PART THREE
1890-1955
CHAPTER 16
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ART NOUVEAU: VICTOR HORTA
The two preceding chapters, in entering the nineties, crossed what is perhaps the major historical frontier within the century and a half covered by this book. The skyscrapers of Sullivan and the early houses of Wright and Voysey—despite Voysey’s own disavowal of modernism—are among the first major manifestations of the period of architectural history that extends down to and includes our own time. The contemporaries of these men who were the new leaders on the Continent in the nineties had as sharp a sense of the novelty of the innovations they were making as did Sullivan or Wright, and the most characteristic stylistic formulation of this decade in Europe was appropriately known from an early date[[356]] as ‘Art Nouveau’. Before discussing the Art Nouveau itself, two related developments that precede it must be considered at least briefly. In France, various feats of metal construction of the sixties, seventies, and eighties had prepared the way for the Art Nouveau on the technical side, and these have, moreover, considerable intrinsic interest in their own right. English innovations in decorative art of the eighties and nineties are accepted by most historians as providing one of the most important immediate sources of the Art Nouveau,[[357]] and English architecture and architectural theory of the later decades of the nineteenth century certainly offered a generic stimulus to Europeans between 1890 and 1910 that was of vital consequence to subsequent developments.
By the early nineties advanced English work began to be widely known on the Continent. In 1888 the German architect Alexander Koch (1848-1911) started to publish annually his Academy Architecture bringing current English production, and many significant projects also, to the attention of designers abroad. L’Architecture moderne en Angleterre by the French architect Paul Sédille (1836-1900) appeared in Paris in 1890. The architect Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927), who was stationed at the German Embassy in London from 1896 to 1903 primarily to study low-cost housing, issued two folio volumes devoted to Die englische Baukunst der Gegenwart in 1900-2, another on Die neuere kirchliche Baukunst in England in 1902 and, in 1904-5, three thick quarto volumes on Das englische Haus. These richly illustrated books made much of the story of the development of English architecture in the second half of the century available in German long before it was pieced together by the English (see Chapters [12] and [15]).
Voysey never worked abroad; but his houses, known internationally from an early date thanks to their publication in the Studio, an English periodical founded in 1893, were soon much studied on the Continent, and to a lesser extent in America. Voysey’s contemporaries Baillie Scott and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), however, both received foreign commissions as early as 1898; in fact, Mackintosh and his highly original ideas—he was no Voyseyan ‘reformer’ but a very bold innovator—received more support abroad than at home and were much more influential on the Continent than in Great Britain.
Historians of modern architecture have generally emphasized, and rightly, the special importance of the advances in metal construction[[358]] that were made in France in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The great name of the period is not that of an architect but of an engineer, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923). At the International Exhibition of 1855 in Paris and again at the World’s Fair of 1893 in Chicago the vast metal-and-glass structures were masked externally by real or imitated masonry façades. Between these dates, however, came a series of French exhibition buildings that were increasingly bold in scale and frank in design; with the construction of most of them Eiffel was directly concerned. Yet his bridge over the Douro at Oporto in Portugal of 1876-7 quite overshadowed the Galerie des Machines that he and Krantz built for the Paris Exhibition of 1867, as his later Pont de Garabit of 1880-4 outclassed the pavilion that he designed for the Exhibition of 1878 and that portion of the Bon Marché Department Store on which he collaborated in 1876 with the younger Boileau. In the exhibition buildings the metalwork was completely exposed and in that of 1878[[359]] a serious attempt was made to develop appropriate embellishments, quite as Wyatt had done for Brunel at Paddington Station in London twenty-five years earlier. The rather tawdry result helps to explain why innovations in architectural design had so little public support in France in this period—a period, of course, when the bold innovations of the Impressionists were revolutionizing another art in Paris.
Beside Eiffel’s gallery, the Anglo-Japanese room[[360]] which Whistler and Godwin showed at this same exhibition must have seemed infinitely sophisticated, and even the Late Stuart detailing of the cement-brick front of Shaw’s Jury House most agreeably urbane. Such things might well have turned the attention of foreign architects towards England earlier than was generally the case. Sédille, one of the less tradition-bound French professionals of this period, did visit England in the eighties, publishing his book on current English architecture, which has just been mentioned, ten years before Muthesius’s. His selections, however, were not very discriminating, nor is there evidence that he profited much from what he saw. The Printemps department store of 1881-9, designed of course well before his trip, certainly shows no English influence.
For the Paris Exhibition of 1889[[361]] Eiffel early proposed and, in 1887, was commissioned to build the tremendous all-metal tower[[362]] which still dominates Paris (Plate [130A]). As has been noted, this 984-foot edifice was, down to the erection of the Empire State Building in New York by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon more than forty years later, the tallest structure in the world. The Eiffel Tower, which appropriately carries its designer’s name, is no more a building in the ordinary sense than are his great bridges, however. Although scraping so much higher skies than did Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building in Chicago, which was erected in precisely the same years, the Paris tower was far less significant either technically or functionally. Except the painter Seurat, most contemporaries disliked it, considering it a monstrous blemish on the Parisian skyline; today of course, it is rightly deemed a nineteenth-century masterpiece, but a masterpiece of engineering rather than of architecture.
As with Eiffel’s pavilion at the Exhibition of 1878, there is considerable ambiguity in the design of the Eiffel Tower. Seen from a distance its four legs have much of the vigorous spring of his bridges and the tapered shaft of criss-crossed metalwork seems—but in fact is not—an almost inevitable expression of large-scale construction in metal. Seen from nearer to, however, the arbitrarily arched forms that link the legs are very conspicuous and also the coarse ornamentation of curvilinear strapwork—recalling a little Wyatt’s at Paddington Station of nearly forty years before, but much less just in scale—with which the basic forms are bedecked. The close similarity of this mixture of frank construction and applied decoration to the Art Nouveau approach to the design of metal structures will shortly become evident. Over-impressed, perhaps, by the more functional engineering feat of construction at the 1889 Exhibition provided by the wide-spanned metal-and-glass Palais des Machines of the engineers Contamin (1840-93), Pierron, and Charton—in which the contribution of the associated architect C.-L.-F. Dutert (1845-1906) was relatively unimportant—certain later critics have preferred that structure to the Eiffel Tower. Yet it is the tower which clearly has more of the magnificence of Eiffel’s bridges despite its irrelevant and (from a distance) almost invisible ornamentation. The tower, moreover, is premonitory of the Art Nouveau; the Galerie des Machines rather of later modern architecture (see Chapters [20] and [22]).