Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Fauvism

Art Nouveau was popular between 1890 and 1910. It was an

international style that spanned across the fine and decorative arts,
including architecture, painting, graphic art, interior design,
jewelry, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass art, and metal work.

A reaction to the academic art of the 19th century, it was inspired

by natural forms and structures, particularly the curved lines of
plants and flowers.

Art Nouveau took its name from the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, an
art gallery opened in 1895 by the Franco-German art dealer
Siegfried Bing, who helped introduce Japanese art to the West.
Théophile Steinlen, Le Chat Noir, 1896
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge, 1891, lithograph, 190 x 120 cm
Henry van de Velde, Tropon, 1899
Alphonse Mucha, Dreaming, lithograph, 1897
Victor Horta, interior of the Hotel Tassel, 1894
Entrance to a Paris metro station
Louis Tiffany, Lily lamp, 1900
James McNeil Whistler, The Peacock Room, 1877
Joseph Maria Olbrich, Secession Building, 1897
“To every age its art, to every art its freedom”
Antoni Gaudi, Casa Batllo, 1904
 Symbolism in literature and visual art, a late 19th century
descendent of Romanticism, was an approach to the ultimate
reality or to a pure essence that transcends concrete physical
experience.

For them, the inner idea, the dream or symbol, could only be
hinted at through a series of words, analogies, or images from
which an insight in the viewer could emerge. Symbolism lead
some poets and painters to religion and mysticism.

During this time, Sigmund Freud was also beginning his studies
that would lead to his theory of dreams and the workings of the
unconscious.
John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888
Odilon Redon, The eye like a strange balloon goes toward infinity, 1882
lithograph, 26 x 20 cm
Gustave Moreau, The Sacred Elephant, 1885
Stéphane Mallarmé was a French Symbolist who is most famous
for his poem “A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance”
(1897).

Not only is the poem visually compelling, Mallarmé introduced

the concept of using chance in the production of art which, artists
like Duchamp and Cage as well as whole movements like Dada
and Fluxus would use in their work.
 Henri Matisse wanted to return to the immediacy and joyous
embrace of nature in Impressionism and the emotional,
colorful expression in post-Impressionism, without the literary
morbidity of Symbolism.

He further emancipated color from its traditional role of

describing reality and concentrated on paintings ability to
communicate directly the artist’s experience of reality. The
Fauves saw painting as an autonomous creation, freed from
narrative or symbolic ends.
 The word fauve (lit. “wild beasts”) made reference to these
artists’ - principally Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck - brilliant,
arbitrary color, which was more intense than the scientific
color of the neo-Impressionists and the non-descriptive color
of Gauguin and van Gogh.

The Fauves wanted to use pure color, squeezed directly from

the tube, not to describe objects in nature, not to evoke retinal
vibrations, not to invoke a mystical subject, but to develop an
entirely new use of color.

For them, all pictorial elements could be realized through

color. Even space and modeling could be rendered without the
Renaissance tricks of perspective or chiaroscuro.
André Derain, The Drying Sails, 1905
André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge, 1906
André Derain, Turning Road, L’Estaque, 1906
oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm
Maurice de Vlaminck, The River Seine at Chatou, 1906
Maurice de Vlaminck, Portrait Of André Derain, 1906
oil on cardboard, 27x 22 cm
Henri Matisse, Portrait of Madame Matisse/The Green Line, 1905
oil and tempura on canvas, 40 x 33 cm
Henri Matisse, The Roofs of Collioure, 1905
Henri Matisse, Landscape at Collioure, 1905
Henri Matisse, The Open Window, 1905
oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm
Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red, 1908
oil on canvas, 180 x 220 cm
Henri Matisse, Window at Tangier, 1912
Henri Matisse, The Conversation, 1912