The initiation of the Art Nouveau by Horta in 1892 was sudden and its spread extremely rapid. Almost concurrently forms very similar to those he had invented began to appear in other European countries. Rarely has a new idea in the visual arts been taken up internationally with so little lag. Advanced artistic circles at this time were evidently thoroughly prepared to accept major innovations and new periodicals, starting up almost one a year, provided vehicles for their transmission: Pan in 1895, for example, Jugend in 1896, Dekorative Kunst in 1897, and Die Kunst in 1899, to mention only German magazines. Had the Art Nouveau not already been invented by Horta the year before, three works of art dated 1893, Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Cello Player’, an illustration in black and white, Toorop’s picture ‘Three Brides’, and Munch’s ‘The Cry’, first a painting but widely available as a colour-lithograph the following year, might well have supplied the impetus for other designers to do so; doubtless such inspiration did encourage rivalry rather than direct imitation of Horta. In Germany a Munch exhibition in Berlin in 1892 and a Toorop exhibition in Munich in 1893 called attention to the long waving curves and the general linearity of style of these artists. In 1893, moreover, the Studio began to bring to designers and architects everywhere well-chosen illustrations of current English decorative work.

England itself was least responsive to the new Continental mode. It is, indeed, improper to call the Bishopsgate Institute in Bishopsgate in the City of London, built in 1893-4 by C. Harrison Townsend (1850-1928), Art Nouveau. Yet, despite its evident dependence on Webb, the way in which Townsend took the characteristically stylized but basically naturalistic patterns of contemporary English wallpapers and chintzes and used them in relief at architectural scale is as drastic an innovation as are the bits and pieces of more abstract stone carving that Horta used on his Brussels houses of these years. Townsend remained a ‘fellow-traveller’ rather than a member of the international Art Nouveau group for a decade. For example, the façade of his Whitechapel Art Gallery in the Whitechapel Road in the East End of London, designed in 1895 and built in 1897-9, is an improved version of that of the Bishopsgate Institute (Plate 134B). The broad and almost Richardsonian arch is placed off centre, the ornament is freer and bolder, and the few windows are organized in a continuous band below the plain wall of the upper portion.

Less successful, though perhaps more advanced, is Townsend’s Horniman Museum of 1900-1, a free-standing edifice in London Road, Forest Hill, south of London. This has less external ornamentation, except for the façade mosaic by Anning Bell, but there is a very plastically conceived tower with rounded corners placed at one side of the front façade. His church of St Mary the Virgin, consecrated in 1904, at Great Warley in Essex, is very simple, indeed rather Voysey-like as regards the buttressed and roughcast exterior. However, the elaborate decorations inside by Sir William Reynolds-Stephens (1862-1943) offer the most virtuoso example of Art Nouveau in England—at least they are about as close to the Continental mode as the English came.^[380] No other English architect came nearer the Art Nouveau than Townsend; in quality, moreover, his work excels most of that done on the Continent by the various imitators and emulators of Horta, even if it lacks the humble integrity of Voysey’s best houses of these years.

The earliest and, later, the most versatile Art Nouveau architect of France^[381] was Hector Guimard (1867-1942). But his first work of consequence, the complex block of flats in Paris called the Castel Béranger^[382] at 16 Rue La Fontaine, which was completed after several years of construction in 1897, still represents a very ambiguous exploitation of the new ideas coming from Brussels. It must be remembered, however, that the original design almost certainly antedates by a year or two all other Art Nouveau work outside Belgium. Also notable is the fact that the façade of the Castel Béranger was premiated by the City of Paris in 1898, since this indicates the rapidity with which the new mode won approval in France.

In 1896, while the Castel Béranger was building, Siegfried Bing, a Hamburg art-dealer whose wares included Japanese prints—now even more in demand than at any time since their introduction to Europe in the late fifties—and also the new English decorative products, decided to open a shop in Paris. Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau at 22 Rue de Provence was designed for him by L.-B. Bonnier (1856-1946) in the Belgian mode, which thereby acquired its familiar name. This shop was of no great architectural interest, however, except that it was the first of the multitude that were produced in the next ten or fifteen years. Not only in Paris but in most Continental cities large and small, and even in England and in America, where the Art Nouveau otherwise hardly penetrated, these shop-fronts can still be noted; one of the finest has even been transferred from Paris to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in America.

Bing also enlisted the services of Van de Velde, still quite immature as a designer compared to Horta, but very articulate as a critic. Influenced more intellectually than visually by the English, Van de Velde’s personal development as a decorator now proceeded very rapidly. The lounge he designed for the Dresden Exhibition of 1897, for example, was an accomplished if somewhat heavily scaled example of an Art Nouveau interior and much more elaborate than those completed in his house at Uccle the year before.

