Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style

Explores the shift in the locus of modernity in fin-de-siecle France from technological monument to private interior. The text examines the political, economic, social, intellectual and artistic factors specific to the French fin-de-siecle that interacted in the development of art nouveau.

Silverman describes art nouveau as a style possessing “a propensity for effervescent linearity and highly worked surfaces,” a style that “conjures up images of a European-wide invasion by the restless dynamism of organic form,” a style “dedicated to revitalizing all recesses of the urban artifice with the evocations of metamorphic growth.” But, Silverman argues, the art nouveau movement was characterized as much by conscious goals as by stylistic qualities. She sums up these goals in three objective statements:

-to disrupt the hierarchy of media and to reunite art and craft

-to discover a new distinctively modern design style, liberated from the conventions of historical ecelecticism

-to assert the primacy of individual vision over the function of materials

In evaluating these objectives, Silverman focuses her inquiry around the question, “What kinds of assumptions about modernity were expressed in an art of organic retreat and irrepressible curvature?” Her formulation reflects the degree to which she herself views the stylistic and ideological as necessarily connected in terms of the meaning they convey.