Search Results

[Fr.: ‘new art’]

Decorative style of the late 19th century and the early 20th that flourished principally in Europe and the USA. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, its chief manifestations were in architecture and the decorative and graphic arts, the aspects on which this survey concentrates. It is characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms; in a broader sense it encompasses the geometrical and more abstract patterns and rhythms that were evolved as part of the general reaction to 19th-century historicism. There are wide variations in the style according to where it appeared and the materials that were employed.

Art Nouveau has been held to have had its beginnings in 1894 or 1895. A more appropriate date would be 1884, the year the progressive group Les XX was founded in Belgium, and the term was used in the periodical that supported it, Art Moderne: ‘we are believers in Art Nouveau’. The origin of the name is usually attributed to ...

Informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts that championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman, and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself.

The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th, drawing its support from progressive artists, architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs, and middle-class women seeking work in the home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques, and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. The movement was strongest in the industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an unfocused reaction against industrialization. Although quixotic in its anti-industrialism, it was not unique; indeed it was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City movement, vegetarianism, and folksong revivals, that set the Romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life....

Astrology is the art of predicting events on earth as well as human character and disposition from the movements of the planets and fixed stars. Medieval astrology encompassed both general concepts of celestial influence, and the technical art of making predictions with horoscopes, symbolic maps of the heavens at particular moments and places constructed from astronomical information. The scientific foundations of the art were developed in ancient Greece, largely lost in early medieval Europe and recovered by the Latin West from Arabic sources in the 12th and 13th centuries. Late medieval astrological images were successfully Christianized and were adapted to particular contexts, acquired local meanings and changed over time.

Astrology developed into a scientific branch of learning in ancient Greece, but because of the opposition of the Church Fathers it was transmitted to early medieval Europe in only fragmentary form in technically unsophisticated textbooks and popular divinatory genres. Literary and scientific texts provided more general ideas about the nature and attributes of the planets which were influential on later iconography. The first significant astrological images appear in 11th-century illustrated astronomical texts (e.g. London, BL, Cotton MS. Tiberius BV), which were acquired and produced by monasteries to aid with time-keeping and the construction of the Christian calendar....

(b Boston, MA, July 10, 1868; d La Mesa, CA, Jan 25, 1962).

American book-illustrator and designer of posters, typefaces and furniture. In 1893 Bradley began designing for Vogue magazine. He subsequently worked for Ladies’ Home Journal, and in 1901–2 published an influential series of eight articles on ‘The Bradley House’; the designs in these articles (and another three in 1905) seem not to have been implemented, but they nonetheless exerted a seminal influence on public taste and on subsequent furniture design; his designs for pianos were used by Chickering & Sons of Boston. Bradley also designed two series of plates for Royal Doulton: ‘Golfers’ (...

(b Altona, Germany, June 11, 1741; d Amsterdam, Nov 9, 1799).

Dutch draughtsman and painter. He was the son of Johannes Cats, a Dutch bookdealer who moved back to Amsterdam from Germany following the death of his second wife shortly after Jacob’s birth. Jacob was trained as a bookbinder and as an engraver, first under Abraham Starre and later with Pieter Louw (d 1800). After further training with the pattern designer Gerard van Rossum (c. 1690–1772), he became a wallpaper painter in the Amsterdam factory of Jan Hendrik Troost van Groenendoelen, for whom he worked for three and a half years. Cats then established his own wallpaper factory, with financial assistance from his relative Willem Writs and from Jan de Bosch and Johann Goll van Franckenstein the elder. Cats was also a skilled amateur draughtsman, specializing in topographical views and landscapes, such as Two Shepherds Conversing before a Large Tree (Hamburg, Ksthalle). He also made copies (e.g. New York, O. Naumann priv. col., sold New York, Christie’s, ...

(b Paris, after 1945).

French performance and installation artist, painter, bookmaker, furniture and interior furnishings designer. Chaimowicz moved to England as a child, studying at Ealing College of Art (1963–5), Camberwell College of Art (1965–8) and the Slade School of Art (1968–70). Whilst completing his MA at the Slade, Chaimowicz decided to abandon painting, and started to make performance work, such as Celebration? Real Life (1972; performed at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Gallery House, London). For the duration of each show, Chaimowicz lived within the domestic space that he had created, serving coffee to visitors to the gallery. His work during the 1970s and early 1980s concentrated on performances in imaginary, idealised domestic spaces, with fragmented narratives and symbolic actions. Partial Eclipse (1980–82) consisted of Chaimowicz walking in a figure of eight in front of and behind a screen on which slides of his apartment/studio were projected, whilst a female voice recounted fragments of meetings, situations and relationships (see ...