By the time the Maison du Peuple in Brussels opened three years later in 1899 and Horta’s early career reached its apex of achievement, the Art Nouveau was already a favourite mode with young French designers and generally in rising favour in fin de siècle Paris. As a result even established architects were not averse to introducing its curves in interior decoration and for the detailing of exposed metal structural elements, although most of them had little understanding of its real possibilities. The giant stone colonnades of the Grand Palais in Paris, designed in 1897 and built in 1898-9 for the Exhibition of 1900, were presumably intended to rival those of the plaster palaces of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893; but behind them the architectural team of H.-A.-A. Deglane (1855-1931), L.-A. Louvet (1860-1936), both pupils of Richardson’s master, André, and A.-F.-T. Thomas (1847-1907) provided a vast iron-and-glass interior detailed in a coarse sort of Art Nouveau way that is quite unrelated to the academic treatment of the exterior.^[383]

The entrance feature, designed by René Binet (1866-1911), and the Pavilion Bleu by E.-A.-R. Dulong (1860-?), the principal exhibition restaurant in the Champ de Mars, were even more whole-heartedly à la mode. One can hardly regret, however, that these gaudy structures, unlike the Grand Palais, were only temporary. A much superior example of Art Nouveau decoration, Maxim’s Restaurant in the Rue Royale, remains intact as it was redecorated in 1899 by Louis Marney. This is full of period flavour and still splendidly maintained, but it has no real existence as interior architecture. Soon the Art Nouveau would be vulgarized in dozens of cafés, large and small, all over Europe. Of these the Brasserie Universelle in the Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris by Niermans, carried out two or three years after Maxim’s and lately demolished, was perhaps the most sumptuous; there, however, the new mode was eclectically combined with a lush Neo-Rococo.^[384]

The architect Charles Plumet (1861-1925), working with the decorator Tony Selmersheim (b. 1871), built in 1898 at 67 Avenue Malakoff the first of a series of houses in which Art Nouveau decoration was grafted on to a general scheme of design that was more or less Late Gothic. This has also been demolished. Such eclecticism, based more usually on eighteenth-century models, is characteristic of the rapid Parisian dilution of the Art Nouveau and doubtless played a great part in its early descent into the obsolescence of the démodé. Yet Auguste Perret (1874-1954), in a large block of flats built in 1902 at 119 Avenue de Wagram, exploited in masonry a heavier and richer sort of Art Nouveau than Plumet’s with considerable success (Plate 134A). This edifice is in curious contrast to the flats of ferro-concrete at 25 bis Rue Franklin, designed by Perret in 1902 also, with which his career is generally considered to begin. Even the latter, moreover, have considerably more Art Nouveau feeling in their panels of faience mosaic than is usually recognized (see Chapter 18). The block in the Avenue Wagram is quite typical of French production in these years but of much higher than average quality.

The most accomplished French Art Nouveau designer remained Guimard, the first to take up the mode. His most conspicuous works, however, the Paris Métro entrances of 1898-1901, lie outside the normal realm of architecture (Plate 137B). These are executed entirely in metal of the most sinuous and vegetable-like character, and their extreme virtuosity is the more surprising in that they consist of metal castings produced in series. His no longer extant Humbert de Romans Building of 1902 in the Rue Saint-Didier in Paris, on the other hand, illustrated the usual difficulties of Art Nouveau architects when working with masonry. The exterior was neither Neo-Rococo nor Neo-Flamboyant but curiously crude and gawky in its originality, like his Castel Béranger, with none of the Art Nouveau grace that even Plumet sometimes evoked with success, or the rather lush ornamentation of Perret’s block of flats in the Avenue Wagram. The auditorium inside, however, employed curved structural members even more boldly than Horta had done in that of the Maison du Peuple. Here Guimard succeeded in giving a masculine vigour to the rather feminine forms of a mode already passing its brief prime.

As late as 1911, however, Guimard remained faithful to the Art Nouveau in an extensive range of contiguous blocks of flats that he built at 17-21 Rue La Fontaine near the Castel Béranger. For his own flat there he designed ironwork as boldly abstract as advanced mid twentieth-century sculpture in metal, but also as suavely elegant as comparable Rococo detail of the eighteenth century. The exteriors, moreover, which are entirely of stone, have a great deal of the refinement and restraint of Horta’s Hallet house of 1906 in Brussels. They are, however, more plastically treated with boldly moulded bay windows and attic storeys. Except for Perret’s, few Parisian blocks of flats of the period rival these in interest or in quality of design and execution.

Three Paris department stores of the early years of the century continued to use the metal-and-glass interior structure of Boileau and Eiffel’s Bon Marché, with notable success. In presumable emulation of Horta’s Innovation in Brussels, moreover, the architects of two of these extended considerably the external use of exposed metal introduced by Sédille at the Printemps in the eighties. These two stores remain, with Guimard’s Métro entrances, the most prominent Parisian examples of the Art Nouveau. The main branch of the Samaritaine^[385] in the Rue de la Monnaie near the Pont Neuf was built in 1905 by C.-R.-F.-M. Jourdain (1847-1935). This has several fine galleried courts inside in the tradition of the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie of the 1830s, but it is even more distinguished for the sturdy scale and the straightforward design of the external metal frame (Plate 133). The actual structural members are hardly bent at all by the exigencies of the mode; but they were characteristically ornamented not only with decorative metalwork but also with inset panels of polychrome faience, now painted over. On the north front, however, other panels, here of faience mosaic, remain visible; these are of even greater delicacy and elegance than Perret’s foliate panels in his block of flats of 1902-3 in the Rue Franklin.

