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 materialsIn 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. Winner, 1990 Berkshire Conference Book AwardArt Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style explores the shift in the locus of modernity from technological monument to private interior. It examines the political, economic, social, intellectual and artistic factors, specific to late 19th century France, that interacted in the development of art nouveau.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.Winner, 1990 Berkshire Conference Book AwardArt Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style explores the shift in the locus of modernity from technological monument to private interior. It examines the political, economic, social, int