(b Portland, ME, March 4, 1832; d New York, March 26, 1920).

American painter, interior designer and writer. Colman grew up in New York, where his father, Samuel Colman, ran a successful publishing business. The family bookstore on Broadway, a popular meeting place for artists, offered Colman early introductions to such Hudson River school painters as Asher B(rown) Durand, with whom he is said to have studied briefly around 1850. Having won early recognition for his paintings of popular Hudson River school locations (see Storm King on the Hudson), he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1854. Most of Colman’s landscapes of the 1850s, for example Meadows and Wildflowers at Conway (1856; Poughkeepsie, NY, Vassar Coll., Frances Lehman Loeb A. Cent.), reveal the influence of the Hudson River school. An avid traveller, he embarked on his first European tour in 1860, visiting France, Italy, Switzerland and the more exotic locales of southern Spain and Morocco. His reputation was secured in the 1860s by his numerous paintings of romantic Spanish sites, notably the large ...

(b c. 1706; d 1753).

English engraver, designer of trade cards and furniture designer. In 1746 he published A New Book of Ornaments, and subsequently collaborated with Matthias Lock on a second edition (1752). The New Book contains designs for side-tables, torchères, clocks, frames, pier-glasses and fireplaces, very much in the Rococo idiom but also including such chinoiserie motifs as ho-ho birds and oriental figures. Copland also provided plates for the ...

(b Liverpool, Aug 15, 1845; d Horsham, W. Sussex, March 14, 1915).

English painter, illustrator, designer, writer and teacher. He showed artistic inclinations as a boy and was encouraged to draw by his father, the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane (1808–59). A series of illustrations to Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) was shown first to Ruskin, who praised the use of colour, and then to the engraver William James Linton, to whom Crane was apprenticed in 1859. From 1859 to 1862 Crane learnt a technique of exact and economical draughtsmanship on woodblocks. His early illustrative works included vignette wood-engravings for John R. Capel Wise’s The New Forest: Its History and its Scenery (1862).

During the mid-1860s Crane evolved his own style of children’s book illustration. These so-called ‘toy books’, printed in colour by Edmund Evans, included The History of Jenny Wren and The Fairy Ship. Crane introduced new levels of artistic sophistication to the art of illustration: after ...

Late 19th-century style of American architecture and furniture. It owed its name to the furniture designs of Charles Locke Eastlake (see Eastlake, Charles Locke), which became widely known because of his book Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details, first published in London in 1868 and in Boston, MA, in 1872. The book was an immediate success in the USA, and six more American editions appeared in the next eleven years. In the preface to the fourth English edition (1878), Eastlake wrote of his dismay at finding ‘American tradesmen continually advertising what they are pleased to call “Eastlake” furniture …for the taste of which I should be very sorry to be considered responsible’. Eastlake-style furniture of the 1870s by such firms as Mason & Hamlin was decorated profusely with heavily carved Gothic ornament, whereas Eastlake’s own furniture had decoration that was simpler and more sparingly applied to emphasize function....

(Johann)

(b ?April 9, 1691; d Mannheim, Jan 11, 1752).

German sculptor, stuccoist, draughtsman and illustrator. He was the most important sculptor active in Franconia and the Palatinate in the first half of the 18th century; nevertheless, although his very individual late Baroque sculpture, mostly carved in wood, was highly regarded by his contemporaries, he was quickly forgotten after his death. His rich oeuvre was severely depleted, particularly as a result of World War II. It was only after that date that his importance was reassessed. Egell probably served an apprenticeship with the Würzburg sculptor Balthasar Esterbauer (1672–1722) and collaborated on the interior decoration of the Banz monastery. His first documented work is an expressive Crucifix made in 1716 for St Michael’s Monastery in Bamberg (now in St Otto, Bamberg). His stylistic development was affected by his work between 1716–17 and 1719 as one of the team directed by Balthasar Permoser, which made all the sculptural decorations at the Zwinger in Dresden for ...

(b 1719; d 1775).

American cabinetmaker whose workshop was in Charleston, SC. His account book (1768–75) is an important document in the history of 18th-century American furniture. His furniture is signed with a diamond and figure eight, and is often decorated with a fretwork pattern of circular or oval shapes.

(b Frankenstein nr Breslau [now Wroclaw], Dec 15, 1868; d Munich, 1940).