The contemporary Grand Bazar de la Rue de Rennes, now the Magasins Réunis, at 134-136 Rue de Rennes by H.-B. Gutton (b. 1874) is generally fussier in design than the Samaritaine. Gutton achieved, however, a more completely volumetric expression, emphasizing the lightness and the thinness of metal-and-glass construction somewhat as the early monuments of the 1840s and 1850s in England had done. New shop-windows below and the removal of the open grillework that once rose against the sky have now much diminished its effectiveness. Binet’s earlier galleried court of 1900 at the Printemps was burned out in 1923, unfortunately. With the lifts rising in the corners and the staircases swooping down in great splashing curves, this court was altogether superior to his Entrance to the Exhibition of 1900 and even to Frantz Jourdain’s small later courts in the Samaritaine. It seemed somehow to epitomize what a great metropolitan department store ought to look like somewhat as Garnier’s Opéra epitomizes what later generations came to expect of an opera-house. If Prince Danilo supped with the ‘damen’ of Maxim’s, we can be sure the ‘Merry Widow’ and the ‘Pink Lady’ did their shopping here.

It was the Art Nouveau structures at the Exhibition of 1900 which first focused public attention on the new mode, occasioning also that rapid Parisian vulgarization which brought its early end. At the exhibition, besides the crude but conspicuous things designed by Binet and Dulong that have been mentioned, there was the Pavillon Art Nouveau Bing by Georges de Feure (1868-1928), a designer rather than an architect, which had rooms by Edward Colonna, back from working for Tiffany in America, and others of the best artists and craftsmen employed by Bing; but their exhibits represented decoration, not interior architecture properly speaking. However, by 1900 the Art Nouveau was not at all the strictly Parisian manifestation that it must have seemed to most of those who visited the exhibition. The Germans, notably, had already taken it up with great enthusiasm, beginning about 1897.

The Studio Elvira of 1897-8 in Munich by August Endell (1871-1925) had a plain stucco façade cut by a few strategically placed windows of varied shape; but this façade was splashed across the centre with a very large abstract relief of orientalizing character resembling something half-way between a dragon and a cloud. Endell’s studio, if not the first manifestation of the Art Nouveau in Germany, was certainly the most striking; moreover, it followed immediately upon the showing of Van de Velde’s Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of 1897. Already, however, in that portion of the Wertheim Department Store in Berlin in the Leipzigerstrasse which was begun in 1896, Alfred Messel (1853-1909) had used a great deal of exposed metal and glass and even perhaps modified the detail a bit towards the Art Nouveau. This was five years before Horta designed the Innovation Department Store in Brussels and ten years earlier than Jourdain’s Samaritaine in Paris. Messel made the spacing of his heavily moulded masonry piers quite wide and opened up completely the bays between. The result was at least as close to Sullivan’s Gage Building of 1898-9 as to the Paris department stores of a decade later. In those portions of this department store that Messel added in 1900-4, however, the façades, although highly stylized, were of rather Late Gothic character and certainly quite remote from the Art Nouveau.

In 1899 Van de Velde moved from Paris to Berlin. There he designed the Hohenzollern Kunstgewerbehaus, a shop parallel to Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris in its interests and its activities. In the next year he carried out the Haby Barber Shop and the Havana Cigar Store, two of the most extravagant of all Art Nouveau shop interiors. With the opening of the new century, however, in his full-scale architecture Van de Velde moved almost as rapidly away from the Art Nouveau as did Messel, although in a different direction (see Chapter 20). By this time strong counter-influences were reaching Germany from Glasgow and Vienna.

Although not disdaining the Art Nouveau as completely as did the English and the Americans, the Austrians showed little of the enthusiasm of the French and the Germans. There is in Vienna one block of flats^[386] of about 1900 so completely Art Nouveau that it might well have been designed by Horta himself. But the leading Austrian architects, old and young, reflected the new Belgian mode only with considerable diffidence and restraint. Otto Wagner (1841-1918), long a well-established academic architect and indeed Professor of Architecture at the Akademie, introduced more and more Art Nouveau detail in the Stadtbahn stations that he built over the years 1894-1901, most notably in the one at the Karlsplatz with its curved metal frame and inset floral panels. However, even this seems tentative and hardly rivals in interest Guimard’s contemporary Métro stations in Paris.

Wagner’s so-called Majolika Haus, a block of flats at 40 Linke Wienzeile designed about 1898, is far more distinguished and original (Plate 138A). Although the ironwork of the balconies is here and there curvilinear in detail and the faience plaques that completely cover the wall are decorated with great swooping patterns of highly colourful flowers, the architectonic elements of the façade are nevertheless very crisp, flat, and rectangular. That Vienna would very shortly become the focus of a reaction against the Art Nouveau does not seem surprising in the light of this façade. Moreover, on an office building erected in the Ungargasse for the firm of Portois & Fix in 1897 by Max Fabiani (b. 1865), who had been Wagner’s assistant in 1894-6, the coloured faience slabs which sheathe its surface are arranged in a purely geometrical chequer-board pattern; only the ironwork has a slightly Art Nouveau flavour. In the late nineties it would be hard to say whether Art Nouveau influence was arriving or departing but for the projects other Viennese architects were publishing in the review Ver Sacrum started in 1898.

