Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘Lady Alice, Lady Louise
Between the wash of the tumbling seas
We are ready to sing, if so you please;
So lay your long hands on the keys . . .
Alice the Queen and Louise the Queen
Two damozels, wearing purple and green . . .

Now read it again, this time visualizing the two sea-girt queens, their apparel and their furnishings. We are in the thrilling eighteen-seventies, just before the aesthetic break-through, and the lines are from ‘the Blue Closet’ by William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, who believed that the common man could be saved from ugliness and spiritual death by surrounding himself with simple things made by conscientious craftsmen or by making them himself: ‘What business have we with art at all unless we can share it? . . . Real art must be made by the people and for the people, as a happiness for the maker and user. . . . That talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense, there is no such thing: it is a mere matter of craftsmanship.’

     ‘A very pre-Raphaelite friend of mine came to me one day and said, apropos of his having designed a very Early English chair, “After all, if one has anything to say one might as well put it into a chair”.’ (Richard le Gallienne, from ‘The Yellow Book’ 1894-7.) Oh dear — what has happened? For this cannot be the chair ‘such as Barbarossa might have sat in’ that William Morris set out to build. The socialism of the 1880s has gone and fin-de-siecle self-consciousness has set in. The chair le Gallienne’s friend designed might have looked something like Charles Voysey’s. This chair, with its rush seat, has indeed something ‘Early English’ about it; it remains part of the tradition. However, the chair of Voysey’s young admirer, Charles Mackintosh, designed a year later, is original, like nothing else. It is Art Nouveau! Simple, functional, yet dignified; nervous, joyous and, like everything he did, vertical. And yet the parabolic, pierced ovoid at the summit and the way the uprights are carried past it, the relative width of splats and stretchers, give it a look of Picasso at the top and of Mondrian at the bottom; the two directions, one might say, in which Art Nouveau forked. The Glasgow School of Art, for whom this throne was intended, was sitting on a volcano.

     As always with a successful Art Nouveau object, it appears unique of its kind, an isolated Friday’s footprint, and we are all the more surprised to find that similar artefacts are at that moment cropping up in many capitals. The style with which it has most affinities, the Rococo, presents only one major problem: did it originate in Italy or France? But the origins of Art Nouveau are much harder to track down, for it seems to have erupted from many parallel centres of similarity-in-diversity. One moment it is not there and then suddenly, from about 1899, the pastel shades and seductive contours of this false dawn are visible everywhere.

     But despite its brevity, it is a truly European movement, and on the grand scale, for there is not only Art Nouveau painting, sculpture and industrial design, there is also present ‘L’Art maitresse’ an Art Nouveau architecture (whereas there is little Rococo and still less Surrealist architecture). ‘The major monuments of that architecture at its best had qualities not seen before or since,’ writes Henry Russell Hitchcock, and Dali puts forward a modest claim: ‘I believe I was the first in 1929 to consider — without a flicker of humour — the liberating architecture of Art Nouveau as the most original and extraordinary phenomenon in the history of art’ (Minotaure, 1933).

     Here I should like to make an important point. We all owe an enormous debt to Professor Nikolaus Pevsner, particularly where Art Nouveau is concerned. In 1931 he was writing on the architects who originated the modern movement, in 1936 he produced his invaluable Pioneers of Modern Design (enlarged and reprinted in 1948) which describes the movement with affection and respect, clears up its history and traces its influence. But in order to make it even more respectable he writes (and this is constantly repeated by others) that both Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau have the same functions, they are ‘transitional between Historicism and the Modern Movement’. Consequently the justification of Art Nouveau is that it prepared the way for the modern movement, and that what did not seem to anticipate this, for example Gaudi’s work and especially the unfinished church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, was abandoned as a blind turning. I think it is more correct to see the style as complete in itself, an unattainable end no doubt, but one having very little to do with modern art as we now know it. Then when we read a phrase like ‘the worst excesses of Art Nouveau’ we know it refers to the good Art Nouveau which cannot be assimilated, just as the ‘worst excesses of the Rococo’ meant the Rococo which did not slide imperceptibly into Neo-Classicism. It is to the honour of Loos, Gropius, Mies van de Rohe that, coming though they did on the heels of Art Nouveau, they took practically nothing from it; and it is to them we owe our world.

