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(b Lyon, 1867; d New York, May 20, 1942).

French architect, furniture designer and writer. After attending the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, in 1885 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; he left four years later without a diploma, however, to work for a builder as both architect and site craftsman. The influence of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc is evident in his early works, particularly the Ecole du Sacré-Coeur (1895), in which the exposed cast-iron structure of V-shaped columns is an adaptation of a drawing taken from Viollet-le-Duc’s Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72). These early commissions, built in a picturesque and eclectic manner, culminated in the Castel Béranger block of flats, Paris, where his first use of the Art Nouveau style appeared in its decorative elements. He visited Brussels in 1895, where he met Victor Horta, whose Maison du Peuple was then under construction. After seeing Horta’s work Guimard made changes to the original neo-Gothic decorative elements of the Castel Béranger, introducing a colourful mixture of facing materials and organically derived embellishments, based on his belief that decoration is the more effective for being non-representational. Between ...

(Joseph)

(b London, Feb 25, 1866; d Melbourne, May 16, 1929).

Australian architect, theorist and writer of English birth. He trained as an architect in London from 1881 and then worked in various architectural offices there. He emigrated to Australia in 1889 and worked in various states before settling in Melbourne in 1899. He designed a number of offices, residences, churches and other public buildings, often for other architects. Through this work and his teachings and writings, he influenced many Australian architects by his strong principles of originality and simplicity in design, harmony and balance in composition, and national sentiment. These principles were closely allied with those of English architects working in the Arts and Crafts Movement; however, his use of nature for inspiration and his relaxation of past rules of composition and decoration also place him within the Art Nouveau movement. Haddon’s designs were characterized by plain façades, the careful use of simple ornament and the positioning of elements to produce a distinctive and often delicately balanced composition. Examples of this work include his residence, Anselm (...

(b Brussels, April 7, 1877; d Brussels, Feb 22, 1956).

Belgian interior designer and architect. He was the son of the painter Adolphe Hamesse (1849–1925) and studied architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He then worked successively in the offices of Paul Hankar and Alban Chambon. With the latter he found his true vocation in interior design using numerous ornamental components, manufactured industrially, which he excelled at combining in Art Nouveau compositions. Assisted by his two brothers, the painters Georges Hamesse (b 1874) and Léon Hamesse (b 1883), he responded to the eclectic tastes of the period by exploiting a very broad range of styles in such commissions as the Cohn-Donnay house (1904), the Ameke department store (1905), a masonic lodge (1909) and the Théâtre des Variétés (1909), all in Brussels. He also worked on a number of cinemas in Brussels, including the Artistic Palace (...

American glasshouse established in 1885 in Meriden, CT by Philip Handel (1866–1914); in 1900 a second factory was opened in New York City. The company was best-known for its Art Nouveau shades for gas and electric lamps; some shades were leaded and some reverse-painted with plants, animals and landscapes. In ...

(b Frameries, Dec 11, 1859; d Brussels, Jan 17, 1901).

Belgian architect and designer. A stonecutter’s son from Hainaut, he served an apprenticeship as a decorative sculptor before entering the Brussels Académie in 1873, where he later met Victor Horta, whose career ran parallel to Hankar’s for over a decade. Both were responsible for the introduction of Art Nouveau in Belgium in 1893.

From 1879 Hankar worked with the architect Henri Beyaert, eventually managing his practice. In 1893 he set up on his own and participated in the Symbolist movement Le Sillon, headed by his friends Xavier Mellery and Fernand Khnopff and sculptors such as Jef Lambeaux and Charles Van der Stappen. His first independent work was his own house in the Rue Defacqz, Brussels (1893), a sober structure in brick with blue stone dressings and horizontal bands, decorated with wrought-iron work and a monochrome mural by the painter Adolphe Crespin (1859–1944). Unlike the flowing, more flamboyant style of Horta’s earliest private residences, Hankar’s house is a model of formal restraint, showing a Japanese influence that had been disseminated by his friend the Belgian writer Jules Destrée’s ...

(b Paris, May 7, 1855; d Paris, 1930).

French architect, son of Pierre-Antoine-Achille Hermant. He studied under Joseph-Auguste-Emile Vaudremer and Gustave-Laurent Raulin (1837–1910) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and in 1880 won second place in the competition for the Prix de Rome with a project for a hospice on the Mediterranean coast. He was an eclectic architect, at one time attracted to the Art Nouveau style, and he perpetuated eclecticism well after World War I, although he incorporated modern details into some of his buildings. His career began when he collaborated with his father on the barracks in the Place Monge, and in 1890 he won the competition to build further barracks (completed 1896) in the Boulevard Henri IV. Here, Louis XIII-style stone façades, with eclectic French and Italian Renaissance details, conceal large metal roof trusses, in the manner used by Victor Baltard to conceal his structural ironwork at the church of St Augustin, Paris. Hermant designed the French pavilions for the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in ...

