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The End of a Century - Art Nouveau Style

© Barbara Nicholson Bell

"The end of the century brought the dawning of a new age and a new attitude toward life. It was an era when social differences dissipated and the mores, customs, and expectations of the citizenry came together...The burgeoning middle classes had a voice and a visible presence, and reaped the rewards of the economy they created. Nowhere was their presence more apparent than in the increased desire for popular entertainment." Can you guess the year described in the above sentences? If you guessed 1999, you'd be only 100 years off. It is a description of the year 1899 and the last decade before the turn of the 20th century.

The end of the 19th century is often called "La Belle Époque" - or "beautiful era." It was a time when the technological and social changes affected the daily lives of people who only a generation before had lived almost medieval lives. The wonders of the modern world which sprang into being in the 1880s and 1890's brought the first rewards of modern industrialization and mass-produced abundance.

Not only was there more money spread among more people, there were many more ways to spend it. More food, more fashion, more entertainment, more travel, more newspapers and books. "It was as social historians have characterized it, the dawning of the age of material novelties, heard in the clatter of the telegraph, the jingle of the telephone and the cacophony of the first mass-produced typewriters, experienced in the eerie feeling of ascent on the first elevator rides, the dazzling aura of electric light, and the new, democratic mobility of the bicycle." For a fascinating and comprehensive overview of the fin-de-siecle period, I am grateful to the San Diego Art Museum website featuring Toulouse-Lautrec and his works.

Around 1890, a new style of design in architecture, furniture, clothing, commercial art, and household articles began to appear. It took its name from a Paris shop owned by Siegfried Bing. This elusive and brilliant connoisseur and entrepreneur may well be called the "father" of Art Nouveau. A traveling exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution in 1986-1987 brought Bing's role to the attention of the international art and academic community.

Bing as an entrepreneur could deal in art as both an investor and a patron. France had suffered a lack of innovation and creativity in design compared to the excitement of the Arts & Crafts movement in England, the Jugendstil movement in Germany and the Stilo Liberty in Italy. Even the United States had its abundance of arts and crafts advocates. Bing remedied the situation with his unusual talent of anticipating public taste. An admirer of the Japanese aesthetic, Bing believed that new design would naturally follow if one simply applied Japanese design principles to everyday objects. The French at this time were fascinated by anything Japanese ("japonisme") and Bing capitalized on this by opening his own workshop, or "atelier," where furniture, wall coverings, appliances and other utilitarian objects were created in a single esthetic concept.

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