Chapter 17

THE SPREAD OF THE ART NOUVEAU: THE WORK OF C. R. MACKINTOSH AND ANTONI
GAUDÍ

THE initiation of the Art Nouveau by Horta in 1892 was sudden and its spread extremely rapid. Almost concurrently forms very similar to those he had invented began to appear in other European countries. Rarely has a new idea in the visual arts been taken up internationally with so little lag. Advanced artistic circles at this time were evidently thoroughly prepared to accept major innovations and new periodicals, starting up almost one a year, provided vehicles for their transmission: _Pan_ in 1895, for example, _Jugend_ in 1896, _Dekorative Kunst_ in 1897, and _Die Kunst_ in 1899, to mention only German magazines. Had the Art Nouveau not already been invented by Horta the year before, three works of art dated 1893, Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Cello Player’, an illustration in black and white, Toorop’s picture ‘Three Brides’, and Munch’s ‘The Cry’, first a painting but widely available as a colour-lithograph the following year, might well have supplied the impetus for other designers to do so; doubtless such inspiration did encourage rivalry rather than direct imitation of Horta. In Germany a Munch exhibition in Berlin in 1892 and a Toorop exhibition in Munich in 1893 called attention to the long waving curves and the general linearity of style of these artists. In 1893, moreover, the _Studio_ began to bring to designers and architects everywhere well-chosen illustrations of current English decorative work.

England itself was least responsive to the new Continental mode. It is, indeed, improper to call the Bishopsgate Institute in Bishopsgate in the City of London, built in 1893-4 by C. Harrison Townsend (1850-1928), Art Nouveau. Yet, despite its evident dependence on Webb, the way in which Townsend took the characteristically stylized but basically naturalistic patterns of contemporary English wallpapers and chintzes and used them in relief at architectural scale is as drastic an innovation as are the bits and pieces of more abstract stone carving that Horta used on his Brussels houses of these years. Townsend remained a ‘fellow-traveller’ rather than a member of the international Art Nouveau group for a decade. For example, the façade of his Whitechapel Art Gallery in the Whitechapel Road in the East End of London, designed in 1895 and built in 1897-9, is an improved version of that of the Bishopsgate Institute (Plate 134B). The broad and almost Richardsonian arch is placed off centre, the ornament is freer and bolder, and the few windows are organized in a continuous band below the plain wall of the upper portion.

Less successful, though perhaps more advanced, is Townsend’s Horniman Museum of 1900-1, a free-standing edifice in London Road, Forest Hill, south of London. This has less external ornamentation, except for the façade mosaic by Anning Bell, but there is a very plastically conceived tower with rounded corners placed at one side of the front façade. His church of St Mary the Virgin, consecrated in 1904, at Great Warley in Essex, is very simple, indeed rather Voysey-like as regards the buttressed and roughcast exterior. However, the elaborate decorations inside by Sir William Reynolds-Stephens (1862-1943) offer the most virtuoso example of Art Nouveau in England—at least they are about as close to the Continental mode as the English came.[380] No other English architect came nearer the Art Nouveau than Townsend; in quality, moreover, his work excels most of that done on the Continent by the various imitators and emulators of Horta, even if it lacks the humble integrity of Voysey’s best houses of these years.

The earliest and, later, the most versatile Art Nouveau architect of France[381] was Hector Guimard (1867-1942). But his first work of consequence, the complex block of flats in Paris called the Castel Béranger[382] at 16 Rue La Fontaine, which was completed after several years of construction in 1897, still represents a very ambiguous exploitation of the new ideas coming from Brussels. It must be remembered, however, that the original design almost certainly antedates by a year or two all other Art Nouveau work outside Belgium. Also notable is the fact that the façade of the Castel Béranger was premiated by the City of Paris in 1898, since this indicates the rapidity with which the new mode won approval in France.

In 1896, while the Castel Béranger was building, Siegfried Bing, a Hamburg art-dealer whose wares included Japanese prints—now even more in demand than at any time since their introduction to Europe in the late fifties—and also the new English decorative products, decided to open a shop in Paris. Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau at 22 Rue de Provence was designed for him by L.-B. Bonnier (1856-1946) in the Belgian mode, which thereby acquired its familiar name. This shop was of no great architectural interest, however, except that it was the first of the multitude that were produced in the next ten or fifteen years. Not only in Paris but in most Continental cities large and small, and even in England and in America, where the Art Nouveau otherwise hardly penetrated, these shop-fronts can still be noted; one of the finest has even been transferred from Paris to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in America.

