Art Nouveau// Chapter 11

Hishikawa Moronobu

1618-1694. Was the first master of the Ukiyo-e print. Began his career making design for embroidery. Later he became a book illustrator who used Chinese woodcut techniques. In addition to actors and courtesans his work presented the everyday life of ordinary people, including crowds on the street and peddlers.

Okumura Masanobu

1686-1764. Was among the first artists to move from hand-coloring single-color woodcuts to two-color printing.

Suzuki Haranobu

1725-1770. Introduced full color prints from numerous blocks. each printed in a different color.

Kitagawa Utamaro

1753-1806. Portrayed beautiful women.WAs called the supreme poet of the Japanese print. His loving observation of nature and human expression resulted in prints of insects birds flowers and women, possessing great beauty and tenderness. Conveyed his subject's feelings based on careful observation of their physical expression, gestures and their emotional state. His warm yellow/tan backgrounds emphasized delicate, lighter tones skin.

Katsushika Hokusai

1760 -1849.Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. Published prints of Kabuki actors. Album prints, genre scenes, historical events illustrations for novels, landscape series, nature studies, and privately commissioned prints called Surimono.

Ando Hiroshige

1797-1858. Was the last great master of the Japanese woodcut. Inspired the european impressionist with his brilliant spatial composition and ability to capture the transient moments of the landscape.

William Morriss

1834-1896. Leader of English Arts and Craft Movement. Brilliant two-dimensional pattern designer. Medieval art and botanical forms were his main inspiration. Concerned about the problems of industrialization and the factory system.

Arthur H Mackmurdo

1851-1942. Architect. Arts and Crafts movement. Incorporated renaissance and Japanese design ideas into work. Inspired by midieval, has swirling organic forms. Forerunner of private press movement.

Jugendstil

Art Nouveau in Germany. Gernman art nouveau had strong French and British influences, also retained strong links to traditional academic art. Had interest in medieval letter forms.Moved rapidly from floral phase of art nouveau to more geometric and objective approach.

Japonisme

Late 19th century. Western Mania for all things Japanese.

Ukiyo-e

"Pictures of the floating world" Ukiyo-e defines and art movement of Japan's Tokugawa period (1603-1667). Ukiyo-e Blended the realistic narratives of traditional picture scrolls (Emaki) with influences from decorative arts. The earliest Ukiyo-e works were screen paintings entertainment districts, scenes and actors from the Kabuki theatrical plays, renowned courtesans and prostitutes, and erotica. Embraced the woodblock print.

Jules Chéret

1836-1933. Lithography. During the 1870s he evolved away from Victorian complexity, simplifying his designs and increased the scale of his major figures and lettering. He used black lines with primary colors. Bright colors. Typical composition is central figure in animated gesture, surrounded by swirls of color. Secondary figures or props and bold lettering that that often echoes the shapes and gestures of the figure. Introduced a new role model for women in the late victorian era. The beautiful young women he created were called the "Chérettes." They were archetypes for the idealized presentation of women in mass media, but also for the generation of French women who used their dress and apparent lifestyle as inspiration. Carefree, energy lifestyle, and movement. Prefers large format of posters.

Eugène Grasset

1841-1917. Influence of Medieval art and love of exotic Asian art reflected strongly in his designs. Decorative borders framing content. "Coloring-book style," thick contour drawing locking forms into flat areas of color in a manner similar to medieval stained glass windows. Figures wear medieval clothing. He has formal composition and muted colors. Has flowing line, subjective color and floral motifs.

Louis Rhead

1857-1926. American Art Nouveau. Studied in his native England then in Paris before immigrating to America. He embraced Grasset's willowy maidens, contour line, and flat color, he rejected his pale colors in favor of vibrantly unexpected combinations, such as red contour lines on bright blue hair before an intense green sky. He has an eclectic style. He sometimes mixed decorative embellishments from Victorian designs, forms inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, curving, and abstract linear patterns in his designs. He adopted the French poster as his model.

