Art Nouveau for beginners: the whiplash line

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Around 1890 designers across Europe began to draw a new kind of line: long, curving, alive, like a vine or a woman’s hair in the wind. They put it on everything, from posters and jewelry to furniture, metro gates and whole buildings. The style had many names, Art Nouveau in France and Belgium, Jugendstil in Germany, Secession style in Vienna, but one dream: to make everyday life beautiful.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition What later admirers made of it. Modern How it lives on.

A line from nature

Historical Art Nouveau designers studied plants, insects and waves and turned them into ornament. In Brussels, Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (1893) let iron stems and painted tendrils climb its stairwell. In Paris, Hector Guimard’s cast-iron entrances for the new Métro, from 1900, still sprout like green stalks. René Lalique made jewelry of dragonflies and women with wings, and in New York Louis Comfort Tiffany made lamps and windows of glowing glass. The name came from Siegfried Bing’s Paris shop, the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, opened in 1895.

Mucha and the poster

Historical Alphonse Mucha (1860 to 1939), a Czech artist in Paris, became famous overnight with his poster Gismonda for the actress Sarah Bernhardt, printed at the very end of 1894. His tall women with halos of hair and flowers sold everything from biscuits to bicycles. Later he returned to Bohemia and spent nearly twenty years on The Slav Epic, twenty huge canvases of Slavic history.

Vienna: the Secession and Klimt

Gustav Klimt, Mäda Primavesi (1903 to 2000), 1912 to 1913. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (64.148). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical In 1897 Gustav Klimt and other young Viennese artists broke away from the official academy and founded the Secession. Their exhibition hall bears the motto “To every age its art, to art its freedom”. Klimt’s golden period is full of gold leaf and pattern. This portrait of nine-year-old Mäda Primavesi, 1912 to 1913, shows a banker’s daughter standing firm and frank, legs planted, before a field of flowers. I find her one of the most confident children in art.

Gaudí and the North

Historical In Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí built undulating, organic buildings, such as the Casa Batlló and the Casa Milà, and from 1883 led the work on the basilica of the Sagrada Família, still under construction a century after his death in 1926.

The style traveled north too. In Riga, whole streets of apartment houses were built in Jugendstil. In Finland it merged with national romanticism: Eliel Saarinen designed Helsinki Central Station, opened in 1919, with its granite giants holding lamps, and Lars Sonck built Tampere Cathedral with its stone and its frescoes by Hugo Simberg. Simberg’s paintings there include a garland of twelve boys carrying a thorny vine, and a Garden of Death tended by skeleton gardeners. These buildings still feel like forest made into stone.

The esoteric angle

Historical Mucha was a Freemason and took part in spiritualist séances in Paris. In 1899 he published Le Pater, an illustrated Lord’s Prayer full of mystical light and Masonic symbolism, which he considered one of his most important works. Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1902), painted for a Secession exhibition, shows humanity’s longing for happiness passing hostile powers to reach the redeeming kiss of art. I describe it in words, since it contains nudity.

Later tradition In the 1960s, Mucha’s posters came back as psychedelic art, and his women became icons of a new spiritual counterculture.

Modern Many modern tarot decks borrow Mucha’s halos and frames. Our site uses the original 1909 tarot images instead; you can see them in the 1909 tarot gallery.

Try it yourself

Find an Art Nouveau building or metro entrance in a city near you, or online. Draw only its main line, the one curve that the whole design seems to grow from. What plant or animal does it remind you of?

Before and after

Before this: Symbolism.

After this: Arts and Crafts.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.