In England in the fifties, however, a loose alliance did exist between the new Pre-Raphaelite painters and some of the leading High Victorian Gothic architects, both supported for a time by the critic Ruskin. In the sixties and seventies Morris on the one hand, developing as a decorator out of the Pre-Raphaelite milieu of Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, and Whistler on the other hand, chiefly nurtured in the advanced artistic world of Paris but also influenced in England by Rossetti, collaborated closely with architects—Morris with Webb and with Bodley, Whistler with Godwin. As has been noted, the strikingly novel results of the latter collaboration were displayed in Paris in their Anglo-Japanese room at the Exhibition of 1878. Europeans became generally aware of Morris’s decorative work only somewhat later.
In France in these decades fewer painters than in England commissioned talented individualists of the order of Shaw or Webb or Godwin to build their houses.[[372]] If they were Realists or Impressionists they could not have afforded to do so; if they were prosperous Academicians they would not have wished to. Even in England, Millais, after he became really successful, preferred to build a dull house in South Kensington of quite conventional character rather than to employ Shaw or Webb or Godwin.
In the eighties the most advanced European painters, not merely those of France but more generally, turned away from Realism and even from Impressionism in order to concern themselves more with pattern or with expression. The two French leaders of this reaction whose art seems to posterity most architectonic, Cézanne and Seurat, did not affect architecture or design at this time at all. Even Van Gogh and Gauguin, whose styles have a more decorative inflection, were less influential than such almost forgotten painters as the Dutch Toorop and the Belgian Khnopff, the better-known Belgian Ensor, or the Swiss Hodler and the Norwegian Munch, not to speak of the English Beardsley.
The general admiration in avant-garde circles for the work of these artists—with which went paradoxically a continuing and even growing estimation of the anti-architectonic pictures of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists both French and native—ran parallel everywhere with the rapid rise and spread of the Art Nouveau. In some sense, indeed, the Art Nouveau may be considered the equivalent as a mode of design of what is somewhat ambiguously called Impressionism in music—the work of Debussy, Delius, etc. Some of the chief critical supporters of the new painters in the nineties such as Julius Meier-Graefe were also active proponents of the Art Nouveau. Yet advanced painting, in fact, provided little more than a sympathetic atmosphere for the birth of the Art Nouveau, somewhat as the young painters and critics of the third quarter of the eighteenth century had done in Rome for the gestation of Romantic Classicism in architecture.
Why the Art Nouveau should have been initiated full-fledged by Victor Horta (1861-1947)[[373]] in Brussels in 1892 remains a mystery. The rather similar stylistic crystallization in Sullivan’s architectural ornament, henceforth almost equally organic and sinuous in character, had begun several years earlier even before the interiors of the Auditorium were designed in 1887-8. These will hardly have been known in Belgium, for few foreigners were aware of Sullivan’s work at all until they came to Chicago to visit the World’s Fair in 1893. Illustrations of the remarkable ironwork on Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona are not likely to have reached Brussels either, though several of its interiors were published in The Decorator and Furnisher in New York in 1892. In any case Gaudí’s ultimate style was only beginning to take form in the early nineties. A certain amount of quite original decoration was being done in New York from the beginning of the eighties by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), but it is unlikely that it was known abroad. Tiffany’s ‘Favrile’ glass came a good deal later and is precisely contemporaneous with the Art Nouveau,[[374]] of which it continued to be for a decade and more one of the most internationally distinguished products.
It is generally assumed that Horta knew the rather similar glass designed earlier by Émile Gallé (1846-1904) in France and that he already had some familiarity with the work of such painters as Ensor, Khnopff, and Toorop, if not with that of Hodler, Munch, or Beardsley. Yet such familiarity would hardly by itself have counter-balanced the academic training he received from his master and later employer Balat (see Chapter 9). This explains, however, the very Classical character of his Temple des Passions Humaines, erected in 1884 in the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Horta did no building on his own between 1885 and 1892. Presumably, however, it was knowledge of the theories and the projects of Viollet-le-Duc acquired in those years that encouraged him to make frank and expressive use of iron in association with masonry when he really began to practise. Yet the influence of Viollet-le-Duc hardly provides an explanation for the specific character of his innovations in ornament or the consistency of style that he achieved almost at once.
Against such rather negative assumptions, a more positive one may be set. In the Tassel house in Brussels, completed in 1893, Horta’s first mature work, he introduced an English[[375]] wallpaper between the exposed metal structural elements of the dining-room walls. It is highly likely, therefore, that the new English decorative products were already known to him the previous year[[376]] when he designed and began this epoch-making house.
The Tassel house at 6 Rue Paul-Émile Janson, just off the Avenue Louise, initiated a new architectural mode as definitely as one modest terrace-house could possibly do. How long before 1892, when the Tassel house was begun, Horta may have been designing on paper in this way does not seem to be known. When one considers how important the innumerable projects of the second half of the eighteenth century are to our understanding of the architectural revolution that established Romantic Classicism as the successor to the Baroque, the absence of such clues concerning the gestation of the Art Nouveau is most exasperating; but considerable research by students of the period has so far brought little that seems relevant to light.
In plan there are no very great novelties in the Tassel house, although the interior partitions of the principal floor are bent to give varying shapes and sizes to symmetrically disposed spaces that open rather freely into one another. The major innovation lay in the frank expression of metal structure and in the characteristic decoration, particularly that of the stair-hall (Plate [130B]). There at the foot of the stair an iron column rises free and svelte out of which iron bands branch at the top, like vines from the trunk of a sapling, to form brackets under the curved openwork beams of iron above. Other lighter and less structural bands interlace to form the stair-rail. The organic, swaying, and interweaving lines of the metalwork, both structural and decorative, were originally rather boldly echoed in purely ornamental curvilinear decoration painted on the walls, and they are still so echoed in the patterns of the extant floor mosaic.
These patterns in the stair-hall are each unique, not repeated like those on the English chintzes and wallpapers they so much resemble. The lines, whether moving freely in space like those of the ironwork, painted on the curved wall, or inlaid in the flat floor plane, all form part of complex organic motifs. The result is therefore more comparable to Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883, or even to some of the repoussé brasswork on his furniture. (Like the very few buildings Mackmurdo designed, this furniture is quite rectilinear otherwise, it might be noted.) During the brief life of the Art Nouveau hardly even Horta himself, much less those who followed in his footsteps, achieved an ensemble more exemplary than this stair-hall. It is truly a work of interior architecture, not merely a matter of applied decoration as is most of the ornament used in association with the English wallpaper in the dining-room.