Bing also enlisted the services of Van de Velde, still quite immature as a designer compared to Horta, but very articulate as a critic. Influenced more intellectually than visually by the English, Van de Velde’s personal development as a decorator now proceeded very rapidly. The lounge he designed for the Dresden Exhibition of 1897, for example, was an accomplished if somewhat heavily scaled example of an Art Nouveau interior and much more elaborate than those completed in his house at Uccle the year before.

By the time the Maison du Peuple in Brussels opened three years later in 1899 and Horta’s early career reached its apex of achievement, the Art Nouveau was already a favourite mode with young French designers and generally in rising favour in _fin de siècle_ Paris. As a result even established architects were not averse to introducing its curves in interior decoration and for the detailing of exposed metal structural elements, although most of them had little understanding of its real possibilities. The giant stone colonnades of the Grand Palais in Paris, designed in 1897 and built in 1898-9 for the Exhibition of 1900, were presumably intended to rival those of the plaster palaces of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893; but behind them the architectural team of H.-A.-A. Deglane (1855-1931), L.-A. Louvet (1860-1936), both pupils of Richardson’s master, André, and A.-F.-T. Thomas (1847-1907) provided a vast iron-and-glass interior detailed in a coarse sort of Art Nouveau way that is quite unrelated to the academic treatment of the exterior.[383]

The entrance feature, designed by René Binet (1866-1911), and the Pavilion Bleu by E.-A.-R. Dulong (1860-?), the principal exhibition restaurant in the Champ de Mars, were even more whole-heartedly _à la mode_. One can hardly regret, however, that these gaudy structures, unlike the Grand Palais, were only temporary. A much superior example of Art Nouveau decoration, Maxim’s Restaurant in the Rue Royale, remains intact as it was redecorated in 1899 by Louis Marney. This is full of period flavour and still splendidly maintained, but it has no real existence as interior architecture. Soon the Art Nouveau would be vulgarized in dozens of cafés, large and small, all over Europe. Of these the Brasserie Universelle in the Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris by Niermans, carried out two or three years after Maxim’s and lately demolished, was perhaps the most sumptuous; there, however, the new mode was eclectically combined with a lush Neo-Rococo.[384]

The architect Charles Plumet (1861-1925), working with the decorator Tony Selmersheim (b. 1871), built in 1898 at 67 Avenue Malakoff the first of a series of houses in which Art Nouveau decoration was grafted on to a general scheme of design that was more or less Late Gothic. This has also been demolished. Such eclecticism, based more usually on eighteenth-century models, is characteristic of the rapid Parisian dilution of the Art Nouveau and doubtless played a great part in its early descent into the obsolescence of the _démodé_. Yet Auguste Perret (1874-1954), in a large block of flats built in 1902 at 119 Avenue de Wagram, exploited in masonry a heavier and richer sort of Art Nouveau than Plumet’s with considerable success (Plate 134A). This edifice is in curious contrast to the flats of ferro-concrete at 25 bis Rue Franklin, designed by Perret in 1902 also, with which his career is generally considered to begin. Even the latter, moreover, have considerably more Art Nouveau feeling in their panels of faience mosaic than is usually recognized (see Chapter 18). The block in the Avenue Wagram is quite typical of French production in these years but of much higher than average quality.

The most accomplished French Art Nouveau designer remained Guimard, the first to take up the mode. His most conspicuous works, however, the Paris Métro entrances of 1898-1901, lie outside the normal realm of architecture (Plate 137B). These are executed entirely in metal of the most sinuous and vegetable-like character, and their extreme virtuosity is the more surprising in that they consist of metal castings produced in series. His no longer extant Humbert de Romans Building of 1902 in the Rue Saint-Didier in Paris, on the other hand, illustrated the usual difficulties of Art Nouveau architects when working with masonry. The exterior was neither Neo-Rococo nor Neo-Flamboyant but curiously crude and gawky in its originality, like his Castel Béranger, with none of the Art Nouveau grace that even Plumet sometimes evoked with success, or the rather lush ornamentation of Perret’s block of flats in the Avenue Wagram. The auditorium inside, however, employed curved structural members even more boldly than Horta had done in that of the Maison du Peuple. Here Guimard succeeded in giving a masculine vigour to the rather feminine forms of a mode already passing its brief prime.

