BRITISH ART NOUVEAU

I thought I'd post about a Christmas gift idea I had, namely architectural posters. I did some research and was amazed to find how few decent ones there were. It looks like those who want that sort of thing will have to make them at home.

I'd just seen a documentary about British Art Nouveau at a friend's house so the first pictures I tried to track down were of Nouveau buildings like the famous chapel at Compton, England (above). No luck, though.

In this case it's possible that the lack of demand for posters can be accounted for by the offputting clutter and darkness of Nouveau interiors. English artists liked to mix Nouveau with Gothic and the combination didn't always gel.

British Nouveau rooms were often platypuses where different influences were thrown together, helter skelter.

The combinations seldom worked, but that doesn't disqualify them as art. I like British Nouveau. The flaws don't diminish the invigorating passion and intelligence behind it.

Nouveau/craftsman artists like William Morris were socialists and were embarrassed by the fact that the new styles (above) were labor intensive and weren't really affordable by the working poor.

To correct that he put a lot of effort into fabric design (above) that could be cheaply mass-produced. It was a case of no good deed going unpunished: the poor guy was denounced by his socialist friends who thought anything factory made was a tool of the Devil. A bitter schism took shape.

Morris must have had OCD. His leaf patterns were incredibly busy, even more so than you'd find in real life forest cover. When I was a little kid old ladies were fond of dress patterns like this. All these years later it occurs to me that some of them must have associated those busy designs with Morris and the avant garde of his day.

Anyway, the man created some beautiful fabrics but he was undercut by a brand new movement in architecture that believed in filling rooms with light. Morris's fabrics were meant for shadowy rooms illuminated by oil lamps. Bright sunlight seemed to call for something more light-hearted and airy.

Gee, thinking about all this reminds me of how fast art movements came and went in the astonishingly creative Twentieth Century. Art Nouveau had ten years, which is better than some had.