One other line of innovation in France in these decades deserves mention. In 1871 Jules Saulnier built a factory for Chocolat Menier near Paris at Noisiel, S.-et-M., with an exposed metal skeleton. The iron frame consists of diagonally set members rather similar to the late medieval timber-framing of France, and the infilling of the panels is of varicoloured bricks and tiles. This structure attracted the attention of Viollet-le-Duc, who saw in it a realization of certain of his theoretical ambitions for nineteenth-century architecture. He not only mentioned it very favourably in the second volume of his Entretiens, which appeared in 1872, but in several illustrations suggested similar and variant combinations of iron and masonry. In a colour plate, for example, he showed a striking urban façade with its visible iron framework filled with brilliantly coloured glazed tiles. By the nineties quite a few buildings in France had exploited very successfully this structural system;[[363]] it is perhaps more important, however, that Viollet-le-Duc’s text and illustrations made the idea familiar internationally.
When one learns that Horta or Gaudí or various Americans ‘read Viollet-le-Duc’ in the seventies and eighties one must assume that the Entretiens, of which the first volume appeared in 1863, is meant—and perhaps even more specifically the second volume of 1872 with its accompanying set of plates. These last could be ‘read’ by architects to particularly good purpose. The Entretiens were available to most Europeans in the original language and to the English and the Americans in translation.[[364]]
The characteristic employment of metal by Art Nouveau architects in the nineties and the first decade of this century undoubtedly owed a great deal both to the inspiration of Eiffel’s large engineering structures, culminating in his tower of 1887-9, and to the vigorous critical support of Saulnier’s ideas which Viollet-le-Duc provided, not to speak of the projects of his own that he published in 1872. The knot is tied tighter—although with a different sort of structural development—when one notes that de Baudot, of all French architects most particularly the disciple and heir of Viollet-le-Duc as well as a former pupil of Henri Labrouste, was the first to exploit ferro-concrete architecturally and not merely technically (see Chapter [18]). Moreover, he employed as his contractor to construct his epoch-making concrete church of St Jean de Montmartre in Paris of the nineties (see Chapter [17]), Contamin, one of the engineers responsible for the Galerie des Machines at the Exhibition of 1889. But the European Art Nouveau was even less a matter of structural innovation, pure and simple, than Sullivan’s contemporary skyscrapers in America (see Chapter [14]).
This brief and curious episode in the history of art,[[365]] starting in the early nineties and subsiding little more than a decade later, has always been called in English by a French name, perhaps because it never became acclimatized in England but was always considered a dubious import from Belgium and France. Despite the diffidence of the English—which Americans fully shared—the Art Nouveau was an international mode. It was as frequently called in France by the English name ‘Modern Style’, while to the Germans it was ‘Jugendstil’ and to the Italians ‘stile Liberty’. The German term comes from the magazine Jugend, whose illustrations and typography were fairly consistently in the new mode; the Italian from Liberty’s, the shop in London whose orientalizing fabrics became widely popular at this time (but with overtones from the obvious pun involved). In Italian it is also, and much more descriptively, the ‘stile floreale’.
The Art Nouveau is not primarily an architectural mode. Many of the finest and boldest of the large edifices built between 1890 and 1910, however, beginning with Sullivan’s skyscrapers, are certainly related to its ethos; and the Art Nouveau leaders produced quite a few buildings of real distinction that can be defined by no other term. Like the Rococo of the early and mid eighteenth century—which the Art Nouveau sometimes closely resembled and to whose revived forms it was often vulgarly assimilated—it was most successful as a mode of interior decoration. Generally linear rather than plastic,[[366]] the Art Nouveau was also very closely associated with the graphic arts; indeed they provide many of the most characteristic examples, as well as the earliest items that can be considered possible prototypes.
