write a informative abstract

Write an informative abstract of the article” ART NOUVEAU”

ARTNOUVEAU

from Art History, volume 2 by Marilyn
Stokstad

Art Nouveau was essentially a Continental

development with roots in the English Arts

and Crafts movement. Like that movement,

it emerged initially in response to a world’s

fair, in the case the Paris Universal

Exposition of 1889. The centerpiece of the

fair was an enormous tower designed by

civil engineer gustave Eiffel (1832-1923),

the winner of a competition for the design of

a monument that would symbolize French

industrial progress. The Eiffel Tower,

composed of iron lattice-work, stands on

four huge legs reinforced by trussed arches

like those Eiffel used for his famous railway

bridges. The passenger elevators,

themselves an innovation, allowed fairgoers

to ascend to the top of what was then, at 984

feet, the tallest structure in the world.

Although the French public loved the tower,

most architects, artists, and writers found it

completely lacking in beauty. Even before it

was completed, several dozen of them

signed a petition protesting it to the

government: “This tower dominating Paris,

like a gigantic and black factory chimney,

crushing with its barbarous mass Notre-

Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle…all our

monuments humiliated…And in twenty

years we shall see, stretching over the entire

city…the odious shadow of the odious

column built up of riveted iron plates.” The

last part of their protest refers not the literal

shadow of the tower but to its metaphorical

one, the negative influence many people

anticipated it would have on the future of

architecture in Paris.

Art Nouveau, a style that attempted to be

modern without the loss of a preindustrial

sense of beauty, was one response to this

concern, which extended beyond the French

borders. Art Nouveau’s commitment to the

organically beautiful and its emphasis on

traditional materials such as stone and wood

were in many ways an attempt to forestall

what might be called the industrialization of

architecture and design. For the

practitioners of Art Nouveau, a purely

functional structure like the Crystal Palace

or a railway bridge was just not beautiful.

They appreciated the simplicity of such

structures but found their naked engineering

lacking in the linear grace long considered

the very essence of beauty.

The man who apparently launched the Art

Nouveau style of the 1890s was a Belgian,

Victor Horta (1861-1947). Horta trained as

an architect at the Brussels Academy, then

worked in the office of a Neoclassical

architect. In 1892 he received his first

independent commission, a private residence

in Brussels for a Professor Tassel. The

result, especially the house’s entry hall and

staircase, was strikingly original. The

ironwork, wall decoration, and floor tile

were all designed in terms of an intricate

series of long, graceful curves. Although

Horta’s sources are still a matter of debate,

he apparently was much impressed with the

stylized linear graphics produced by artists

of the English Arts and Crafts Movement of

the late 1880s, such as the architect and

designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-

1942) and the painter and illustrator Walter

Crane (1845-1915). Horta’s concern for

integrating the various arts into a more

unified whole, like his reliance on a refined

decorative line, also derived largely from

English reformers.

Figure 1: Victor Horta. Stairway, Tassel

House, Brussels. 1892-93

The application of graceful linear

arabesques to all aspects of design, evident

in the entry Hall of the Tassel House, began

a vogue that lasted for more than a decade.

During its lifetime the movement had a

number of regional names. In Italy it was

called Stile floreale (“Floral Style”) and Stile

Liberty (after the Liberty department store in

London); in Germany, Jugendstil (“Youth

Style”); in Spain Modernismo (Modernism);

in Vienna, Secessionsstil, after the secession

from the Academy led by Klimt; in Belgium

it was called Paling Style (“Eel Style”); and

in France it had a number of names,

including modern. The name eventually

accepted in most countries derives from a

shop, La Maison de l’Art Nouveau (“The

House of the New Art”), which opened in

Paris in 1895.

In France it was sometimes known as Style

Guimard after its leading French

practitioner, Hector Guimard (1867-1942).

Like Horta, Guimard was more a designer

than an architect in the strictest sense. His

major production was in the area of interior

design and furnishings. Typical of his work

is the desk that he made for himself out of

olive wood and ash wood. Instead of a static

and stable object, Guimard has handcrafted

an organic entity that seems to undulate and

grow.