The design of the art gallery built in the Friedrichstrasse in Vienna in 1898-9 for the Sezession, a newly founded society of artists in revolt against the Academy, by J. M. Olbrich (1867-1908) seems more influenced, however, by the façade of Townsend’s Whitechapel Art Gallery—only just begun but already published as a project in the Studio in 1895—than by the work of the Belgians or the French, which had affected him strongly in the immediately preceding years. The pierced dome of floral metalwork alone vies in virtuosity with Horta or Guimard, and the pattern of this is actually quite English in character. The bronze doors are by Gustav Klimt, an Austrian Post-Impressionist who can be grouped, up to a point, with the Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, and Swiss Post-Impressionists mentioned earlier (see Chapter 16). Olbrich was called to Darmstadt in Germany to work at the artists’ colony sponsored there by the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig in 1899 and Darmstadt, like Vienna, soon became a centre of reaction against the Art Nouveau under his leadership (see Chapter 20).

Both in Vienna and in Darmstadt the influence of the Scottish designer Mackintosh helped most to crystallize an alternative mode. Mackintosh first exhibited a room on the Continent at Munich in 1898, the same year that Baillie Scott was called by the Grand Duke to decorate an interior in the palace at Darmstadt. In 1900 Mackintosh was invited to design a room in the Sezession Exhibition in Vienna. That exhibit undoubtedly encouraged Viennese architects, already diffident towards the Art Nouveau, to turn very sharply away from it. This Adolf Loos (1870-1933) had already done in designing a completely rectilinear shop interior in Vienna in 1898. Loos, Wagner after about 1901, and Wagner’s pupil Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) were all leaders in the international reaction against the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 20). The position of Mackintosh, however, is rather hard to state so categorically and must be considered here in more detail.

At home in Scotland Mackintosh’s early decorative work of the mid nineties approached Continental Art Nouveau more closely than that of any other Briton, not excluding Townsend. Indeed, he was castigated by his compatriots and his English contemporaries for participating in so exotic a movement. But Mackintosh also came nearer to possessing genius than most of the men of his generation associated with the Art Nouveau, not even excluding Horta. That genius, all the same, was of so ambivalent a nature that he could seem for a few years to go along with the general stream of Continental fashion and yet, almost at the very same time, provide also a real protest against its excesses and its superficialities by the craftsmanlike integrity and the almost ascetic restraint of his best work. That protest the Austrians and the Germans were not slow to heed.

Mackintosh made his first mark in Glasgow, which had earlier been the home of the highly original ‘Greek’ Thomson (see Chapter 4). By the nineties, moreover, interest in contemporary French painting was probably livelier there than it was in London. But Glasgow was also as notorious as Chicago, that major focus of architectural achievement in the America of the nineties, for its presumed philistinism. Touches of Mackintosh’s hand can be distinguished in work of the office of John Honeyman (1831-1914) and his partner Keppie, where the young architect was employed at the start of his career, notably in the Martyrs’ Public School in Glasgow of 1895. But it was in the decoration of the first of a series of Miss Cranston’s ‘tea-rooms’ (scottice, restaurants), the one in Buchanan Street remodelled by him in 1897-8, that Mackintosh’s personal talents were first effectively exploited. His very earliest decorative compositions and the murals that he and his wife provided here, full of heavy and presumably Gaelic symbolism, are parallel to, rather than derivative from, the work of the Belgians. They are, in fact, much closer to the drawings of Beardsley and the paintings of Toorop and Munch than to the plant-like ironwork and almost Neo-Rococo carved stone ornament characteristic of Horta. But the same long swinging curves are present, the same linearity, and the same rejection of all stylistic influence from the past.

In this same year 1897 Mackintosh’s firm had the good fortune to win the limited competition for the Glasgow School of Art with a project that was entirely their young designer’s (Plate 132A). Thus he very soon had an opportunity to prove himself architect as well as decorator in a way that only two or three of the Europeans associated with the Art Nouveau had been able to do up to this point. The school was built during the next two years, just as Horta was finishing his Maison du Peuple in Brussels. The only element in the design that relates to the contemporary Art Nouveau of the Continent is the ironwork. This is quite incidental to the major architectonic qualities of the building, moreover, since it is purely decorative, not structural. It is also extremely restrained in its abstract curves, like Fabiani’s of this date in Vienna, and almost totally devoid of vegetable or floral reminiscence.

The entrance to the Glasgow Art School seems to derive from Webb, but, like that of Townsend’s contemporary art gallery in London, it is rather less traditional in character than Webb’s work of this period. The somewhat wilful asymmetry and the plastic elaboration of the central part of the façade contrast nevertheless with the straightforwardness of the general treatment. There are two ranges of very wide studio windows—reputedly derived from a Voysey project—like ‘Chicago windows’ but larger, with the reinforced-concrete lintels above them frankly exposed, and little else in the whole composition. To later eyes this façade, expressing so clearly the uncomplicated plan that it fronts, tends to appear deceptively simple and obvious. But Mackintosh’s very sensitive proportions and the delicate touches of linear detail provided by the ironwork create a design at once very direct and very subtle.

The north end of the building is a tall plain wall of rather small-scaled random ashlar broken only by a few strategically spotted windows of various shapes. At once medievally dramatic and quite abstract, this façade makes one appreciate all the more the almost classical serenity and horizontality of the main front. The Art School is clearly the manifesto of an architectural talent of broad range and great assurance—very different indeed from that of Voysey.

