CHAPTER 16 - Notes

[357]. See Madsen’s Sources of Art Nouveau, 75-83.

[358]. See Schmutzler, R., ‘English Origins of the Art Nouveau’, Architectural Review, CXVII (1955), 108-16. The question is discussed further at a later point in this chapter (pp. 284-5).

[359]. See Note [[149]], Chapter [7].

[360]. The one large structure built for this exhibition in permanent form, the Palais du Trocadéro by Davioud, has since been replaced. Vaguely Saracenic in design, yet not altogether unworthy in silhouette of its splendid site on the Chaillot heights, this shared none of the qualities of Eiffel’s temporary pavilion. See Davioud, G., Le Palais du Trocadéro, Paris, 1878. As long as it lasted, however, the Trocadéro provided a sort of pendant on this side of Paris to Abadie’s Sacré-Cœur atop Montmartre, begun in the same rather dreary decade of French architectural production.

[361]. See Note [[265]]a, Chapter [12].

[362]. See Alphand, A., L’Exposition universelle de Paris de 1889, Paris, 1892.

[363]. See Eiffel, G., La Tour de trois-cents-mètres, Paris, 1900.

[364]. Bogardus’s shot-towers of the fifties in New York, which were of essentially similar construction, received little contemporary or later publicity. It is still uncertain whether Jenney knew of them when he built the Home Insurance Building in Chicago in 1883-5. See T. C. Bannister, ‘Bogardus Revisited, Part II’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVI (1957).

[365]. See Note [[253]], Chapter [11].

[366]. See Grady, J., ‘Bibliography of the Art Nouveau’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV (1955), 18-27 and Art Nouveau (Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Catalogue), New York [1960].

[367]. This applies particularly to Art Nouveau decoration; the major architectural works were frequently very plastically organized, although most of the detail was linear.

[368]. See Schmutzler, R., ‘Blake and the Art Nouveau’, Architectural Review, CXVIII (1955), 90-7.

[369]. See Lancaster, C., ‘Oriental Contributions to Art Nouveau’, Art Bulletin, XXXIV (1952), 297-310.

[370]. See Grady, J., ‘Nature and the Art Nouveau’, Art Bulletin, XXXVII (1955), 187-92.

[371]. See Mackmurdo, A. H., Wren’s City Churches, Orpington, 1883.

[372]. Not perhaps impossible: There is something a little analogous to Impressionism in the work of Shaw, though he probably had no admiration for the art of Monet and his contemporaries in the seventies even if he was at all aware of it. The same is true of the American masters of the Shingle Style. The analogy lies in the casual looseness of over-all composition and the delicacy of the touch—both tile-hanging and shingles provide a certain effect of ‘broken colour’ or at least ‘tachiste’ brushwork—even though they are usually monochrome. On the other hand, Kimball in his American Architecture, written a generation ago, saw an analogy to Cézanne in the return to architectural order in the mid eighties in America. There is no evidence that McKim or White then admired any French painters more advanced than Puvis de Chavannes however.

[373]. Some studio houses were certainly built in France by leading architects throughout the second half of the nineteenth century: The one that Viollet-le-Duc provided for the painter Constant Troyon in the late fifties was of notable interest—in fact, one of his best works. Moreover, the more modest ateliers d’ artiste erected by builders provided much later, in the 1920s, precedents of value to Le Corbusier and Lurçat. See Banham, R., ‘Ateliers d’artiste’, Architectural Review, CXX (1956), 75-83.

[374]. See Delhaye, J., ‘Hommage à mon maître; architecte Baron Victor Horta’, L’Appartement d’aujourd’hui, Liège, 1946, 6-17; Maus, O., ‘Habitations modernes, Victor Horta’, L’Art moderne, XX (1900), 221-3; Sedeyn, E., ‘Victor Horta’, L’Art décoratif, IX (1902), 230-42; and Madsen, S. T., ‘Horta. Works and Style of Victor Horta before 1900’, Architectural Review, CXVIII (1955), 388-92.

[375]. See Koch, R., and others, Louis Comfort Tiffany 1848-1933, New York, 1958.

[376]. The wallpaper was probably one of those designed by Heywood Sumner, possibly his ‘Tulip’ according to Elizabeth Aslin of the Victoria and Albert Museum. This was one of the considerable range of English papers shown by Jeffrey & Company at the Salon de l’Association pour l’Art d’Anvers in Antwerp in the winter of 1892-3. These papers, which included designs by most of the English leaders in the field of decorative art, had already been shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889. It is hard to believe that Horta became aware of them only when the Tassel house was nearly finished and not earlier in Antwerp or in Paris. For the Antwerp showing, see Van de Velde, H., ‘Artistic Wallpapers’, L’Art moderne, XIII (1893), 193-5. This article was copied in L’Emulation, XVIII (1893), 150-1, the most advanced Belgian architectural journal, where the Tassel house itself was published in 1895. It introduces the name of another important Belgian figure besides Horta in the story of the Art Nouveau.

[377]. It is of interest, although irrelevant to the inception of the Art Nouveau, that in this same year Horta became professor of architecture at the Académie like Balat before him.

[378]. See Kaufmann, E., ‘224 Avenue Louise’, Interiors, 116 (1957), 88-93.

[379]. For a late tribute to Van de Velde in English, see Shand, P. M., Architectural Review, CXII (1952), 143-55. It is a major error of emphasis—and in detail an accumulation of errors of fact—that H. Lenning offers in his book The Art Nouveau (The Hague, 1951) by accepting the legend that Van de Velde was the initiator of the Art Nouveau. There is plenty of evidence that Van de Velde was aware of English innovations in decoration from the early nineties. On the other hand, despite the wallpaper in the Tassel dining-room, it should be noted that Horta’s widow and his disciple Delhaye minimize, to the point of denying all but absolutely, the dependence of Horta on English sources at the time he designed the Tassel house.

[380]. Paul Hankar (1861-1901) was a third Belgian architectural innovator in this period. His work, however, is so crude and uneven that his name need be no more than mentioned. He is in no proper sense an exponent of the Art Nouveau. See Conrady, C., and Thibaux, R., Paul Hankar, [n.p.] 1923.