The Road to Prague: Six Art Nouveau Signposts

In the 1890s, Prague’s city planners began an urban renewal project that leveled slums in the Jewish Quarter and parts of the Old Town. The rebuilding effort corresponded with new art movements that were spreading across Europe and resulted in streets that are a veritable Art Nouveau theme park. Facades present a panoply of ornament: stucco trees grow around doorways, windows glitter with stained glass, mascarons scowl from corners, and voluptuous allegorical figures beckon from pediments. The architecture has a sense of lightness and originality, yet it harkens back to the classical Baroque buildings of Prague’s earlier history.

Prague’s architects drew on influences from across Europe in employing this color and drama. To explore those influences, we will follow a path through six cities and discuss their leading Art Nouveau architects and designers. It’s a winding, incomplete road without a strict geographic or chronological direction. It will, however, encounter important buildings, objects, and philosophies that influenced Prague’s city planners.

Municipal House, Prague, Osvald Polívka and Antonín Balšánek,1905 -12

But first, how do we define this art movement and style?

Art Nouveau. Secession. Jugenstil. Stile Floreale. Modernista. Glasgow style. The terms for the new art movements of the late 19th century have many names, but they arose from the same spirit and impetus, and from the conjunction of two powerful forces. Prior to 1890, architecture and design were primarily a succession of historic revival styles. Neoclassicism, Rococo revival, Gothic revival, Romanesque revival and several culturally-specific genres gained prominence across Europe. By the end of the century, many architects and designers were rejecting a reliance on tradition and were seeking a contemporary style that reflected the present, not the past. As stated by art historian Paul Greenhalgh, “Art Nouveau was the first self-conscious, internationally based attempt to transform visual culture through a commitment to the idea of the modern.”

The transformation of visual culture sounds grand but it is not an exaggeration. The adherents of Art Nouveau emphatically promoted the concept of gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, meaning that all arts are equal and that the style should be applied across painting, sculpture, pottery, architecture, and furniture. They believed in design unity from the exterior decoration to the interior furnishings. The practice led to collaboration and diversification. Architects designed dining tables and the flatware to set on it. Sculptors created exterior ornament on buildings. Glass makers filled skylights with stained glass and produced decorative objects for mantelpieces. No discipline was superior to another and all disciplines strived to create one total piece of art in buildings. While it doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary today, that kind of uniformity and equality of the arts and artisans was avant garde at the time.

Brasserie Julien, Paris, Edouard Fournier, 1901-02

The second wave of the industrial revolution was equally impactful. Across the century, manufacturing, materials, labor, and construction were changing with unprecedented speed and innovation. New techniques and materials changed how artists designed and made objects and how architects built structures. Citing just one example, manufacturers used new techniques of wrought and cast iron—an old material—and applied it to mass-produced balconies, new types of furniture, and the structural support holding up the great European train sheds with mass and lightness. This industrial revolution also brought an increase in consumers with buying power and the leisure time to indulge it. Late 19th-century architects and designers wanted to abandon the strictures of the past by embracing new materials, new ideas, and new forms that were structurally and aesthetically expressions of their age. And they now had a market of patrons and consumers ready to buy what they were creating.

Staircase, Petit Palais, Paris, 1900

Photo credit: By Guilhem Vellut from Paris, France - Stairs @ Petit Palais @ Paris, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59309120

Art Nouveau artists and architects created their non-traditional aesthetic with a mix of naturalism, exoticism, and eroticism. Using natural forms as ornament was nothing new. But in Art Nouveau natural forms went beyond decoration to become the object: trees were table legs and orchids were lampshades. As expressed in Art Nouveau, nature also had a darker side with images of insects, bats, and various “unpretty” creatures decorating vases and lampshades. They also drew on Asian and Muslim cultures, adapting their forms and decorative motifs such as Tiffany’s rose water sprinklers. Finally, sensual female figures appeared everywhere from Alphonse Mucha’s cigarette advertisements to the sculptural depictions of Loïe Fuller’s dances to the structural elements for François Rupert Carabin’s—arguably misogynistic—furniture. It added up to produce organic, sinuous, asymmetrical forms ornamenting interiors and exteriors.

Nymph lamp, Egide Rombaux & François Hoosemans, 1900

Photo credit: King Baudouin Foundation, photo: Studio Philippe de Formanoir

Chair, François Rupert Carabin, 1893

Photo credit: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Now let’s begin the journey. In subsequent journal entries, we’ll visit each signpost.