Art Nouveau
A decorative approach where photographs introduce flowing organic ornament and stylised natural forms into photographic composition, lighting and subject treatment.
Art Nouveau, literally "New Art," is a decorative visual style that emerged in the late nineteenth century and flourished until the First World War. First named in the Belgian journal L’Art Moderne and popularised commercially by Siegfried Bing’s Paris gallery Maison l’Art Nouveau, it arose as a reaction against industrial mass production. Its advocates sought to reintroduce craftsmanship and beauty into everyday life, promoting the idea that the arts should be an indispensable part of daily experience. The style drew on Rococo curves, Celtic graphic motifs, plant forms from nature, and the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, as well as literary and artistic sources such as Songs of Innocence.
Visually, Art Nouveau is characterised by natural forms, flowing lines, and intricate, sinuous designs. Motifs include delicate tendrils, stylised leaves and flowers, swooping and swirling curves, eccentric geometry and elongated, often exotic bodies, all frequently arranged in asymmetric compositions. Natural forms are flattened and abstracted into elegant decorative patterns, with simplified areas of tone and a reduced sense of depth, echoing Japanese printmaking. Although best known from architecture and the decorative and graphic arts—stained glass, posters, street furniture such as Paris Métro entrances—its aesthetic also shapes pictorial photography. Pictorialist photographers incorporated soft focus, symbolic motifs and interpretive, subjective treatment of scenes in ways that parallel Art Nouveau’s blend of naturalism, Symbolism and Japonisme.
Art Nouveau is known by different labels in various regions, including Style Métro, the derisive Style Nouille ("Noodle Style") and Jugendstil in German-speaking contexts. In photography discourse it appears among the artistic tendencies embraced by Pictorialism and is sometimes linked to the broader Aesthetic Movement. Later styles, such as Art Deco, reworked aspects of modernism in a more commercial, streamlined direction, marking a shift away from Art Nouveau’s reformist ambition to improve daily life through ornamental design.