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ART NOUVEAU

Viennese Secession

Art Deco

Architecture

Considered the Modern Era of architecture, we see several styles of architecture stemming from artistic styles. These include Art Nouveau, Viennese Secession, Jugenstil, and Art Deco. 

 

Art Nouveau was popular in Scotland, England, France, and Czechoslovakia. It utulized curves, swirls and whiplash curves to integrate nature as a decorative element. Using new techniques of bending wood, it perfectly blended the natural beautiful world and the beastly, manufactured world. Even in the decorative arts, elements of both the beautiful and the grotesque were used. The curves and swirls were bendable, flexible, malleable but NOT breakable and there was a powerful statement made by that concept. There was a combination of asymmetry with a natural balance and proportion of features. The ability of air to mingle with the architecture and furniture truly melded nature to the manmade. 

 

The Viennese Secession used stylist elements of Art Nouveau but leaned more on geometric shapes to create a more industrial and linear aesthetic. Architects and artists incorporated metal, and the new ability to bend metal into their works. The main designer of this style was Josef Hoffman. 

 

Jugenstil was a German movement that took the Art Nouveau tenants of line and style but making it much more symmetrical than what was happening in France, Spain, and Belgium.

 

Art Deco was mainly a North American style of architecture based in Geometry and Egyptian aesthetics. There was a focus on geometrical shapes and arches. Just like in Ancient Egypt, Art Deco architects embraced gold and metallics to play with light and how if affects a space. Popular motifs included sunbursts and mirrors.

Costumes

This period is marked by three distinct styles and periods in fashion: The Belle Epoch (1890s), the Edwardian Period (1900 - 1914), and Prohibition (1920s). Each of these decades had clear shift in silhouette and style for women. 

 

Women: In the Belle Epoch period, the sleeve of women's dresses becomes outrageously large, causing the waist and head to appear abnormally small in comparison. Women's fashion became more masculine and took elements of men's style, like the pleated shirt. The bustle of the Victorian period begins to go away and the exaggerated fullness moves to the torso. In the Edwardian period, the torso became a rigid s-shape. With a full bust that stuck out and was accentuated by pleats and excess fabric. The s-curve corsets pushed the hips backwards. Although the understructure was rigid, there was a curvyness and softness that contrasted from the very structured style of the Victorian period or even the Belle Epoch Period. Where the Belle Epoch period was more masculine, the Edwardian period pushed for feminitity by adding lots of lace and frills. The ideal woman was known as the Gibson Girl. As the period progressed, skirts shortened to the ankle and the entire body silhouette became columnar topped off with an oversized hat. The fullness of the sleeves narrowed tremendously. Corset shapes varied greatly based on the activities of the wearer. Between 1915 - 1920, corsets transformed into girdles, beginning below the bust and pulling in the waist and hips. The need for tight-lacing became less and less important. As Prohibition began in the 1920s, women asserted their dominance in another way. The silhouette was relatively narrow and boxy. The hemline became shorter and shorter. Corsets disappeared entirely and if a woman wore a girdle it was just to shape the body. Big busted women would wear a brassiere to bind in the bust to stay in line with the column silhouette. Waists lowered to the hips by 1925 and the Art Deco (particularly in the US) created a desire to glamour up women's dresses with beading and metallic thread to mimic the new Egyptian aesthetic. 

 

Men: Men's fashion did not change much over this entire period. Suit jackets were boxier and pants narrower at the cuff than in the Victorian Period. Shirts usually closed in the back and the front pleating was built in with a faux closure. There was a huge variation in collar types (that could attach to your shirt with buttons) and ways to tie the neckties. The collar and tie allowed men to show a little bit of their personality while still fitting in with the silhouette. For formal occasions, the fashion became more comfortable and relaxed. Instead of being strictly tail coats, tuxedo jackets became much more accepted. During the Prohibition (1920s), coats became more fitted to the body with individual tailoring becoming more affordable. Lapels and pants began to widen while coat lengths shortened. The silhouette continued to get more and more casual as the period went on. Sweaters began to be worn as daywear instead of just for sports.