Mackintosh was not alone in Glasgow in these years. A real ‘school’ existed, chiefly in the field of decoration, of which George Walton was another notable exponent.^[387] Like Baillie Scott and Ashbee, Walton had some success as an architect in England (see Chapter 15) as Mackintosh did not, even though he executed a few interiors below the Border. But local support was not what it should have been for any of them in either Scotland or England. While the Art School was in construction, however, Mackintosh was asked in 1898 to provide the already-mentioned room in Munich, first of many that he showed at various exhibitions in Germany and Austria. This interior was very different indeed, both in the basic rectangularity of the forms and in the delicacy of the membering, from Van de Velde’s Art Nouveau Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of the previous year. Thus, even before Van de Velde reached Berlin in 1899, a new line of influence from Glasgow into Germany—and soon into Austria also—was established whose general tendency was in sharp opposition to the lusher currents flowing from Brussels and Paris.

When Olbrich settled in Darmstadt—just before Mackintosh’s room was shown at the Sezession—he also rejected almost completely in the work he carried out at the Grand Duke’s Art Colony the still slightly Art Nouveau leanings—in any case already closer to the English Townsend than to Horta or Van de Velde—of his newly completed Sezession Building (see Chapter 20). Only his Pavilion of the Plastic Arts of 1901 at Darmstadt retained curved elements, and those were structural rather than merely decorative. The general rectangularity and the broad horizontal windows of the Ernst Ludwig Haus, a block of artists’ studios also completed by Olbrich in 1901, suggest comparison with Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art. Whether or not, in fact, Olbrich knew Mackintosh’s building—he may well have seen drawings if not photographs of it—his approach here was certainly very similar.

Mackintosh had a good many further opportunities as a decorator, both at home and abroad, but only too few commissions to design whole buildings. However, his two houses near Glasgow, Windy Hill at Kilmacolm of 1899-1901 and Hill House at Helensburgh of 1902-3, are both very notable. Externally they have a certain generic similarity to Voysey’s, with their moderate pitched roofs of dark slate, roughcast walls, and plain stone trim. His prototypes are not English but Scottish, however—the simple seventeenth-century houses of the minor lairds. As one would expect from his interiors, moreover, the façades of Mackintosh’s houses are much more carefully and abstractly composed than Voysey’s; they even include some simple geometrical features that are not at all reminiscent of the past in their design. Like Voysey’s houses, Mackintosh’s show no real novelties in planning, although the disposition of the rooms is always straightforward and commodious. The interiors are very original and rather less forced than those he was producing for exhibitions on the Continent.

Mackintosh built very little after 1903 except the Scotland Street School of 1904 in Glasgow, the north wing of the Glasgow Art School in 1907-8, and the finest of the various tea-rooms that he remodelled for Miss Cranston. This was the Willow Tea Room in Sauchiehall Street of 1904, for which he remade the façade as well as reorganizing the interior. Internally this tea-room was arranged on several interrelated levels subdivided by ingenious screenwork; the exterior was a flat surface of white stucco cut by broad horizontal openings, one to a storey. The Scotland Street School is equally straightforward in design, the rather plain façade with its ranges of horizontal windows being flanked by rounded stair-towers articulated into continuous stone grids by mullions and transoms, like the bay windows of Voysey’s Broadleys but much taller.

The north wing of the Glasgow Art School is more remarkable, quite worthy of the original front but much more stylized (Plate 135A). Where the front is strongly horizontal the new end façade, like that on the south, is markedly vertical, in part because of the way the ground falls off. But the tall oriels, glazed at the outer plane of the stonework, are striking features, and the whole composition is tense and dramatic. The library inside is a tour de force of spatial subdivision somewhat like the Willow Tea Room. Most notable is the way the rectangular stick-work makes manifest the complex articulation of the total volume. This sort of handling of interior space was unique up to this time as a product of conscious design, although already present inside Paxton’s Crystal Palace in the mid nineteenth century. Certainly there is no evidence here of a decline in Mackintosh’s creative powers; indeed, quite the contrary. Yet this library proved to be his swan song; for want of further commissions Mackintosh’s career all but closed at much the same time that the Art Nouveau was coming to an end on the Continent. Not since Ledoux perhaps had so great a talent been thus thwarted by circumstances, although just what the thwarting circumstances were, other than Mackintosh’s own temperament, is not so evident as in the case of the revolutionary French architect.

The Art Nouveau, so extensively propagated by exhibitions, is often thought to have terminated with an exhibition, that held at Turin in 1902. This is more than a slight exaggeration, as various already mentioned buildings executed as late as 1911 will have made evident. Yet after the early years of the century the decline of the Art Nouveau was almost universal except in provincial places and in outlying countries such as those of Latin America and eastern Europe. At Turin the Belgian section had characteristic Art Nouveau interiors by Horta. Mackintosh, wholly detached by now from the Art Nouveau, contributed a Rose Boudoir, typically light in colour and delicate in line with the predominant verticals and horizontals relieved by little abstract knots, so to say, of curvilinear decoration. Raimondo D’Aronco (1857-1932), the Italian architect responsible for the principal pavilions, wavered between a rather plastic, somewhat Neo-Baroque, version of the Art Nouveau, not unrelated to the seventeenth-century work of the great local architect Guarino Guarini, and a crisper mode much influenced by Mackintosh and the Viennese.

