Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an art movement of the 1880–1910 period. The gallery holds 490 works in this movement, including works by Alphonse Mucha, Piet Mondrian and Charles Demuth. Browse Art Nouveau paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Art Nouveau—French for "new art"—was an international style of art, architecture, and the applied arts that flourished from roughly 1890 to 1910. It took its name from the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, the Paris gallery opened by the German-born dealer Siegfried Bing on 26 December 1895, which showcased innovative design from across Europe. The movement was a deliberate revolt against the imitative historicism that dominated nineteenth-century taste and against the coarseness of industrial mass production. Practitioners sought a wholly modern idiom and, crucially, the dissolution of the old hierarchy that ranked painting and sculpture above the "decorative" crafts—an ambition inherited in part from the English Arts and Crafts movement.

Its defining visual signature is the line: long, sinuous, organic curves drawn from plant stems, tendrils, flowing hair, and the forms of deep-sea organisms. The most emblematic of these is the "whiplash"—a tense, sharply accelerating S-curve that snaps and reverses direction. Asymmetry, flattened ornament, and an embrace of the "total work of art," in which architecture, furniture, glass, and metalwork were conceived as a unified whole, are equally characteristic. The flat patterning and decorative economy of Japanese prints (japonisme) were a profound formative influence.

The style spread under many regional names: Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Stile Liberty in Italy, and Modernisme in Catalonia. Its canonical figures span media. Victor Horta's Hôtel Tassel in Brussels (1892–93) is often called the first fully realized Art Nouveau interior; Hector Guimard's cast-iron Paris Métro entrances (1900) brought the style to the street. Alphonse Mucha defined its graphic vocabulary through lithographic posters for the actress Sarah Bernhardt, while Émile Gallé and Louis Comfort Tiffany transformed glass, and Antoni Gaudí carried it to visionary extremes in Barcelona. In painting, Gustav Klimt—a founder of the Vienna Secession (1897)—fused Art Nouveau ornament with Symbolist content in works such as his shimmering society portraits.

Art Nouveau waned before the First World War, eclipsed by the harder geometries of Art Deco and modernism, yet its legacy endured. It overlapped with Aestheticism and Symbolism, grew from Arts and Crafts ideals, and its insistence on integrating fine and applied art reshaped twentieth-century design thinking. The catalogue holds notable examples, including Mucha's *Maude Adams as Joan of Arc* and Klimt's portrait of *Serena Pulitzer Lederer*.