“Nature and the Art Nouveau”

AboutJames Grady surveys the Art Nouveau movement (c. 1890-1910) as fundamentally an architecture of Nature, arguing against critics who dismissed it as a merely decorative "wavy line" style. He examines how designers including Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Victor Horta in Brussels, Hector Guimard in Paris, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow each developed distinct methods of transmuting natural forms into ornament and structure, then situates Louis Sullivan within this international movement, arguing that although Sullivan's buildings remain governed by strong underlying geometry rather than literal natural imitation, his belief that ornament should possess "the spirit of the structure...just as a certain kind of leaf must appear on a certain kind of tree" anticipated Art Nouveau principles even before the style was formally established elsewhere. Grady cites the ornament of the Auditorium Building, the Gage Building, the Van Allen Store, and the Guaranty Building as examples of Sullivan's logically integrated, rather than imitative, use of natural form, and closes by tracing the movement's later influence on painters including Picasso, Miró, and Dalí.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3079%28195509%2937%3A3%3C187%3ANATAN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3