As late as 1911, however, Guimard remained faithful to the Art Nouveau in an extensive range of contiguous blocks of flats that he built at 17-21 Rue La Fontaine near the Castel Béranger. For his own flat there he designed ironwork as boldly abstract as advanced mid twentieth-century sculpture in metal, but also as suavely elegant as comparable Rococo detail of the eighteenth century. The exteriors, moreover, which are entirely of stone, have a great deal of the refinement and restraint of Horta’s Hallet house of 1906 in Brussels. They are, however, more plastically treated with boldly moulded bay windows and attic storeys. Except for Perret’s, few Parisian blocks of flats of the period rival these in interest or in quality of design and execution.

Three Paris department stores of the early years of the century continued to use the metal-and-glass interior structure of Boileau and Eiffel’s Bon Marché, with notable success. In presumable emulation of Horta’s Innovation in Brussels, moreover, the architects of two of these extended considerably the external use of exposed metal introduced by Sédille at the Printemps in the eighties. These two stores remain, with Guimard’s Métro entrances, the most prominent Parisian examples of the Art Nouveau. The main branch of the Samaritaine[385] in the Rue de la Monnaie near the Pont Neuf was built in 1905 by C.-R.-F.-M. Jourdain (1847-1935). This has several fine galleried courts inside in the tradition of the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie of the 1830s, but it is even more distinguished for the sturdy scale and the straightforward design of the external metal frame (Plate 133). The actual structural members are hardly bent at all by the exigencies of the mode; but they were characteristically ornamented not only with decorative metalwork but also with inset panels of polychrome faience, now painted over. On the north front, however, other panels, here of faience mosaic, remain visible; these are of even greater delicacy and elegance than Perret’s foliate panels in his block of flats of 1902-3 in the Rue Franklin.

The contemporary Grand Bazar de la Rue de Rennes, now the Magasins Réunis, at 134-136 Rue de Rennes by H.-B. Gutton (b. 1874) is generally fussier in design than the Samaritaine. Gutton achieved, however, a more completely volumetric expression, emphasizing the lightness and the thinness of metal-and-glass construction somewhat as the early monuments of the 1840s and 1850s in England had done. New shop-windows below and the removal of the open grillework that once rose against the sky have now much diminished its effectiveness. Binet’s earlier galleried court of 1900 at the Printemps was burned out in 1923, unfortunately. With the lifts rising in the corners and the staircases swooping down in great splashing curves, this court was altogether superior to his Entrance to the Exhibition of 1900 and even to Frantz Jourdain’s small later courts in the Samaritaine. It seemed somehow to epitomize what a great metropolitan department store _ought_ to look like somewhat as Garnier’s Opéra epitomizes what later generations came to expect of an opera-house. If Prince Danilo supped with the ‘damen’ of Maxim’s, we can be sure the ‘Merry Widow’ and the ‘Pink Lady’ did their shopping here.

It was the Art Nouveau structures at the Exhibition of 1900 which first focused public attention on the new mode, occasioning also that rapid Parisian vulgarization which brought its early end. At the exhibition, besides the crude but conspicuous things designed by Binet and Dulong that have been mentioned, there was the Pavillon Art Nouveau Bing by Georges de Feure (1868-1928), a designer rather than an architect, which had rooms by Edward Colonna, back from working for Tiffany in America, and others of the best artists and craftsmen employed by Bing; but their exhibits represented decoration, not interior architecture properly speaking. However, by 1900 the Art Nouveau was not at all the strictly Parisian manifestation that it must have seemed to most of those who visited the exhibition. The Germans, notably, had already taken it up with great enthusiasm, beginning about 1897.

The Studio Elvira of 1897-8 in Munich by August Endell (1871-1925) had a plain stucco façade cut by a few strategically placed windows of varied shape; but this façade was splashed across the centre with a very large abstract relief of orientalizing character resembling something half-way between a dragon and a cloud. Endell’s studio, if not the first manifestation of the Art Nouveau in Germany, was certainly the most striking; moreover, it followed immediately upon the showing of Van de Velde’s Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of 1897. Already, however, in that portion of the Wertheim Department Store in Berlin in the Leipzigerstrasse which was begun in 1896, Alfred Messel (1853-1909) had used a great deal of exposed metal and glass and even perhaps modified the detail a bit towards the Art Nouveau. This was five years before Horta designed the Innovation Department Store in Brussels and ten years earlier than Jourdain’s Samaritaine in Paris. Messel made the spacing of his heavily moulded masonry piers quite wide and opened up completely the bays between. The result was at least as close to Sullivan’s Gage Building of 1898-9 as to the Paris department stores of a decade later. In those portions of this department store that Messel added in 1900-4, however, the façades, although highly stylized, were of rather Late Gothic character and certainly quite remote from the Art Nouveau.