     But, what is Art Nouveau, that short-lived offspring of the conflict in our grandparents’ souls between puritanical functionalism and decadent rococo, whose symbol combined the long, straight stalk and curvilinear bell of the lily? Let us call it a syndrome — a group of symptoms which, found together, constitute ‘that strange decorative disease known as Art Nouveau’ (Walter Crane). They are: (a) A revolutionary simplicity in design (an end to fussy Victorian shoddiness). (b) The wavy line or plant arabesque (sometimes violent). (c) Plastic decorative flatness (painters become decorators under the influence of Japanese prints). (d) Symbolism (or Art for Art’s sake combined with fin-de-siecle pessimism).

     When all these are found together a reaction is produced, occasionally referred to as ‘counter-Art-Nouveau’ where the curvilinear is abandoned for the rectilinear.

     The work of certain English graphic artists is considered the precursor of all Art Nouveau, and Professor Pevsner, as well as everyone since, makes much of a book-cover by Mackmurdo for Wren’s City Churches, 1883, as the first indisputably Art Nouveau object. Yet no one has pointed out how totally inappropriate it is for the subject matter. In fact it is Blake’s conception of the unity between a poem, its illustrations and its calligraphy which is the real jumping off place for Art Nouveau and which leads on inexorably to the nine copies, bound for as many moods, which Dorian Gray possessed of Huysmans’s A Rebours and to the exquisite ‘décor purement ornemental’ of, for example, Van Rysselberghe’s illustrations for Histoires Souveraines by Villiers de l’Isle Adam (Brussels, 1899).

     The Japanese influence which played such an important role in the graphic arts and painting seems to have made itself felt in England even before Edmond de Goncourt publicized it in France. The Pre-Raphaelite artist Rossetti introduced Whistler to Farmer and Rogers’s Oriental emporium on Regent Street, where they obtained blue and white china. The young manager was Lazenby Liberty who afterwards set up on his own and whose wares gave the name Stile Liberty to Italian Art Nouveau. Curiously enough, Edmond de Goncourt got his ‘blue’ from a similar emporium in Paris run by a German Jew from Hamburg, Sigfried Bing. Bing also branched out into decoration and coined the name ‘Art Nouveau’ for his exhibition in 1896, where three whole rooms were furnished by an unknown Belgian decorator and craftsman, Henry van de Velde. In the meantime, Bing had accused Edmond de Goncourt of plagiarizing his own Far Eastern agent’s comments in a book on Hokusai; so that it was not surprising that, on leaving the exhibition, the old French aesthete threw up his hands in horror. Yet his suggestion that van de Velde’s objects were like ‘small sailing-ships built for speed — a yachting style’ was well-meant and well-taken. A year later, in Dresden, the exhibition was a terrific success and this led to van de Velde eventually directing the Weimar School until the 1914 war. He was replaced there by Gropius.

     We are now ready to examine the bewildering cross-fertilization which involved architects, painters and decorators in the new style as it proliferated through the nineties in Belgium, France, Germany and Austria. What had originated in industrialized England as a revolution in design took root in industrialized Belgium, home of the great architect Horta, and the many-talented van de Velde, who, like the French painters, Emile Bernard and Maurice Denis, was also an able theoretician. ‘En Belgique on a vu toutes les témérités.’

     Apart from the somewhat over-praised Metro entrances of Guimard, the French contribution to Art Nouveau came primarily through painting: Puvis de Chavannes, Moreau, Odilon Redon were major influences. According to Pevsner ‘the connecting link between Moreau, the Pre-Raphaelites and the new style of 1890 is the work of the Belgian Fernand Khnopff and the Dutch Jan Toorop’ but an even stronger current flowed through Gauguin (especially in his more decorative moments;: his disciple and mentor, Emile Bernard; Maurice Denis; and the Nabis, Van Gogh was also an overwhelming revelation to van de Velde, and one might say that French Post-Impressionist painting and English Post-Pre-Raphaelite craftsmanship are the two master-forces in Art Nouveau which came together in Brussels and from there moved eastwards to Berlin, Munich, Vienna and presumably, Russia (see Leon Bakst’s ballet decor). As additional sources one must add two English painters, Whistler whose Peacock Room with his own decorations, 1877, is certainly Art Nouveau, and the middle period of Aubrey Beardsley; and also the architect-designer Voysey, the first sight of whose wallpapers in Vienna made van de Velde cry out that ‘spring has come at last’.

