It is a historical paradox that Horta’s architectural career should have continued long after the Art Nouveau was forgotten, bringing him in the end such public esteem and material success as few other innovators of his generation ever knew. Yet his later work, beginning with his Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, designed in 1914 just before the First World War but begun only in 1923, and continuing down to his Central Station there, begun in 1938 and only lately completed, is of purely local significance. What brought him a peerage and a street named after him—that at the side of his Palais des Beaux-Arts—was not his early work of the Art Nouveau years, standing with Sullivan’s skyscrapers like a landmark at the beginning of modern architecture, but this later official work which is almost totally without intrinsic interest and, in the case of the station, actually rather monstrous. The contrast with Sullivan’s barren later years after 1904 is very striking.
Despite the poetic justice that there might be in ignoring a Belgian who long falsely claimed the credit for the invention of the Art Nouveau, one cannot turn to other countries without mentioning the name of Henri Van de Velde (1863-1957).[[378]] In 1892, when Horta designed the Tassel house, Van de Velde had not even begun to practise architecture. His first work, which is his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle near Brussels, though still rather conventional externally in a simple, almost peasant way perhaps influenced by Voysey, included furniture more functional than Horta’s, if much less elegant and imaginative. He also brought to Brussels—and later to Paris, Berlin, and Weimar—an interpretation of Ruskin’s and Morris’s sociological approach to the arts that had a wide and growing influence, for he pursued his mature career as decorator, architect, and educator largely outside Belgium[[379]] (see Chapters [17] and [20]).
CHAPTER 17
THE SPREAD OF THE ART NOUVEAU: THE WORK OF C. R. MACKINTOSH AND ANTONI GAUDÍ
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.