In 1899 Van de Velde moved from Paris to Berlin. There he designed the Hohenzollern Kunstgewerbehaus, a shop parallel to Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris in its interests and its activities. In the next year he carried out the Haby Barber Shop and the Havana Cigar Store, two of the most extravagant of all Art Nouveau shop interiors. With the opening of the new century, however, in his full-scale architecture Van de Velde moved almost as rapidly away from the Art Nouveau as did Messel, although in a different direction (see Chapter 20). By this time strong counter-influences were reaching Germany from Glasgow and Vienna.

Although not disdaining the Art Nouveau as completely as did the English and the Americans, the Austrians showed little of the enthusiasm of the French and the Germans. There is in Vienna one block of flats[386] of about 1900 so completely Art Nouveau that it might well have been designed by Horta himself. But the leading Austrian architects, old and young, reflected the new Belgian mode only with considerable diffidence and restraint. Otto Wagner (1841-1918), long a well-established academic architect and indeed Professor of Architecture at the Akademie, introduced more and more Art Nouveau detail in the Stadtbahn stations that he built over the years 1894-1901, most notably in the one at the Karlsplatz with its curved metal frame and inset floral panels. However, even this seems tentative and hardly rivals in interest Guimard’s contemporary Métro stations in Paris.

Wagner’s so-called Majolika Haus, a block of flats at 40 Linke Wienzeile designed about 1898, is far more distinguished and original (Plate 138A). Although the ironwork of the balconies is here and there curvilinear in detail and the faience plaques that completely cover the wall are decorated with great swooping patterns of highly colourful flowers, the architectonic elements of the façade are nevertheless very crisp, flat, and rectangular. That Vienna would very shortly become the focus of a reaction against the Art Nouveau does not seem surprising in the light of this façade. Moreover, on an office building erected in the Ungargasse for the firm of Portois & Fix in 1897 by Max Fabiani (b. 1865), who had been Wagner’s assistant in 1894-6, the coloured faience slabs which sheathe its surface are arranged in a purely geometrical chequer-board pattern; only the ironwork has a slightly Art Nouveau flavour. In the late nineties it would be hard to say whether Art Nouveau influence was arriving or departing but for the projects other Viennese architects were publishing in the review _Ver Sacrum_ started in 1898.

The design of the art gallery built in the Friedrichstrasse in Vienna in 1898-9 for the Sezession, a newly founded society of artists in revolt against the Academy, by J. M. Olbrich (1867-1908) seems more influenced, however, by the façade of Townsend’s Whitechapel Art Gallery—only just begun but already published as a project in the _Studio_ in 1895—than by the work of the Belgians or the French, which had affected him strongly in the immediately preceding years. The pierced dome of floral metalwork alone vies in virtuosity with Horta or Guimard, and the pattern of this is actually quite English in character. The bronze doors are by Gustav Klimt, an Austrian Post-Impressionist who can be grouped, up to a point, with the Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, and Swiss Post-Impressionists mentioned earlier (see Chapter 16). Olbrich was called to Darmstadt in Germany to work at the artists’ colony sponsored there by the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig in 1899 and Darmstadt, like Vienna, soon became a centre of reaction against the Art Nouveau under his leadership (see Chapter 20).

Both in Vienna and in Darmstadt the influence of the Scottish designer Mackintosh helped most to crystallize an alternative mode. Mackintosh first exhibited a room on the Continent at Munich in 1898, the same year that Baillie Scott was called by the Grand Duke to decorate an interior in the palace at Darmstadt. In 1900 Mackintosh was invited to design a room in the Sezession Exhibition in Vienna. That exhibit undoubtedly encouraged Viennese architects, already diffident towards the Art Nouveau, to turn very sharply away from it. This Adolf Loos (1870-1933) had already done in designing a completely rectilinear shop interior in Vienna in 1898. Loos, Wagner after about 1901, and Wagner’s pupil Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) were all leaders in the international reaction against the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 20). The position of Mackintosh, however, is rather hard to state so categorically and must be considered here in more detail.

At home in Scotland Mackintosh’s early decorative work of the mid nineties approached Continental Art Nouveau more closely than that of any other Briton, not excluding Townsend. Indeed, he was castigated by his compatriots and his English contemporaries for participating in so exotic a movement. But Mackintosh also came nearer to possessing genius than most of the men of his generation associated with the Art Nouveau, not even excluding Horta. That genius, all the same, was of so ambivalent a nature that he could seem for a few years to go along with the general stream of Continental fashion and yet, almost at the very same time, provide also a real protest against its excesses and its superficialities by the craftsmanlike integrity and the almost ascetic restraint of his best work. That protest the Austrians and the Germans were not slow to heed.

