July 11, 2018 Comments Off on Bring art to every household: the wonder of the Art Nouveau furniture Views: 2440 Looking Back, Nostalgia

Who wants their furniture at home boring?

The designers of the Art Nouveau furniture certainly didn’t.

When they first appeared at the end of the 19th century, they uproared our living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms. For a moment, the movement was omnipresent: in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, to London… to the other side of the Atlantic in the U.S. as well.

Distinctive for its sense of long and sinuous lines, Art Nouveau furniture added new flavors to interiors. Suddenly there were all these vivid, unfamiliar shapes and curls, composed in an organic and fashionable manner. Some pieces were embellished with elongated curing lines that would bend back on themselves or whiplash curves.

The linear quality and flattened spaces – European designers adopted that from Asian cultures such as the Japanese art movement.

One enthusiast who helped introduce Japanese styles and artworks to the West was German-French art dealer Siegfried Bing. The Maison de l’Art Nouveau gallery and shop which he opened in Paris in 1895, stirred artists across the country and also in neighboring Belgium. In these two countries in Europe, the ‘new art’ was more commonplace than anywhere else.

Artists and creators of Art Nouveau furniture continually offered attention-grabbing pieces, just like Art Nouveau architects persistently rejuvenated public spaces with new building and facade solutions.

The Art Nouveau designation stood precisely for ‘new art.’ The movement, in general, aimed to accomplish a new style at the turn of the century: to set a new mode which meant abandoning any notion of old outdated styles that belonged to the dying 19th century.

Another purpose of the movement was to offer quality designs and craftsmanship.

Furniture manufacturers typically worked with the finest types of woods such as oak, walnut, and teak. Metal and glass were also favorites, combined and incorporated meticulously in the entire furniture composition.

However, some hopes and dreams of the Art Nouveau designers were unreal. As much as they wanted everyone to worship good craftsmanship in an age of growing mass-production, as much as they wanted to reignite art in every household, they never managed at entirely replacing other furniture styles.

First, working with super quality woods such as oak and walnut was costly. Then, producing a genuine piece of furniture with all its distinctive curved elements also required a lot of time and great knowledge. The style was simply unaffordable to go mainstream.

Though the Art Nouveau was shortlived, it had a lasting effect. It is sometimes described as the first ‘modern style’ and it subsequently bolstered other art and design movements such as the Art Deco and Modernism.

We also though to remind you of some Belgian urbanscapes back in the day

Tags: Art Nouveau, Art Nouveau furniture, Brussels, Paris