     In 1900 Mackintosh (whose chair we have admired) was invited to exhibit the designs for one of his Glasgow tearooms before the Vienna Art Nouveau group, known as the Sezession. Klimt and Olbrich were in charge of the pavilion. ‘Here was indeed the oddest mixture of puritanically severe forms designed for use with a truly lyrical evaporation of all interests in usefulness. These rooms were like dreams . . . vertical everywhere.’ Professor Pevsner thinks Mackintosh’s interest in space links him to Frank Lloyd Wright and Corbusier. ‘In dealing with him we are able at last to link up the development in England with the main tendency of continental art in the nineties, with Art Nouveau.’ The chaste tearoom, enemy of the saloon, was at that time a revolutionary conception.

     In considering the development of Art Nouveau we keep coming back to van de Velde, the most articulate and conscientious of the architect-artist-craftsmen and one with a religious understanding of natural forms. He has written marvellously about his early days (and those of the movement) when, after a nervous breakdown in 1890, he wished to redesign his whole environment for the young wife who had brought him back to health and I should like to quote from the selection from his memoirs by P. Morton Shand in The Architectural Review, September 1952:

     ‘There will be no place in the society of the future for anything which is not of use to everyone’ (1890).

     ‘In 1891 Brussels saw the first things from Liberty’s — small tables and cabinets lacquered in red and green, furnished cretonnes, a little rustic pottery of peasant type exposed in the Compagnie Japonaise show-windows on the Rue Royale . . . and 1891 is also memorable because that year, for the first time, Les Vingt invited some of those artists who had broken with academicism and turned to what would now be called industrial design to participate in their annual salon. Among the scanty exhibits were vases by Gauguin, plates decorated by Willy Finch, posters by Chéret and some children’s books illustrated by Walter Crane.’ (Kelmscott Press books were shown the next year.) ‘The real forms of things were covered over. In this period the revolt against the falsificating of forms and against the Past was a moral revolt’ . . .

     ‘Our chief task now was to make ourselves thoroughly familiar with all the details of the recent revival of handicrafts in England . . . The pioneers during the initial period of 1893-5 were the Liégeois cabinet-maker Serrulier-Bovy and myself in the field of furniture and decoration, and Hankar and Horta in architecture . . .

     ‘That house (the Tassel house) which was in the Rue de Tunis, was much discussed at the time and has since become an historical landmark. (Built by Horta 1892-3. The house was said to fit its engineer-owner, M. Tassel, like a well-cut coat.)

     ‘Just as evil is forever seeking to corrupt virtue,’ concluded van de Gelde, ‘so throughout the history of art some malignant cancer has ceaselessly striven to taint or deform man’s purest ideals of beauty. The brief interlude of Art Nouveau, that ephemeral will o’ the wisp which knew no law other than its own caprice, was succeeded as I had foretold, by the hesitant beginnings of a new, a disciplined and purposeful style, the style of our own age.’

     Van de Velde, who had once designed his wife’s clothes to blend with his furniture, wallpapers and silver and even ordered the foods which would play a part in the general colour scheme of his new home, with its bilious exterior, lived to design interiors for the big new steamers on the Dover-Ostend service. In fact longevity seems an additional privilege of anyone connected with Art Nouveau, with only Beardsley dying young. Nature looks after her own: Tiffany (Louis) 1848-1933 (American), Mackintosh 1851-1942 (Scots), Voysey 1857-1941 (British), Lalique 1860-1945 (French), Ensor 1860-1949 (Belgian), Horta 1861-1947 (Belgian), Van de Velde 1863-1957 (Belgian), Brangwyn 1857-1956 (British), Bradley (Will) 1869- (American), Wright (F. L.) 1869-1959 (American), Hoffman 1870-1955 (Austrian).

