Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international style of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that sought to renew art by uniting painting, graphics, architecture and applied design into a single artistic ensemble. Its core is the cult of natural, organic form: the sinuous "whiplash" line, plant shoots, flowers, stems, waves of hair and elongated female figures. Art Nouveau artists deliberately avoided the right angle and symmetry, favoring a flowing asymmetrical rhythm, decorative flatness and refined color schemes of muted, pastel tones combined with gold. The style made active use of new materials — wrought iron, glass, ceramics — and of the lithographic poster, which made art part of the urban environment. In different countries it bore its own names: Secession in Vienna, Jugendstil in Germany, Stile Liberty in Italy. Its emblematic figures are Alphonse Mucha with his posters and decorative panels, Gustav Klimt with his mosaic-like ornament, and the architect Victor Horta. In Ukraine Art Nouveau found vivid expression in the architecture of Vladyslav Horodetsky in Kyiv and in the work of masters connected with folk ornament, notably in the graphics of Heorhiy Narbut, who fused European Art Nouveau with the Ukrainian tradition. Art Nouveau was the last great unified style to embrace every sphere of visual culture and, at the same time, prepared the ground for the avant-garde experiments of the early twentieth century.