D’Aronco’s finest building, however, was not at Turin but the Pavilion of Fine Arts that he designed for the Udine Exhibition the next year. Moving sharply away from the turgidity of much of his work at the earlier exhibition, he produced for Udine a façade that was unified in design, frankly impermanent in its materials, and at once festive in spirit and dignified in tone. This was a most distinguished piece of exhibition architecture in a period when leading designers gave a great part of their attention to such rather ephemeral things—largely, doubtless, because so few opportunities to build permanent structures came their way. In Istanbul, D’Aronco built a small mosque in 1903, prominently located by the Galata Bridge, and also several blocks of flats that signally fail to maintain the promise of his Italian exhibition buildings. The very awkwardly sited mosque, raised on top of an existing structure, is as Viennese in character as the Udine pavilion.

Other Italian architects, however, remained faithful for a few years to the stile floreale, their version of the Art Nouveau. In Milan the Casa Castiglione, a palazzo or mansion-like block of flats at 47 Corso Venezia built by Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867-1917) in 1903, is a very large and ponderous example. The detail is extremely bold, inside and out, the materials rich, and a very large part of the interior is given up to a monumental stair-hall of almost Piranesian spatial complexity. A Milanese hotel at 15 Corso Vittorio Emmanuele of 1904-5 by A. Cattaneo and G. Santamaria is of a comparable extravagance. Finer perhaps, certainly simpler, is the Casa Tosi of 1910 at 28 Via Senato in Milan by Alfredo Campanini (1873-1926).^[388]

To judge from the rather stile floreale character of some work of this period in Latin America, Italians as well as Iberians may well have carried the Art Nouveau there. In Cuba and Brazil, especially, memories of Colonial exuberance encouraged a profusion of carved or moulded ornament beyond even the excesses of the French around 1900. The most prominent example, but not the most characteristic, is the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City begun for President Diaz by Adamo Boari after 1903 and completed in 1933 by Federico Mariscal; this is ‘Beaux-Arts’—not inappropriately, perhaps—in all except its detailing; in the latest portions this reflects the Paris of the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925 rather than the Art Nouveau Paris of 1900.

In Spain itself the international current of the Art Nouveau was not very influential outside Barcelona. Gaudí, whose earlier work of the seventies and eighties has already been described (see Chapter 11), continued to be as much apart from the contemporary Spanish architectural scene as he was from the international Art Nouveau. His finest late works, moreover, all but post-date the demise of the Art Nouveau in the major European capitals. Nor is there any such close, if ambivalent, linkage between Gaudí’s career and the general rise and fall of the mode as in the case of Mackintosh. One can only say that his personal style is more closely related to the Art Nouveau than to the new stage of modern architecture that was already succeeding it by the time he produced his final masterpieces. The premonitory character of his early ironwork has been discussed and illustrated already (Plate 96B).

Gaudí’s work on the church of the Sagrada Familia^[389] in Barcelona went on more or less continuously from 1884 to 1914 and began again in 1919 after the First World War. The most conspicuous portion that has so far been executed, one of the transept façades, was designed and largely built in the nineties. Dominating Barcelona with its four extraordinary towers—not finally completed until after Gaudí’s death in 1926—this façade, begun in 1891, breaks quite sharply with the Neo-Gothic of Villar’s crypt and his own chevet. The portals with their steep gables have a generically Gothic ordonnance; but the extraordinary profusion of sculpture, mostly executed after 1903, gives a highly novel flavour. While conventional enough as regards the figures, this is otherwise either naturalistically floral or else meltingly abstract. It resembles the Art Nouveau in many minor details, but is generally bolder in scale, more fully three-dimensional, and, in places, somewhat nightmarish.

Although only about two-thirds as tall as the cluster of towers intended by Gaudí to rise over the crossing, the four openwork spires above this façade—with the two in the centre taller than those on the sides—reach a wholly disproportionate height in relation to the roof that should ultimately cover the still unbuilt transept. At the top they break out into fantastically plastic finials whose multi-planar surfaces are covered with a mosaic of broken tiling in brilliant colours. The prototypes for these finials are the chimney-pots of the Palau Güell, but here their note of free fantasy is raised to monumental scale. The inspiration of the towers, so remote in character from anything that the Art Nouveau ever produced, came from certain native buildings which Gaudí had seen in Africa: these strange primitive^[390] forms he first exploited in a project of 1892-3 for the Spanish Franciscan Mission in Tangier which was never executed.

In posse the Sagrada Familia is perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical monument of the last hundred years; beside it such a suave late example of monumental Neo-Gothic in England as Liverpool Cathedral, begun by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1903, lacks both vitality and originality of expression, if not nobility of scale. However, Gaudí’s church still remains a fragment, and a very incoherent one at that, even though he prepared in 1925, the year before his death, a brilliant new project for the nave. Gaudí really stands or falls by the few secular buildings that he was able to carry to completion, beginning with the Palau Güell of 1886-9 (Plate 96B), and not, as many compatriots assume, by the unrealized—perhaps unrealizable—plans for the Sagrada Familia. (Construction has gone slowly forward, however, on the other transept for a decade now.)

Gaudí’s next Barcelona mansion after the Palau Güell, that built at 48 Carrer de Casp for the heirs of Pedro Mártir Calvet in 1898-1904, is much less impressive. Baroque rather than medieval in its antecedents, this is interesting chiefly for the detailing of the ironwork; but even that is no more remarkable here than that at the Palau Güell of a decade earlier. It is of interest, however, as illustrating the support which Gaudí received all along from his fellow citizens, that the Casa Calvet was awarded a prize in 1901 as the best new façade in Barcelona, quite as Guimard’s Castel Béranger was premiated three years earlier in Paris.