     Hoffman’s art degenerated into Viennese frivolity and he died penniless and neglected. Van de Velde and Baron Horta became respected reactionaries (the latter designed the new Brussels railway-station). In 1926, Gaudi, aged a mere seventy-four, was knocked down by a tram on his daily walk to Mass from his lodging in his unfinished cathedral. [‘The greatest piece of creative architecture in the last twenty-five years’ — Louis Sullivan.] Mistaken for a tramp, he was carried unconscious to the pauper’s ward, since no taxi would take him.

     While Horta was creating wrought-iron interior winter-gardens of airy freshness such as that of the van Eetveld House, 1895, the Catalan Gaudi, like Horta of humble origin, was concentrating on surface, on the new exterior forms and shapes which iron and cement could yield. His Art Nouveau (called Modernismo) triumphs are, however, later than Horta’s, and the Casa Batlló and Casa Mila, both on the Paseo de Grácia in Barcelona, date from 1905 to 1910. They have been praised by Sullivan, Gropius and Corbusier but are best described by Dali as ‘aspirations-concrètes, extra-plastiques’, ‘a house built in the shape of the sea with fossilized waves and wrought-iron foam’ in a formula ‘convulsive-ondulante’. He speaks of the ‘collective sentiment of ferocious individualism which characterized the founders of the style’. ‘In a modern-style building Gothic is metamorphosed into Greek, into Far Eastern, and — by a certain involuntary fantasy — into Renaissance which can suddenly become pure modern-style again, dynamic and asymmetric and that withal in the fluid time and space of a single window! They are the first edible houses and beauty shall be nothing if not edible!’

     The garden suburb, now a park, built for the Guell family, 1900-14, includes ravishing polychrome serpentine benches and collages of various bright and broken materials which, according to Henry Russell Hitchcock, ‘compete for priority with paintings by Kandinsky and Delaunay as the first examples of wholly abstract art’. He was both architect and sculptor in the Ruskinian tradition and a mystic whose earliest ironwork (1878-80) pre-dates even MacMurdo’s cover. The vitality of all of Gaudi’s buildings gives the lie to those who consider Art Nouveau a decadent calligraphy, and they increase in importance now that we cannot see such masterpieces as Endell’s Studio Elvira, 1897-98 (Munich).

     In my memory, the highlights of Art Nouveau, besides talking about Gaudi to the Conde Guell (‘Don’t mention that man! He ruined my father!’) and meeting the gentle Voysey in the early 1930s with his latest disciple, the youthful John Betjeman, was my visit to the Stoclet Palace. As so little has been written about this last and greatest masterpiece of the style (Austrian Sezession, Hoffman and Klimt, Brussels, 1904-11), I will give my impressions. The palace belongs to the last rectilinear counter-form of Art Nouveau. It was constructed with no thought of cost for the Baron Stoclet who gave Hoffman the freedom that Richard Wagner desired from King Ludwig. It is both austere and supremely elegant and is built of a cold Norwegian marble, yet not altogether cold, with windows of solid crystal. The street side is functional, with a long staircase window and a tower like an advanced Swiss church. The garden-side is in swelling Baroque, and the garden is also a construction with a huge blank wall to shut out the other houses. Inside all is colour and light, and the predominating material appears to be lapis lazuli. There is an intimate theatre fit for Pelléas and Melisande, the famous dining room with Klimt’s mosaics and many salons to hold the Baron’s collections which included Merovingian jewellery, Byzantine, Celtic and Coptic objects, Chinese swords and the then unknown ‘art of the Steppes’. Hoffman’s grave, elegant personality is everywhere. He designed the furniture, the splendid bathrooms, the linen, the cutlery, the pens and writing paper, the binding of the books ornamented by Van Rysselberghe for early editions of Gide, even the Visitors’ Book. Everything is a functional luxury, everything breathes the taste of the designer and the restless curiosity of the princely owner (whose three children have since inherited it). It is both the last Lust-schloss and the precursor of the liners Bremen and Europa — the fitting conclusion to the work of Voysey and Mackintosh, of van de Velde and Horta, the Northern antithesis to Gaudi. and it winds up the movement which never degenerated into sentimentality, flatness or weariness in the hands of these great men.