Both the organic principle and the concern

to unify all areas of life into a beautiful

whole relate Art Nouveau to the nearly

contemporary work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

While Wright wanted to reintegrate

humanity with nature in a suburban setting,

Art Nouveau designers and architects were

content to redecorate the modern city in a

style resembling nature—to compensate

formally for its gradual disappearance from

modern, industrial life.

The Art Nouveau emphasis is also evident in

the work of the Catalan architect Antonio

Gaudí y Cornet (1852-1926). The son of an

ironworker, Gaudi, like Horta, was familiar

with the writings of Morris and the graphics

of other English Arts and Crafts

practitioners. His work paralleled

developments in the work of Horta and

others but did not depend on them. Almost

ten years before Horta’s decorative ironwork

at the Tassel House, Gaudí had produced

similar work in Barcelona for his patron

Count Güell.

Gaudí also attempted to introduce the

organic principle into the very structure of

his buildings. In the Casa Milá apartment

house in Barcelona, for example, the interior

and exterior walls gently undulate like ocean

waves. The building has no straight lines.

Constructed around a steel frame, it is

covered with cut stones hammered to give

the surface a look of natural erosion, like

beach cliffs. The organic effect is

completed by the stylized ironwork, which

seems to grow like foliage or seaweed on the

balconies. As Wright’s architecture was

based on his American sensibilities, Gaudí’s

alternative to both historicism and the threat

of industrialism reflected his affinity for

Spanish Gothic architecture.

Figure 2: Antonio Gaudí. Casa Milá

apartment building, Barcelona. 1905-7.

Despite the role of English Arts and Crafts

Movement played in the formation of Art

Nouveau, the English did not participate in

the style. During the 1890s they remained

faithful to the styles and principles

associated with Morris. One British

architect whose work most closely

approximates Art Nouveau was the Scot

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). In

1891 he and a colleague at his firm, Herbert

McNair, met and eventually married two

students at the Glasgow School of Art,

Margaret Macdonald (1865-1933) and

Frances Macdonald (1987-1921), who

shared their taste and ideas. The four soon

began to collaborate on a variety of

decorative projects, including posters,

metalwork, glass, and fabrics. Their work,

shown at La Maison de l’Art Nouveau in

1896, featured an elegant, elongated line

reminiscent of Horta’s and Guimard’s but

used more sparingly in conjunction with

large empty spaces.

The style developed by “The Four,” or

“Mac’s Group,” is evident in the Director’s

Room at the Glasgow School of Art (1897-

1909), which was designed largely by

Mackintosh but with considerable help from

his wife, Margaret Macdonald. The

Director’s Room is the first of the

Mackintoshes’ innovative “white rooms”:

The wood paneling, instead of being left

naturally dark, is painted white to match the

walls. In sharp reaction to both the

Victorian and the Arts and Crafts preference

for filling the walls with décor, here they are

refreshingly clean and spare. The focus is

on the wood furniture designed in a

simplified medieval style and produced by

local craftspeople under Mackinstosh’s

supervision. Some of the furniture—

particularly the famous high-backed

Mackintosh chair with the oval rail—

sacrifices utilitarian comfort to beauty. The

linear designs used in the metalwork on the

cabinet and in the frosted-glass lighting

fixtures were inspired by the interlaces

featured in Celtic manuscripts. The

Mackintoshes, like Wright and Gaudí, were

interested in developing not simply a

modern style but one based on their own

cultures.

ASSIGNMENT 13: Informative Abstract

ASSIGNMENT OVERVIEW

Condensing information and recognizing a text’s main ideas are skills relevant to countless professions and careers.

Writing an informative abstract requires both of these skills, and it is a skill you will practice again as part of our research report.

You will find full assignment details on page 75 of your textbook.

Read not only the sample abstract on page 72 but the article it summarizes.

Page 75

Your abstract will summarize the excerpt “Art Nouveau,” which is attached as a document;. is not that long, but I still recommend that you print off a copy to make notes on before drafting your abstract.

GRADING CRITERIA[footnoteRef:1] [1: Your assignment grade will be reduced by one letter if (1) you do not adhere to the basic formatting guidelines included on the syllabus or (2) you do not follow the topic guidelines provided for some assignments.]

5 points

Grammar and coherence (including transitions)		5 points
Title	2 points
Tone	3 points
Thoroughness and detail	10 points
Efficiency (length of 150 words and proportion)
TOTAL:	25 points