A wholly new spirit, quite comparable in its total originality to the Art Nouveau, first appears in the work that Gaudí did for Don Eusebio Güell at the Park Güell (now the Municipal Park of Barcelona), carried out over the years 1900-14, and in the walls and the gate he built in 1901-2 for the suburban estate of Don Hermenegildo Miralles in Las Corts de Sarriá. In the latter all the forms are curved and no stylistic reminiscence whatsoever remains, but it is a production of minor importance compared to the park. The park is mostly landscaping, but partly architecture in that it includes several small buildings and much subsidiary construction. A sort of Neo-Romantic naturalism, exceeding in fantasy that of the most exotic landscape gardening of the eighteenth century, controls the whole conception. Sinuous and megalomaniac near-Doric colonnades of concrete support a sort of flat vault that is of great interest technically;^[391] yet these colonnades also suggest artificial ruins of the eighteenth-century sort raised to giant scale. The other porticoes and grottoes, however, recall no architecture of the past. Their rubble columns seem rather to emulate slanting tree-trunks, but in fact their profiles were worked out statically with the most careful study of the forces involved.

The ranges of curving benches surrounding the great open terrace over the Doric hypostyle, although covered with a mosaic of the most heterogeneous bits and pieces of broken faience, seem like congelations of the waves of the sea; the roofs of the lodges, also tile-covered, toss in the air like cockscombs. A strange biological plasticity, rather like that of the small-scale carved detail of Horta’s or Guimard’s buildings very much enlarged, turns whole structures into malleable masses as in some Gulliverian dream of vegetable or animal elements grown to monumental size. Everything but the ironwork is moulded in three dimensions, and even the ironwork tends towards a heavy scale more comparable to that of the structural members of metal used in Belgian or French work of the day than to the delicacy of Art Nouveau decorative detail.

Gaudí’s major secular works belong to the same years as the execution of the park. It is hard to believe that the Casa Batlló at 43 Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona, a small block of flats, is not a completely new structure but a remodelling carried out in 1905-7. This fact perhaps explains the relative flatness of the façade. Yet Gaudí made the lower storeys extraordinarily plastic and open, using a bony articulation of curvilinear stone members, and the high roof in front that masks the roof terrace is of even more cockscomb-like character than those on his park lodges (Plate 136). The upper storeys of the façade glitter with a fantastic plaquage of broken coloured glass considerably more subtle in tonality than his usual mosaic of faience fragments.^[392] But architecturally the façade is handled more like Horta’s, with most of the windows nearly rectangular even though bulging balconettes of metal project at their bases. The effect, as with Horta, is slightly Neo-Rococo. But the sort of Rococo which this façade recalls is not circumspect French eighteenth-century work but the lusher mode that was exploited in Bavaria and Austria—and still more appositely in Portugal and Spain. The entire wall surface seems to be in motion, and all its edges waver and wind in a way that even interior panelling did rarely in eighteenth-century France. This effect of total motion is even more notable in the interiors, which seem to have been hollowed out by the waves of the sea.

The rear façade of the Casa Batlló is remarkable for its openness. The wide window-walls in the paired flats open on to sinuous balconies extending all the way across. Above, there is a simpler plastic cresting than on the front; over this the curious forms of the chimney-pots provide a range of abstract sculptural features covered with polychrome tiling, always a favourite terminal theme of Gaudí’s.

Much larger than the Casa Batlló is the edifice built for Roser Segimon de Milá in 1905-7 at 92 Passeig de Gracia, appropriately known in Barcelona as ‘La Pedrera’ (the quarry). Surrounding two more or less circular courts, this large block of flats occupies an obtuse corner site, and the entire plan is worked out in curves as well as all the elements of the exterior (Figure 35). The façade of the Casa Milá is not a thin plane, curling like paper at the edges and pierced with squarish holes like that of the Casa Batlló; instead ranges of balconies heavier than those on the rear of the Casa Batlló sway in and out like the waves of the sea beneath the foamlike crest of the roof, making the whole edifice a very complex plastic entity (Plate 137A). From a distance La Pedrera looks as if it were all freely modelled in clay; in fact, it is executed in cut stone with boldly hammered surfaces that appear to result from natural erosion.

There is no external polychromy of glass or tile here, and the frescoed colour used on the court walls has suffered such serious deterioration that it is difficult to know what it was like originally. On the other hand, Gaudí’s detail was never more carefully studied nor more consistent; there are no straight lines at all, and in the forms of the piers rising from the ground to support the balconies of the first storey he suggested natural formations with real success (Plate 135B). These elements look as if they had been produced by the action of sea and weather rather than by the chisel, quite as does much of the mid-twentieth-century sculpture of Henry Moore.

The marine note is seen at its strongest and most naturalistic in the ironwork however. Strewn over the balcony parapets and across various openings, like seaweed over the rocks and sand of the seashore, the railings and grilles are full of intense organic vitality with none of the graceful droopiness of Guimard’s Métro entrances. Gaudí’s metalwork frequently suggests the work of various mid-twentieth-century sculptors in welded metal, quite as his handling of masonry does later sculpture in stone. Indeed, his iron grilles often exceed such sculptors’ metalwork in richness and variety of form, as also in the fine hand-craftsmanship of the execution.