(b Brussels, Jan 7, 1854; d Brussels, March 6, 1936).

Belgian architect and designer. He was the son of a joiner and cabinetmaker and began his career as an interior and furniture designer. His lack of academic training allowed him to join up quickly with the precursors of the Art Nouveau style. In 1895 he exhibited several chairs at the second Salon de la Libre Esthétique; this work followed by the design of a shop in Rue Montagne de la Cour, placed him among the main protagonists of the new style in Brussels. Together with Paul Hankar, Henry Van de Velde and Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Hobé was commissioned to design the Exposition Congolaise at Tervuren, part of the Exposition Internationale (1897), which became an expression of Belgian Art Nouveau at its peak. During this period, he also undertook a trip abroad and studied traditional cottages in southern England. Their architecture and interiors became his chief source of inspiration, and he built numerous houses in this style in the main holiday resorts of Belgium. The interiors he showed at the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa in Turin (...

(Franz Maria)

(b Pirnitz, Moravia [now Brtnice, Czech Republic], Dec 15, 1870; d Vienna, May 15, 1956).

Austrian architect, designer and draughtsman. He had a natural gift for creating beautiful forms, and he proceeded to make the most of it during a career that spanned more than 50 years. In this half century the conditions and nature of architectural practice changed profoundly, but Hoffmann’s fundamental approach remained the same. He relied on his intuition to produce works that were unmistakably his own in their formal and compositional treatment, yet mirrored all stylistic changes in the European architectural scene.

He grew up as the mayor’s son in a small market town in rural surroundings and throughout his life remained emotionally attached to his birthplace and to the arts and crafts of the Moravian peasantry. After hesitations about his career choice, he enrolled in the department of building of the Staatsgewerbeschule at Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic). After a year of practice in Würzburg, Germany, in October 1892 he gained admission to ...

(b Ghent, Jan 6, 1861; d Brussels, Sept 8, 1947).

Belgian architect and teacher. Although his work was confined almost entirely to Brussels, the ten years (1893–1903) of his active career working in the Art Nouveau style had a revolutionary effect on European perceptions of 19th-century rules of design. Apart from initiating and developing the style in Brussels, creating in particular interiors in which his furniture and decoration were remarkable for their stylistic unity and were in complete opposition to the eclecticism of ‘conventional’ contemporary interior decoration, he was one of the first architects to consider the potential of the open plan. He also applied the rationalist principles of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc regarding the exposure of the iron structures of his buildings, and he was the first to make extensive use of cast iron in domestic architecture, combining the taste of an artist with the skill of an engineer in fashioning iron into the sinuous organic outlines characteristic of Art Nouveau. After ...

(b Loucká u Ředhoště, nr Roudnice nad Labem, Jan 14, 1872; d Častolovice, nr Rychnov nad Kněžnou, Aug 11, 1941).

Bohemian painter. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, in 1887–91 under Maximilián Pirner, in Munich in 1891–3 under Anton Ažbé and Otto Seitz (1846–1912) and again in Prague until 1894 under Václav Brožík. He spent some time studying in Italy (1902 and 1909) and had numerous one-man exhibitions from 1900 onwards. His early work concentrated on the figure, inspired by lyrical plein-air painting, and for a while he was influenced by Art Nouveau and Symbolism (e.g. Spring Fairy-tale, 1898; Prague, N.G.). Having come into contact with the school of Julius Mařák in 1897, Hudeček devoted himself to landscapes, producing a large group of paintings of the village of Okoř. The works of this period approach the lyricism of the Glasgow School (exhibited Prague, 1903) and the sensuous impressionism of his friend Antonín Slavíček. Hudeček gradually renounced melancholy, symbolic colour harmonies and refined techniques, using his brush with greater flourish and accenting light with more striking colours (e.g. ...

(b 1883; d 1935).

Basque–French cartoonist, interior decorator and designer, notably of furniture but also of wallpaper, textiles and jewellery. His early work is in an Art Nouveau idiom, but he gradually became a pioneering exponent of Art Deco. Pierre(-Emile) Legrain was initially his employee and later his collaborator. In 1914 Inbe moved to America, where he worked as a set designer, and in ...

(Aleksandrovich)

(b Voronezh, March 28, 1865; d Moscow, 1937).