 

Theatre

Faced with World War I and the overwhelming emotions that could come out of the war, theatre created a genre to aid in the ability of people to escape reality for the evening. Edwardian musical comedies was the first type of musical that began in Britain and will eventually become the US version of musical theatre. Burlesques were slowly dwindling in popularity as well as the family-friendly Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Beginning in the Gaiety Theatre, George Edwardes experimented by putting up a family friendly show mixing popoular songs, romantic banter, and spectacle. The style quickly caught on and spread throughout Europe. The Gaiety Theatre then added a chorus of dancing women wearing fashionable dress to try to sell more tickets. This is where the modern musical chorus comes from (stemming all the way back to a Greek Chorus). 

 

Towards the middle of the nineteen teens, Antonin Artuad (a surrealist) began experimenting with theatre in France and this eventually developed into the Theatre of Cruelty (with the help of Andre Breton). This style of theatre put harsh criticisms on the current structure of society and a revolt against the ideas that started WWI. The style of production for Theatre of Cruelty was a large room with chairs that the audience can sit and the actors perform amongst and around them. Theatrical elements included loud sounds and harsh lights to shock the audience and push them to think by wearing down their senses.

 

Aside from theatre, film was beginning to boom all over the world. From here on, theatre and film will compete for ticket sales. Theare will continue to get bigger and more spectacle filled to try and entice audiences.

Artists

Alphonse Mucha

Aubrey Beardsley

Gustav Klimt

Diego Rivera

Pablo Picasso

Following the stylistic aesthetics of architecture, there were several classifications of fine art during this period. Art Nouveau artists like Mucha and Beardsley used the curves and swirls of architecture in their art for posters and illustrations. While Mucha chose more natural colors in golds and greens, Beardsley's illustrations are generally in black and white. Klimt was a leader of the Viennese Secession. Although this implies he is part of the Vienna group, there is not a unifying aesthetic coming out of Austria at the time. Klimt uses the colors and metallics of Art Deco with the geometric quality of Viennese architecture or post-impressionists. Towards the end of the period, artists like Picasso and Rivera abstract form further in the Cubist style. This abstraction goes so far that the subject matter of some paintings are almost undiscipherable. 

 

All of these styles in fine art can be grouped together under the umbrella of Symbolism. All of the styles are a reaction against naturalism and realism. All styles begin with real subject matter and use methods to abstract them to form an emotional or symbolic meaning. That is why this period is typically referred to as Symbolists.

SYMBOLISM

Symbolism actually refers to an art movement during the last decade of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In Europe this period can be broken down into the end of the Victorian Period into the Edwardian Period (Reigns of King Edwards) at a time of industrial innovation (the Machine Age). In the United States, this period is the end of the Guilded Age into the Progressive Era. There are several world-wide events and movements that unify this period, including: Art Nouveau, Industrial innovations,  and World War I. All over the world, people are trying to define who they are and what they own, whether that was through women's sufferage, colonization, labor strikes, or the delineation of social classes.

Important Dates:

 

1881 - 1905 : 37,000 Labor Strikes occur over unsafe/unfair condition

1884 - Berlin Conference 

1890 - Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota

1893 - Stock Market Panic causes economic depression

1895 - Lumiere Brothers Patent Cinematographe

1896 - First Olympic Games in Athens

1898 - US declares war with Spain

1900 - Sigmund Freud Publishes The Interpretation of Dreams

1901 - First Nobel Prizes Awarded

1902 - Chinese Exclusion Act passed in US

1903 - Wright Brothers make First Flight

1905 - Einstein proposes Theory of Relativity

1909 - Plastic invented

1909 - American Film Companies Move to California

1911 - Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

1914 - Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassinated, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

1914 - World War I Begins: US joins 1917

1919 - Treaty of Versialles Ends WWI

1920 - Prohibition Begins in US

1920 - Women Granted the Right to Vote

1922 - Tomb of King Tut Discovered

The Old Guitarist. Pablo Picasso. c. 1903. Chicago Institute of Art. Oil on Canvas. As a reaction to Realism and Naturalism, artists, fashion designers, and architects seek new styles that could reflect the emotional turmoil felt in a period of War and Self-discovery.