The detailing on the Casa Milá, whether of the masonry or the ironwork, avoids the nightmarish overscaling of the somewhat similar elements at the Parc Güell, and also the coarseness of the broken faience mosaic surfaces that he used so much there and elsewhere but here restricted to the roof-tops. As regards the masonry, moreover, it is really wrong to speak of detailing, for the very fabric of the structure, not just its edges and its trimmings as on the Casa Batlló, has been completely moulded to the architect’s plastic will. Whether or not it be correct to consider the Casa Milá an example of the Art Nouveau—and technically it is not—La Pedrera remains one of the greatest masterpieces of the curvilinear mode of 1900, rivalled in quality only by the finest of Sullivan’s skyscrapers (Plate 119), which it does not, of course, resemble visually at all.

Despite the esteem in which his work has always been held by his fellow-citizens of Barcelona, Gaudí had few local imitators of consequence. However, such detailing on early twentieth-century buildings there as may appear at first to be conventionally Art Nouveau is often in fact a bit Gaudian. Only his assistants Francisc Berenguer (1866-1914) and J. M. Jujol Gibert (1879-1949) seem to have understood Gaudí’s mature style. At least the house by Jujol at 335 Diagonal in Barcelona, though quite small and simple, and the Bodega Güell at Garraf of 1913 by Berenguer are of a quality worthy of comparison with Gaudí’s own best work.^[393] The big Palau de la Musica Catalana, built by Luis Domenech Montaner (1850-1923) in 1908, is a very extravagant example of the architecture of the period, bold and coarse and rich, but with none of Gaudí’s personal flair and integrity.

In Glasgow Mackintosh after 1908 was a prophet with far less honour than ‘Greek’ Thomson had received there in an earlier day. But the countercurrent that he had helped to set going on the Continent was in full swing, particularly in Austria and in Germany (see Chapters 20 and 21). Even in Horta’s own Brussels, Josef Hoffmann had been called from Vienna as early as 1905 to build the suburban Stoclet mansion (Plate 154A) at 373 Avenue de Tervueren (see Chapter 21).

Despite the ephemeral nature of much of its production and the completeness with which it was ultimately rejected everywhere, the Art Nouveau has very great historical importance. The Art Nouveau offered the first international programme for a basic renewal of architecture that the nineteenth century actually set out to realize. Most earlier programmes, moreover, even if not primarily revivalistic, aimed chiefly at the reform of architecture; this was still true of Voysey and his English contemporaries in these very years, though not, of course, of Sullivan and Wright, working in isolation in the American Middle West. Thus the Art Nouveau was actually the first stage of modern architecture in Europe, if modern architecture be understood as implying, before anything else, the total rejection of historicism.

The proto-modernity of earlier stages of nineteenth-century architectural development is almost always ambiguous, since the leaders of the various successive movements rarely intended to break with the past entirely. The characteristic ideal of nineteenth-century architects, as of their late eighteenth-century predecessors, had been to react against what they considered the decadence of the building arts current in their day by returning to the principles of some earlier and supposedly purer or more vital age. The very considerable amount of innovation that many European architects before Horta introduced in their work was not exactly unconscious; but it was rather a matter of achieving personal expression by adapting old forms to new needs, new materials, and new methods of construction than of creating a wholly original modern style.

Well before the nineties a very few men had consciously sought absolute originality and total freedom from the disciplines of the past. But such architects found little or no public support for their programmes of architectural revolution nor even fellow-artists to share in their highly individualistic campaigns. After the relatively universal acceptance of the doctrines of Romantic Classicism there had followed chiefly a succession and a multiplication of divergences; now, in the nineties, a real pattern of convergence appeared. But this convergence was premature. The renewal of ornament and of the accessories of architecture outran the renewal of the more basic elements of the art of building towards which the technical developments of the nineteenth century had been so inevitably leading.

Thus the Art Nouveau stands apart both from the architecture of the preceding hundred years and from the modern architecture of the following sixty which extends down to the present. It did not bring the one to an end, as the profusion of so-called ‘traditional’ buildings of the early twentieth century makes very evident (see Chapter 24), nor did it provide much more than a preface to the major new developments that mark the early decades of the present century (see Chapters 18-21). That the Art Nouveau was completely rejected on principle by ‘traditionalists’ is not surprising: it was the first serious attack on the position they continued to maintain. But the very rapidity with which the Art Nouveau rose to popularity and descended to vulgarization encouraged its denigration in the name of ‘taste’ by almost all other architects soon after it reached its climax around 1900. In recompense, interest in the Art Nouveau began to revive early, by the early thirties, after a much shorter period of neglect than other phases of nineteenth-century architectural development have undergone and are still undergoing.

The place of the Art Nouveau in the story of modern architecture, if only as an episode of youthful wild-oat-sowing, is now well established. Most of its exponents actually lived long enough to receive in their later years embarrassing praise for youthful work they had quite disowned if not forgotten. It is a curious paradox that although most of the leaders of the Art Nouveau survived for decades—and Van de Velde died only in 1957—not one except Gaudí^[394] maintained after 1910 the position of relative pre-eminence that had been his in 1900. A wholly new cast of characters, many of them no younger, came to the fore in the first decade of the twentieth century; they constitute the first generation of modern architects, properly speaking.