Art Nouveau - by Charlotte Ashby (Paperback)

About the Book

"Art Nouveau: Art, Architecture and Design in Transformation presents a new overview of the international Art Nouveau movement. Art Nouveau, Charlotte Ashby argues, represented the search for a new style for a new age, and hence a response to the conditions of modernity, in a world transformed by developments such as industrialisation, the growth of new cities, and the movements of populations into these cities, bringing about new ways of living, working and making that were felt to be fundamentally different to what had gone before. The book is structured around key themes for understanding the aesthetics and contexts of Art Nouveau, including form and ornament, symbolism and psychology, new forms of transport and communication, colonialism and imperialism, the rise of the 'modern woman' and the role of the patron-collector and the professional designer. Ashby explores the movement through 65 varied case studies of architecture, interiors, paintings, furniture, graphic arts, glass and ceramics by artists and designers, drawn from eighteen countries from a wide range of countries"--

Book Synopsis

Art Nouveau presents a new overview of the international Art Nouveau movement. Art Nouveau represented the search for a new style for a new age, a sense that the conditions of modernity called for fundamentally new means of expression. Art Nouveau emerged in a world transformed by industrialisation, urbanisation and increasingly rapid means of transnational exchange, bringing about new ways of living, working and creating.

This book is structured around key themes for understanding the contexts behind Art Nouveau, including new materials and technologies, colonialism and imperialism, the rise of the 'modern woman', the rise of the professional designer and the role of the patron-collector. It also explores the new ideas that inspired Art Nouveau: nature and the natural sciences, world arts and world religions, psychology and new visions for the modern self. Ashby explores the movement through 41 case studies of artists and designers, buildings, interiors, paintings, graphic arts, glass, ceramics and jewellery, drawn from a wide range of countries.

Review Quotes

Ashby's book examines afresh the complex origins, conditions and manifestations of International Art Nouveau through a series of evocative case studies drawn from a range of national contexts and organised around a series of compelling themes. This complicates and challenges our understanding of this key period in modern art, architecture and design and opens up fascinating new insights into the ways in which diverse historical actors grabbled with a rapidly changing world in their search for "a modern style for a modern age"

Fresh and original in its approach, this study provides a comprehensive overview of Art Nouveau that considers the movement's origins in imperialism and networks of global trade alongside its links to the emerging discipline of psychoanalysis, the concept of the "New Woman", and new patterns of patronage in the arts. By casting formal innovation and experimentation as profoundly entangled with the social, political, and economic transformations of fin-de-siècle society, Art Nouveaupromises to forever change the way that we understand this movement and its relevance to our own historical moment.

About the Author

Charlotte Ashby is an art and design historian and Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She is the author of Modernism in Scandinavia (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870s-1920s (2019).