Introduction -- Art Nouveau in Belgium

 By the late nineteenth century, there was a growing desire for a new style of art and architecture to embody the aspirations and achievements of the day.  To signal the break with the past, this style was called simply "the new art," or Art Nouveau.  Art Nouveau was a style which had the confidence to abandon the crutch of historicism, and to turn to nature and engineering for its inspiration.  Belgium was one of the birthplaces of Art Nouveau, and Brussels in particular is rich with examples of architecture of the style.

 Art Nouveau was a style which emerged in the early 1890s in all the visual arts:  painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, graphic arts, posters, jewelry, clothing, and furniture.  It was a decorative style which was intended to suffuse all activities of life with art.  The traditional borders between the arts were to be broken down, and the borders between life and art also.  The leading sources for Art Nouveau were Japanese art, and the British Aesthetic Movement, strongly identified with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as the British Arts and Crafts Movement, and particularly the design philosophies of William Morris and Walter Crane.

  These movements sought to break down the barriers between art and life, if possible to make one's life a work of art.  There was thus an important psychological dimension to Art Nouveau.

 In the decorative arts, energy was a primary characteristic, as organic shapes and curvilinear lines expressed a new dynamism.  Art Nouveau was modernist and experimental.  The movement broke the hold of historicism, and in architecture there was a great deal of experimentation with new materials, especially iron and glass.  There was a Utopian and optimistic quality about the Art Nouveau designers' intention to bring art into every dimension of real life.  The new art and the new world were predicated on extreme individualism, however.  Individual designers and consumers attempted to express their individuality through their artistic choices.  The patrons of Art Nouveau in Belgium tended to be young progressivist intellectuals, often engineers, lawyers and artists.

-- Jeffery Howe