How far back the ultimate sources of the Art Nouveau should be sought, and precisely where, continues to be a subject of active research. In the graphic arts there are certainly significant similarities to be noted in William Blake’s[[367]] way of designing book pages. Through the Pre-Raphaelites, moreover, a line of descent from Blake can be traced down to the eighties and nineties when, indeed, his characteristic pages were sometimes reproduced in facsimile. But oriental,[[368]] specifically Japanese, influence certainly played some part also in the gestation of the mode. There is early evidence of that influence on western architecture in the decorative work of Godwin and Nesfield in England, beginning already in the sixties, as also in the painting of the Impressionists in France (see Chapters [10] and [12]). But the earliest designs that can be readily mistaken for Continental work of 1900 are certainly by the English architect-decorator Mackmurdo and date from just after 1880. Many of the textile and wallpaper patterns that Mackmurdo, Heywood Sumner (1853-1940), and others created for the Century Guild, founded in 1882, already have the characteristic semi-naturalistic[[369]] forms, swaying lines, and asymmetrical organization of the mature decorative mode of the nineties. Even more striking is the design of Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883 for his book on the London churches of Sir Christopher Wren[[370]]—a curious conjunction, this, of two opposed stylistic developments of the eighties, the one towards the Baroque and the ‘Monumental Queen Anne’, the other towards a wholly novel mode of ornamentation.
English products, such as were shown by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from its foundation in 1888, soon reached the Continent. Moreover, even before the Studio began publication in 1893 Koch’s Academy Architecture (from 1888), which has already been mentioned, and (from 1890) his review Innendekoration, as well as less specialized English magazines such as (from 1884) Mackmurdo’s Hobby Horse and (from 1891) The Yellow Book, with its highly stylized and very curvilinear illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, were eagerly studied all over western Europe. The younger men were reading William Morris, too, and responding enthusiastically to his ethical and social demands for a reform of the household arts. At the same time the novel styles of the most advanced Post-Impressionist painters offered a powerful stimulus to architects.
This matter of the relationship between advanced painting and advanced architecture in the nineteenth century, a relationship destined to be of rather greater importance in the early twentieth, deserves some broader comment and recapitulation here. A hundred and fifty years before, when Romantic Classicism was being born in Rome, painters, sculptors, and architects shared common ideals and worked with a full understanding of each other’s problems (see Chapter [1]). The backgrounds of David’s bas-relief-like early paintings show architecture in the most advanced taste of the day, and no more beautiful Romantic Classical furniture was actually produced than that which he invented for his Classical scenes and occasionally introduced in his modern portraits. The Classical sculptor Thorwaldsen at the Glyptothek in Munich and later at the Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen collaborated closely with the architects Klenze and Bindesbøll. Schinkel was himself a Romantic painter of some distinction before he matured as a Romantic Classical architect, and he collaborated later on the mural for the front of the Altes Museum with the painter Peter Cornelius, as did Klenze on the decorations of the Glyptothek in Munich.
With the gradual decline of Romantic Classicism architects and painters had more difficulty in developing parallel programmes; and the results of collaboration between them in the decoration of buildings were rarely as happy as the backgrounds the architects sometimes supplied to the painters. Ingres’s stained-glass windows of the forties in the Chapelle d’Orléans at Dreux and the Chapelle Saint-Ferdinand at Neuilly have been mentioned. More successful are the murals by Delacroix in Joly’s library at the Chambre des Deputés in Paris; but there is hardly that real visual harmony between picture and setting that the previous period had often achieved. However, the rising interest in architectural polychromy and the extension of the range of acceptable stylistic models to include the Early Renaissance and even the Middle Ages were both encouraged by the turn that the art of painting was beginning to take on the Continent around 1815. Hübsch, for example, was a sort of Nazarener among architects. Later Ingres was a close friend of Hittorff, even though he never collaborated with him to any good purpose (see Chapter [3]), much less with Viollet-le-Duc, with whom he was also on good terms. The degree of stylization that Early Christian, Romanesque, or Gothic architectural modes properly demanded was not yet acceptable in figural art. Indeed, the rather quattrocento early pictures of Ingres were much too ‘Gothic’ for most of his contemporaries and are generally less esteemed than his more Classical work even today.
Above all, the ever-rising importance of landscape in the painting of all countries was necessarily without real parallels in architecture, except in so far as the increasing desire to open up houses towards the circumambient view reflects a similar preoccupation with the natural scene. As to Realism, the principal artistic movement of the mid century in French art, that could only be echoed in architectural theory. Impressionism may seem even more difficult to relate to architecture.[[371]]