Théophile-Alexander Steinlen

1859-1923. French art Nouveau. Commissioned Cat drawings, "Le Chat Noir." His radical political views led him toward a social realism. He would depict poverty exploitation and the working class in his drawings/illustrations. His legacy is based of his works from the 1980s. Uses a lot of red yellow and black in his art. Art is similar to that of Toulouse- Lautrec.

Alphonse Mucha

1860-1939. French Art Nouveau. Le Style Mucha. Czech artist in Paris. Made poster for the play Gismonda for famous actress Sarah Bernhardt. His dominant theme was a central female figure, surrounded by stylized form derived from plants and flowers, Moravian folk art and Byzantine mosaics and even magic and the occult. Mucha's women project and archetypal sense of unreality. Exotic and sensuous while retaining an aura of innocence, they express no specific age, nationality, or historical period. His stylized hair patterns became the hallmark of the era.

Henri Toulouse - Lautrec

1864-1901. French Art Noveau. His1891 poster "La Goulue au Moulin Rouge" broke new grounds in poster design. Uses dynamic pattern of flat planes. Japanese art, impressionism and Degas's design and contour inspired him. He developed a journalistic illustrative style that captured the night life of 19th century Paris. He is primarily a printmaker, draftsman and painter. Uses fluid lines and flat colors. Draws a lot of cancan dancers with "gestural expressiveness."

Otto Eckmann

1865-1902 Jugendstil. Known for large multicolor woodblock prints, inspired by French Art Nouveau and Japanese prints. Designed important typeface called Eckmannschrift. Designer and consultant for AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts- Gesellschaft/General electric company)

Edward Penfield

1866-1925. American Art Nouveau. Art Director for Harper and Brothers publications. Contour drawing with flat planes of color. He eliminated the background to force the viewer to focus on the figure and the lettering. His technique was influenced by the Japanese prints. He drew with a vigorous fluid line and his flat color planes were often supplemented by a masterly stipple technique.

Charles Ricketts

1866-1931. English Art Nouveau. His work is based on a thorough understanding of print production. Focussed upon harmony of the parts of a book. Title page, Typography, ornaments, illustration. Usually rejected the density of Kelmscott design. His page layouts are lighter, his ornaments and binding are more open and geometric. His designs have vivid luminosity. Complex intertwining ornaments of Celtic design and the flat stylized figures on Greek vases were major inspirations. Indicated figures and clothing with minimal lines and flat shapes with no tonal modulation.

Frank Lloyd Wright

1867-1959. Glasglow School. American architect. He saw space as the essence of design. Loves organic and geometric shapes.

Charles Rennie Makintosh

1868-1928. Glasglow school. Designed object, chairs and interiors as total environments. His main design theme is rising vertical lines, with subtle curves at the end to temper their junction with the horizontals. Tall and thin rectangular shapes and the counter points of right angles against ovals, circles and arcs characterize his work.

Peter Behrens

1868-1940. Jugendstil. "The first Industrial Designer" Became known for large multicolor woodblock prints, inspired by French Art Nouveau and Japanese prints. Experimented with ornaments and vignettes of abstract design. Used old style typefaces. Became influenced by ideals of arts and crafts movement, purged of its medieval affectations. Sought typography form, was an early advocate for sans-serif typography, and use grid system to structure space in his design layouts. Did work for the AEG. Created unique german type by combing the heavy condensed feeling of the black letter, the letter proportions of roman inscriptions, and his standardized letterform construction. The combination of visual form, working method and functional concern in his work for AEG products proclaimed him as the first industrial designer. Designed a typeface for AEG's exclusive use.

Will Bradley

1868-1962. American Art Nouveau. Ws inspired by English sources. In 1890 his work was Art and Crafts-inspired-pen-and-ink illustrations. In 1894 when he became aware of Beardsley's work led him to flat shapes and stylized contour. He made innovative use of photomechanical techniques, to produce repeated overlapping, and reversed images. He was inventive in his approach to typographic design. Type became a design element to be squeezed in a column or letter-spaced. Passion for type design and layout.

