SLSL Intro. Tendriloquism

[William Zantzinger]

What the tendil of smoke said...


Art nouveau:
 Art Nouveau is a Europe-wide and North-American style
of decorative art and architecture from the 1890s to
about the First World War, which relies on observed
rather than formalistic plant-forms, and swirling,
tendril-derived patterns which are applied to cutlery
and lamps just as to walls and metro stations - or
indeed to book and magazine illustrations, as in the
periodical Jugend, which gives the movement its German
name of Jugendstil. The naturalism perhaps stems from
the work of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts
Movement. Art nouveau as a movement was largely dead
by the 1920s, killed by waves of postwar austerity and
classicism, not to mention its own excessive
tendrilizing and exaggerated naturalistic forms,
although its frivolity lived on in art deco. 

Nevertheless, some of its practitioners (such as
Mackintosh, and Henry van der Velde) designed
restrained pieces, whose simplicity chimed in well
with industrial design, and achieved a classicism of
its own. 




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