Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international art movement and style based on organic forms. It was seen in art, graphic design, architecture and applied arts such as decoration, jewelry, ceramics and glass. and continued until the First World War. 

Art Nouveau is organic in style. It has floral and plant-inspired motifs, and stylized, flowing curvilinear forms. Art Nouveau is an approach to design according to which artists should work on everything from architecture to furniture, making art part of everyday life.
The movement was strongly influenced by artist Alphonse Mucha.

 Art Nouveau monuments are now recognized by UNESCO on their World Heritage Sites list as significant contributions to cultural heritage. The historic center of Latvia, with "the finest collection of art nouveau buildings in Europe", was inscribed on the list in 1997 in part because of the "quality and the quantity of its Art Nouveau architecture". Four Brussels town houses by Victor Horta were included in 2000 as "works of human creative genius" that are "outstanding examples of Art Nouveau architecture brilliantly illustrating the transition from the 19th to the 20th century in art, thought, and society".


One characterization of this art movement was

pictures of flowers and vines, also called foliate forms. Many of these forms were used in mixtures.

In Barcelona, two men named Antonio Gaudi and Josep Jujol worked to produce beautiful ceramic montages. They used a technique known as trencadis in which tiles covered surfaces of buildings. They also fused broken dishes and other found objects such as broken china dolls, which was a revolutionary idea in art and architecture.

De stijil

Magazine or Movement?


De Stijl or style began as a design magazine in which publications are made regarding the search for universal laws that occur in the visible reality, but are hidden by outward appearances of things.

The magazine was a forum, not a closed circle and homogeneous circle.

De Stijl was founded in Holland in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931).

It was a movement in architecture, painting, sculpture, decoration and design industry-oriented execution of works in all the arts, and had an active life from 1917-1931.

Stijl is a variant of abstract art, characteristic of modernity. This art was not intended as reproductive, illustrative, anecdotal as it had been until then the traditional art. I wanted to be understood from itself, without reference to the world of objects or figurative reproduction. From the fundamentals of visual arts was intended configure a new ideal world.



"Undress to the nature of all forms and just be the style "

In this sentence the name of the movement was born, soon joined other artists: painters like Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondrian, furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld, painters and sculptors Georges Vantongerloo and Cesar Domela, the architects JJP Oud, Van't Hoff R., painter and designer Vilmos Huszar, the poet Anthony Kok, filmmaker Hans Richter, designers Peter Röhl and Werner Graeff and others.

Mondrian's paintings are the source from which philosophy and visual forms of De Stijl developed.

The name Stijl is often used to designate their creations and figure in the history of art as the Dutch contribution to modern art.



Main characteristics of the Movement?

Stijl moved back to the very foundations of art:
             Shape and the color
             Surface and the line.
From these elements Stijl artists developed a new visual language and shaped an ideal world counterpart to the real world.

    Composition with Red, yellow, blue and black. Piet Mondrian.1921
    Yellow radiates away blue and red fleet.

  

Gerrit Rietveld

 

Gerrit Reitveld was born on the 24th of June 1888 and died on the 26th of June 1964. He was a Dutch furniture designer and architect.
He was also one of the principal members of the Dutch artistic movement called De Stijl. Famous for his Red and Blue Chair and for the Rietveld House, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Rietveld designed his famous Red and Blue Chair in 1917. Hoping that much of his furniture would eventually be mass-produced rather than handcrafted, Rietveld aimed for simplicity in construction. In 1918, he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair's colours after becoming influenced by the 'De Stijl' movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he became an architect. The contacts that he made at De Stijl gave him the opportunity to exhibit abroad as well. In 1923, Walter Gropius invited Rietveld to exhibit at the Bauhaus. 

He designed his first building, the Rietveld Schröder House, in close collaboration with the owner Truus Schroder-Schrader. Built in Utrecht on the Prins Hendriklaan 50, the house has a conventional ground floor, but is radical on the top floor, lacking fixed walls but instead relying on sliding walls to create and change living spaces. The design seems like a three-dimensional realization of a Mondrian painting.

Gerrit Reitveld was a proponent of the “De Stijl” Movement, which supported simplicity and abstraction.

In his work he uses straight lines, planes and asymmetry and the use of glass and steel in all of his buildings and thus, the use of light was prominent.