Mackintosh made his first mark in Glasgow, which had earlier been the home of the highly original ‘Greek’ Thomson (see Chapter 4). By the nineties, moreover, interest in contemporary French painting was probably livelier there than it was in London. But Glasgow was also as notorious as Chicago, that major focus of architectural achievement in the America of the nineties, for its presumed philistinism. Touches of Mackintosh’s hand can be distinguished in work of the office of John Honeyman (1831-1914) and his partner Keppie, where the young architect was employed at the start of his career, notably in the Martyrs’ Public School in Glasgow of 1895. But it was in the decoration of the first of a series of Miss Cranston’s ‘tea-rooms’ (_scottice_, restaurants), the one in Buchanan Street remodelled by him in 1897-8, that Mackintosh’s personal talents were first effectively exploited. His very earliest decorative compositions and the murals that he and his wife provided here, full of heavy and presumably Gaelic symbolism, are parallel to, rather than derivative from, the work of the Belgians. They are, in fact, much closer to the drawings of Beardsley and the paintings of Toorop and Munch than to the plant-like ironwork and almost Neo-Rococo carved stone ornament characteristic of Horta. But the same long swinging curves are present, the same linearity, and the same rejection of all stylistic influence from the past.

In this same year 1897 Mackintosh’s firm had the good fortune to win the limited competition for the Glasgow School of Art with a project that was entirely their young designer’s (Plate 132A). Thus he very soon had an opportunity to prove himself architect as well as decorator in a way that only two or three of the Europeans associated with the Art Nouveau had been able to do up to this point. The school was built during the next two years, just as Horta was finishing his Maison du Peuple in Brussels. The only element in the design that relates to the contemporary Art Nouveau of the Continent is the ironwork. This is quite incidental to the major architectonic qualities of the building, moreover, since it is purely decorative, not structural. It is also extremely restrained in its abstract curves, like Fabiani’s of this date in Vienna, and almost totally devoid of vegetable or floral reminiscence.

The entrance to the Glasgow Art School seems to derive from Webb, but, like that of Townsend’s contemporary art gallery in London, it is rather less traditional in character than Webb’s work of this period. The somewhat wilful asymmetry and the plastic elaboration of the central part of the façade contrast nevertheless with the straightforwardness of the general treatment. There are two ranges of very wide studio windows—reputedly derived from a Voysey project—like ‘Chicago windows’ but larger, with the reinforced-concrete lintels above them frankly exposed, and little else in the whole composition. To later eyes this façade, expressing so clearly the uncomplicated plan that it fronts, tends to appear deceptively simple and obvious. But Mackintosh’s very sensitive proportions and the delicate touches of linear detail provided by the ironwork create a design at once very direct and very subtle.

The north end of the building is a tall plain wall of rather small-scaled random ashlar broken only by a few strategically spotted windows of various shapes. At once medievally dramatic and quite abstract, this façade makes one appreciate all the more the almost classical serenity and horizontality of the main front. The Art School is clearly the manifesto of an architectural talent of broad range and great assurance—very different indeed from that of Voysey.

Mackintosh was not alone in Glasgow in these years. A real ‘school’ existed, chiefly in the field of decoration, of which George Walton was another notable exponent.[387] Like Baillie Scott and Ashbee, Walton had some success as an architect in England (see Chapter 15) as Mackintosh did not, even though he executed a few interiors below the Border. But local support was not what it should have been for any of them in either Scotland or England. While the Art School was in construction, however, Mackintosh was asked in 1898 to provide the already-mentioned room in Munich, first of many that he showed at various exhibitions in Germany and Austria. This interior was very different indeed, both in the basic rectangularity of the forms and in the delicacy of the membering, from Van de Velde’s Art Nouveau Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of the previous year. Thus, even before Van de Velde reached Berlin in 1899, a new line of influence from Glasgow into Germany—and soon into Austria also—was established whose general tendency was in sharp opposition to the lusher currents flowing from Brussels and Paris.

When Olbrich settled in Darmstadt—just _before_ Mackintosh’s room was shown at the Sezession—he also rejected almost completely in the work he carried out at the Grand Duke’s Art Colony the still slightly Art Nouveau leanings—in any case already closer to the English Townsend than to Horta or Van de Velde—of his newly completed Sezession Building (see