Russian architect. He graduated from the Institute of Civil Engineers, St Petersburg, and then went to Moscow, where he worked as a district architect. His subsequent career, during which he established a reputation as a designer almost exclusively of public service buildings, designing few private houses and no churches, can be divided into three phases. Characteristic of his early work in Moscow during the 1890s are the Belkin and Martyanov houses executed in flamboyant Renaissance and Baroque variants of historicism, and the brick-built Mazyrin municipal children’s home on B. Tsaritsynskaya Street. From 1900 Ivanov-Shits was a member of the Technical Construction Council attached to the Moscow City Authority, where most of his buildings were necessitated by the social conditions of the large city or created to meet the needs of the poor. Works produced during this period include the House of the People (1903) in Vvedensky Square, the first such project in Moscow, and the tea-room theatre, Lefortovo district, and other buildings with auditoria. During the 1900s, with Lev Kekushev, V. F. Valkot (...

(François Eugène)

(b Brussels, Dec 3, 1864; d Brussels, Nov 29, 1935).

Belgian architect. He began his career in 1892 by winning a competition for the construction of small workers’ houses in Laeken, Brussels. In 1899, also as a result of a competition, he became architect to Le Foyer Schaerbeekois, the organization providing low-cost housing in Schaerbeek, Brussels. Between 1900 and 1910 he built seven groups of low-cost housing for the organization, mainly designed as houses divided into flats. The composition of their façades was sober and rational, incorporating an Art Nouveau stylistic vocabulary similar to that of Paul Hankar: contrasting materials, visible lintels and small iron columns, the use of colour, particularly yellow and red brick, and sgraffito decoration.

Jacobs was one of the few Art Nouveau architects specializing in the public sector. In 1907 the construction of a school complex in Rue Josaphat in Schaerbeek earned him an unchallenged reputation in this field. The school was considered at the time to be truly palatial: as well as normal school buildings, it also included a gymnasium, swimming-pool and industrial school, all set out around vast playgrounds according to a clearly articulated layout. The interior spaces and façades, which were influenced by both Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, henceforth constituted a model for school buildings in Belgium. Between ...

(b Munich, Oct 30, 1868; d Munich, Oct 9, 1940).

German painter, illustrator, teacher and poster designer. The son of the painter Christian Jank (1833–88), he attended Simon Hollósy’s private art school in Munich before studying (1891–6) at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, also in Munich, under Ludwig von Löfftz (1845–1910) and Paul Höcker (1854–1910). From 1896 he exhibited at the Munich Secession, and he became a member of Scholle, Die, founded in 1899. A regular contributor to the journal Jugend and at the forefront of modernism, he made his mark as a humorous illustrator, portraying allegories and scenes from military life. Jank also designed posters (e.g. Underworld, 1896; Berlin, Mus. Dt. Gesch.). He taught at the Damenakademie (1899–1907). Having come to prominence as a portrayer of events from German history with three monumental paintings for Berlin’s Reichstag building (destr.) in 1905, he collaborated with Adolf Münzer (1870–1952) and ...

(b Liège, June 23, 1859; d Liège, Feb 18, 1945).

Belgian architect. He attended courses in drawing and architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Liège and then at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he was a fellow student of Victor Horta and Paul Hankar. With the latter, his future brother-in-law, he entered Henri Beyaert’s studio in 1879, and there he received a training based on the precepts of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In 1884 he settled in Liège and began building houses in a spirit that was very close to the Art Nouveau works of Hankar in Brussels. In 1905 he erected two public buildings in Liège whose daring method of construction placed him among the architectural avant-garde. The Galeries Liègeoises department store (destr. c. 1950) used glazing and a visible steel framework to produce the effect of a seven-storey glass cage. In contrast, the Renommée public hall (destr. c. 1950) was one of the first large buildings in the world constructed in exposed reinforced concrete; its vast hall was covered by three reinforced-concrete, thin-shell domes, 15 m in diameter, supported by arches arranged in fascicles. Jaspar later turned increasingly towards archaeology, arts and crafts and to the traditional architecture of the Meuse region, subjects in which he specialized. Subsequently he made notable attempts to reconcile traditional Meuse forms with new materials. After World War I he took part in the reconstruction of towns by reinterpreting regional traditions, notably at Dinant and Visé. He founded the ...

(Arthur)

(b Rådvad, nr Copenhagen, Aug 31, 1866; d Copenhagen, Oct 2, 1935).

