bold compositions across Europe. So this whole current is Japonisme flowing out through a different door than Impressionism. One more thing worth knowing: by around 1910 the style was dismissed as dated and largely forgotten for almost half a century. It was reconsidered starting with a 1959 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art and a 1960 show at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Here too, the work arrived late.