German painter, illustrator and interior designer. He studied at the Kunstschule in Breslau under the German painter Albrecht Bräuer (1830–97), and later at the Pinakothek in Munich, absorbing the work of the Old Masters. He continued his training in Paris at the Académie Julian (1892–4), and established a studio in Munich (1895). With other non-academic painters of the period he rejected the influence of the French Impressionists and allied with the Symbolist painters of the late 19th century. He drew inspiration from wild places and as a young man travelled to the Baltic Sea and to the Riviera and Brittany coasts. He was fascinated by Norse legends, Grimms’ fairy tales and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Stimmen der Völker, all of which had an impact on his subject-matter. His early paintings of bucolic landscapes with figures were executed in flat, calm colours with well-defined outlines, reminiscent of the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. In a long, prolific career he designed costumes and stage sets, stained glass, ceramics and bookbindings....

From the time John Cassian established the first female foundation in Marseille in ad 410, monastic women lived in varying states of enclosure and were surrounded by diverse images and objects that contributed to their devotion, education and livelihood. The first rule for women, written in 512 by St Caesarius of Arles, emphasized their strict separation from men and the world, as did the Periculoso, a directive issued by Pope Boniface VIII (reg 1294–1303) in 1298. Various architectural solutions developed throughout the Middle Ages to reconcile the necessities of enclosure with the access required by male clerics to celebrate Mass and provide pastoral care. Nuns’ choirs, where the women would gather for their daily prayers, were often constructed as discreet spaces in the church, which allowed women to hear or see the Mass without interacting with the cleric, as in the 10th-century choir in the eastern transept gallery at St Cyriakus in Gernrode, Germany. In some Cistercian examples, the nuns’ choir appeared at the west end of the nave. Dominican and Franciscan architecture was largely varied. Double monasteries, which housed men and women, also required careful construction. A 7th-century text describing the church of St Brigida in ...

Narrow, flat, raised moulding used to give emphasis in architecture. The term is employed, for example, for the ridges (stria) between the flutes of an Ionic column, for the ribbon-like ornament between the echinus and necking of a column and for the uppermost step of a cornice. In the decorative arts fillets are used to hide the edges of wallpaper or hangings. In leatherwork (especially bookbindig), the term denotes a wheel tool used to impress a straight line or the straight line made by the tool. (...

English wallpaper manufacturing company founded c. 1836. The company, variously known as Jeffrey, Wise & Co., Jeffrey, Wise & Horne (1842), Horne & Allen (1843) and Jeffrey, Allen & Co., produced pattern books (c. 1837–52) of cylinder machine prints and block prints in traditional designs (London, V&A, see Oman and Hamilton, no. 692A), together with reproductions of works of art, which were shown at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, London, in 1851. In 1864 Jeffrey & Co., then in Whitechapel, merged with Holmes & Aubert of Islington, London, taking over and enlarging their Islington premises. The skill of the company’s block printers led to two important commissions: the printing of wallpapers for Morris & Co. from 1864 onwards and, in 1865, of wallpapers designed by Owen Jones for the Viceroy’s Palace, Cairo.

In 1866 Metford Warner (1843–1930) joined the firm as a junior partner, becoming sole proprietor in ...

(b Budapest, July 13, 1896; d Warwick, NY, May 26, 1981).

Hungarian illustrator and designer, active also in the USA. Karasz studied at the Royal School of Arts and Crafts in Budapest. Her prolific career encompassed a wide range of media, including illustration and designs for textiles, ceramics, silver, furniture, interior and wallpaper, at all of which she excelled and won awards. Her work was inspired by European design, particularly work by artists at the Wiener Werkstättte. In 1913 she moved to the USA, where she taught at the Modern Art School in Greenwich Village, New York. She quickly became involved in the artistic life of Greenwich Village and provided numerous illustrations for a variety of arts and literature publications including Modern Art Collector, Bruno’s Weekly and Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire. Later, in the 1920s, Karasz’s work was included within or as cover art for The Liberator, The Masses, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country and Vanity Fair. Karasz is most famous for her work at ...

(fl c. 1790–c. 1839).

English furniture designer. In the mid-1830s he described himself as ‘an upholsterer of fourty five years experience’. He produced a series of pattern books containing designs for furniture and upholstery that was widely used by commercial cabinetmakers. The Modern Style of Cabinet Work Exemplified (1829) was reprinted in an improved version in 1835 and was still in demand in the trade as late as 1862, when it was reissued unaltered. King claimed that ‘as far as possible the English style is carefully blended with Parisian taste’ in the 227 designs, but he also included Grecian and Gothic furniture. King’s interpretation of the prevailing French taste is a typically confused mixture of bold Baroque scrolls and lighter Rococo curves. His Designs for Carving and Gilding (1830) contains both Greek and Rococo Revival designs, as does Modern Designs for Household Furniture (n.d.). In 1833 King published a book of full-size designs for makers of cabinets, chairs and sofas, turners and carvers entitled ...