Maxfield Parrish

1870-1966. American art Nouveau. Expressed romantic and idealized view of the world. Created elegant land of fantasy with his idealized drawing, pristine color and intricate composition.

Frances Macdonald

1874-1921. Glasglow school. Symbolist and mystical ideas. Architectural structure, feminine, fairy land, fantasy.

Berthold Löffler

1874-1960. The Vienna Secession. Reductive symbol images of thick contours and simple geometric features. figures in his posters and illustrations became elemental significations rather than depictions

Jessie Marion King

1875-1949. Glasglow School. Medieval fantasy illustrations accompanied by stylized lettering. Her grace fluidity and romantic overtones influenced fiction illustration in 20th century.

Ver Sacrum

1898-1903. The Vienna Secession. A magazine that was considered more a design laboratory. All involved were focussed on experimentation and graphic excellence. Enabled designer to develop innovate graphics as they explored the merger of text, illustration and ornament into a lively unity. Magazine had square format. Combined hand-lettering with bold line drawings. Printed in color and on colored background. Decorative ornaments borders, headpieces and tailpieces were used. Overall layout page was refined and concise thanks to ample margins and careful horizontal and vertical alignment of elements into a unified whole.

Chapbook style

A new direction in graphic arts that was inspired by Calson type, wide letterspacing, a mix of roman, italic, and all-capital type, sturdy woodcuts and plain rules from crudely printed books from colonial England called chapbooks. Books were named after the chapmen (traveling peddlers) who sold them.

Private press movement

Arts and Craft. Design and printing movement advocting an aesthetic concern for the design and production of beautiful books. Sought to regain high standards, high quality materials, and careful workmanship of printing.

Aubrey Beardsley

English Art Nouveau. Vibrant black and white work, exotic imagery. Augmented a strong Kelmscott influence with strange and imaginative distortions of the human figure and powerful black shapes. Flat patterns and dynamic curves. Later he changed to a more naturalistic tonal quality and dotted contours.

Art Nouveau

Followed from the Arts and Crafts movement. It was an international decorative style that evolved from Historicism that dominated design for most of the 19th century and thrived during 1890-1910. Art Nouveau's identifying visual quality is an organic plant like line. It defines modulates and decorates a given space. Vine tendrils, flowers and the human female form were a frequent motifs. The term arose in a Paris gallery run by art dealer Samuel Bing. 1895 Salon de l'Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau became the initial phase of the modern movement.

The Vienna Secession

In Austria 1897. Counter movement to the floral art nouveau. Drew inpiration from Glasglow school. Clean simple sans serif lettering, ranging from flat, blocky slabs to fluidly calligraphy forms. Not (very) linear focussed more on squares. Artist specialized in one or more disciplines. Turned toward flat shapes and greater simplicity. Emphasis on geometric patterning and modular design construction. Used squares rectangles and circles in repletion and combination. Decorations and ornament depended on similar elements used in parallel, nonrhythmic sequence. Geometry was subtly organic.

Glasglow school

Scottish Art Nouveau. Inspired by Celtic ornaments, symbols, architectural, strong linear structure, abstract, mystical. Bold simple lines define flat planes of color. Abstract interpretations of the human figure.

English Art Nouveau

Sources include Medieval art, Japanese art, Gothic art and Victorian painting.

Koleman Moser

The Vienna Secession. Austrian artist who exerted considerable influence on twentieth-century graphic art and one of the foremost artists of the Vienna Secession movement and a co-founder of Wiener Werkstätte. Had ideas about clean geometric design. Moving toward modernism. Used sans-serif.

Alfred Roller

The Vienna Secession. Masterly control of complex line, tone and form. A set designer and scene painter for theatre. His principal work as a graphic designer and illustrator was for Ver Sacrum and secession exhibition.

Utagawa Toyokuni

Utagawa Toyokuni, also often referred to as Toyokuni I, was a great master of ukiyo-e, known in particular for his kabuki actor prints. Did woodcut prints.