Danish silversmith and sculptor. He was the son of a blacksmith, and at the age of 14 he was apprenticed to the goldsmith A. Andersen in Copenhagen. In 1884 he became a journeyman and in 1887 he enrolled at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi, where he studied sculpture with Theobald Stein (1829–1901), Bertel Thorvaldsen’s successor; a bronze cast of his Harvester of 1891 is in the courtyard of the Georg Jensen silversmithy in Copenhagen. After graduating in 1892 Jensen took up ceramics, working with Joachim Petersen (1870–1943), and in 1900 his work was awarded an honourable mention at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In the same year he received a grant to travel in France and Italy; it was during this trip that he became interested in the applied arts. On his return to Copenhagen, Jensen worked for the silversmith Mogens Ballin, and in 1904 he opened his own workshop, primarily making jewellery. His brooch of ...

(b Stará Tura, Slovakia, Aug 23, 1868; d Bratislava, Dec 21, 1947).

Slovak architect and designer. He studied architecture at the Staatsgewerbeschule, Vienna, and began his career in Martin, Slovakia. He was inspired by the traditional vernacular architecture of the region and applied its principles to the design of several timber houses including the Maměnka and Jídelna tourist hostels (1897–9) at Pustevny pod Radhoštěm, Moravia, and the Rezek holiday house (1900–01) near Nové Město nad Metují, Bohemia, as well as in the poetically conceived plan of the Luhačovice Spa, Moravia, and some houses there (all 1901–3). Jurkovič was also influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, particularly the work of M. H. Baillie Scott (1865–1945) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, as well as that of Eliel Saarinen and Armas Lindgren in Finland. He transformed these ideas, blending them with the local vernacular tradition to develop an individual style of Art Nouveau, as seen in his own house (...

(Nikolayevich)

(b Simbirsk [formerly Ul’yanovsk], Feb 7, 1862; d ?1918).

Russian architect, designer and teacher. He studied at the Institute of Civil Engineers in St Petersburg from 1883 to 1888, and then in 1890 he went to Moscow, where in a brief, 15-year career he went on to execute more than 60 buildings, as well as designing decorative objects for mass production. His first buildings there are examples of late historicism. The Korobkov House on Pyatnitskaya Street and the Geyer Almshouse in Krasnosel’skaya Street, for example, display an eclectic blend of method, have a rich plasticity of volume, a slightly exaggerated sculptural quality in the architectural forms, and appeal to the legacy of Renaissance, Baroque and Romanesque architecture. From the late 1890s, however, Kekushev began to work in the Russian version of the Art Nouveau style (Rus. modern). He was one of the style’s pioneers in Russia and one of its leading exponents in Moscow, although some features of his earlier historicist works, such as accentuated plasticity, extensive and weighty forms and fidelity to Baroque and Romanesque motifs, continued to appear in his work. This is the case with a series of private residences (...

(b Baumgarten, nr Vienna, July 14, 1862; d Vienna, Feb 6, 1918).

Austrian painter and draughtsman. A leading exponent of Art Nouveau, Klimt is considered one of the greatest decorative painters of the 20th century. His depictions of the femme fatale and his drawings treating the theme of female sexuality have assured him a place in the history of erotic art. He is remembered for his role in the formation of the Vienna Secession, the radical group of Austrian artists of which he became the first president in 1897 (see Secession, §3), and also for the frequent scandals and protests that marked his later career. These contrast strikingly with the public and official approval that marked him out as a young artist of promise, even before he graduated from the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule in 1883.

Klimt was the eldest son of a Viennese engraver and entered the Kunstgewerbeschule, Vienna, in 1876. He studied under the Austrian painters Ferdinand Laufberger (1829–81...

(b Cronkbourne, Tromode, Isle of Man, April 2, 1864; d Douglas, Isle of Man, Feb 22, 1933).

English designer. After training at the Douglas School of Art, Isle of Man (1878–84), he moved to London in 1897 where he worked as a designer for, among others, the Silver Studio and taught at Redhill and Kingston art schools. His important association with Arthur Lasenby Liberty began in 1901 with his designs for the Celtic-inspired Cymric collection of silver and jewellery and for the Tudric domestic pewterware introduced by Liberty in 1903. His interpretation of Celtic forms was the closest approach to true English Art Nouveau, his disciplined use of Runic patterns contrasting with the excesses of the continental versions of the style. He was the most outstanding of Liberty’s creative artists, producing over 400 designs for carpets, fabrics and metalwork from 1904 to 1912. In 1912 he resigned from his teaching post at Kingston College of Art following criticism of his teaching style and results. A group of his students also left in protest at his resignation and formed the Knox Guild of Craft and Design, which held successful annual exhibitions from ...