The Modern Art Review: Art Nouveau

Much absinthe was consumed in the service of this visual enterprise. Heavily influenced by Japanese woodcuts and neoclassical sensibilities, Art Nouveau enjoyed a fifteen year reign during the Bohemian revolution of 1890-1905. Their concepts were simple: art must be a component of everyday life; it must infuse furniture, architecture, instruments, china, sidewalks and bathroom stalls. They called for utilitarianism as well as florality (in fact, a leading inspiration of the movement was the behavior, character and design of flowers). Their style--large planes of color and stark contours--was bred for lithography, and most of their creations were rendered as posters. This added to the utilitarianism of their school, for posters were an everyday art that hung on alley walls outside the Moulin Rogue as well as in the marble halls of the Louvre. And they did.

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa is the poster child of Art Nouveau, quite literally. His Japanese-style prints were formed of brilliantly balanced planes of negative and positive space, sculpting three dimensions out of two through erotic reds, smoldering blacks, and blazing whites, constantly evoking either the scalding emotions of passion or the alarming disgust of the underworld through phantasmic greys, cadaverous greens and lycanthropic browns. This is wonderfully accomplished in "Queen of Joy with Victor Joze," where the cherry red is catapulted to the foreground by the ponderous blacks. She is forward, agressive, and alive, leaping past the white table cloth into the viewers' laps. The flame-colored chair and hair flank her lilly-colored caress, forcing the kiss, and filling it with sparking energy. The unshaded areas of postive space are manipulated in such a way that the frantic angles invest it with awkard, even threatening veracity, and it is only with deliberate observation that the illusion is broken and the two dimensional contours fall flat.

 Apart from his poster-work, Toulouse-Lautrec was a brilliant post-impressionistic draftsman, pouring the rabid vibrancy of impressionistic detail into the solemn misery of

deep moments of humanity. His paintings depict suspicious lesbians, solitary absinthines, and anxious performers. He subject matter was largely collected from the halls of the Moulin Rogue, where the freaks and bohemians found escape at night and despair in day. This colorful depiction of Van Gogh contains the contrasts of livid violets, scarlets and goldenrod, and the plaintive, lonesome posture of its famed sitter, three years before his suicide.

The Austrian, Gustav Klimt, is notable for his emphases on design, pattern and ornamentation. His works, such as Judith Holding the Head of Holofrenes and The Kiss, are comilations of 3D figures emplanted in 2D worlds. Judith is larger than life, towering and potent, draped in bizarre jewelry that reckons distant and forgotten--potentially dangerous--cultures. Her necklace enthrones her head, and the arabesques that flourish, plantlike, in the brilliant gilding behind her give the impression of semetic antiquity, perhaps implying her divinity in a mystic sect. Her ornamentation draws us in, both surging ahead of her and retreating behind her, causing her image to flicker like a fish's lure. But the dark head which she obscures in the corner, warns of the cost for living in her gilded web.

Likewise, the two lovers appear fossilized in their two dimensions, but their arrested nature is simultaneously fluid and frozen, another example of Klimt's obsession with the coexistence of nurturing and destructive poles. They are glitteringly awake, but like insects fossilized in amber bulbs, they are quiet and  unmoving. Their liquid ecstacy is crisp and brittle.

Aubrey Beardsley's work is succinctly florid. It is founded on sweeping contour, but is infused with a throbbing sensation of horror. It is no surprise that his interpretation of Art Nouveau--in typical utilitarian fashion--was often enlisted for to illustrate Poe, Nordic myths, and gothic tragedies. His illustration for "The Pit and the Pendelum" is grotesque. It looks nothing like most depictions. The blade, unlike most masculine sickles, is a modest twist of metal, flying coolly by, hardly distinguishable from the time mechanism. The victim, swaddled in dark strands of fabric, is more disturbing than a man strapped to a board. His hanuted gaze seeps from the page, and his limp, packaged figure recalls the exhausted resignation of a moth in a spider's web. It rejects all previous depictions and shocks with its nihlistic passivity.

His illustration of Isolde, from the Franco-Germanic myth, turned Wagnerian opera, is dominated by a red drape. It is the drape, not the heroine, which is important. Again, Beardsley disappoints traditional expectations, causing seething anxiety and brutal confusion. The scarlet is not erotic or violent, it simply is. It throbs watchfully from the background, like the fateful doom that hovers over she and her lover Tristan. It awaits in the background, aware and profound. It is not tense, as if ready to pounce, but relaxed and reassured. The Japanese planes of red and white flow into one another with certainty, and her doom is not quick or shocking, but like the agony of Poe's protagonist, it is docilely certain, mocking the romanticism of past illustrators with a nihlistic construct of a certain demise. Appropriately, he died of consumption.

Review by Michael Kellermeyer