Women's Roles

 

Women's place in society during the turn of the century was definitely a confusing one. Going from a place in society of running the household and raising children, women's roles changed quickly with the onset of World War. Women were asked to take the place of men in factories, put themselves in danger by nursing sick soldiers back to health, sell war bonds, and still manage the households. Just as abruptly, they were being pushed to go back to those domestic roles once the war ended. Struggling to find their own place in society, Women's suffrage fought for the right of women to vote. Upon succeeding, this would give women a say in how society views them and in turn gives them the power to decide how they spend their lives. 

Science

 

The discovery of radioactivity in 1896 challenged the old ideas of the immutability of atoms. Followed by the discovery of electrons in 1897, huge questions were left regarding scientific evidence to support everything that we thought to be true about physics. Albert Einstein published a series of papers in 1905 that completely redirected the discipline of physics. Einstein took theories of Isaac Newton about the speed of objects and expanded upon them to suggest that there may exist speeds greater than the speed of light. That everything is relative based on a series of factors. In order to further explain this, he proposed that E=mc2. Further publications by Einstein in 1915 about general relativity and the observation of a solar eclipse in 1919, proved his theories.

 

Gregor Mendel around 1900, began work on Darwin's theory of evolution to eventually determine that characteristics of genetic code can be passed down from parents and you can safely predict what characteristics offspring may have. 

Music

 

With the popularity of radio rapidly growing, and it becoming an affordable type of entertainment for all social classes, music hit a rapid increase in artists, methods of recording, reproducing, and distributing music. Headphones were invented and sold so that wearers could sit close to radios and listen to programs that could not only not disturb the people around them, but another person could listen to their own selection of radio or music. In addition to music, radio brought an increase to new broadcasts (particularly updates on the War), sports broadcasts (Babe Ruth had just joined the Yankees), as well as radio stories.

Bibliography

 

Bernstein, George Lurcy. Liberalism and Liberal Politics in Edwardian England. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986.

 

Breeze, Carla. American Art Deco: Architecture and Regionalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

 

Cabanne, Pierre. Cubism. London; Paris: Terrail, 2001.

 

Carlisle, Rodney P. World War I. New York: Facts On File, Inc, 2007.

 

Collins, Ross F. World War I: Primary Documents on Events from 1914 to 1919. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2008.

 

Crawford, Elizabeth. The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928. London: UCL Press, 1999.

 

Gernsheim, Alison. Victorian & Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey. New York: Dover Publications, 1981.

 

Goldwater, Robert John. Symbolism. New York: Westview Press, 1979.

 

Haq, Amber. Roaring into Fashion: The 1920s Saw the Liberation of the Female Form-and the Birth of Haute Couture. 150 Vol. New York: The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC, 2007.

 

Holton, Sandra Stanley. Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. New York; London: Routledge, 1996.

 

MacCann, Richard Dyer. Films of the 1920s. Iowa City, Iowa; Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

 

Mackintosh, Alastair. Symbolism and Art Nouveau. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.

 

Olian, JoAnne. Victorian and Edwardian Fashions from "La Mode Illustrée. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1998.

 

Read, Donald. Edwardian England, 1901-15: Society and Politics. London: Harrap, 1972.

 

Selz, Peter, and Mildred Constantine. Art Nouveau: Art and Design at the Turn of the Century. New York: Museum of Modern art, 1959.

 

Sembach, Klaus-Jürgen. Art Nouveau: Utopia, Reconciling the Irreconcilable. London; Köln: Taschen, 2000.

 

Wolf, Norbert. Art Deco. Munich: Prestel, 2013.

STYLES MORGUE

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