Art Nouveau: Posters, Paintings and Prints

Art Nouveau means “new art” in French. In art it is the international style that ran from the 1890s to the First World War and used sinuous lines and flowing shapes taken from plants, in posters, illustration, painting, design and architecture. The V&A says the name probably came from the Paris gallery of the dealer Siegfried Bing, the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, and that the term had already been used in the 1880s by the Belgian journal L'Art Moderne. The Getty's art vocabulary dates the style to about 1890–1910 in Europe and the United States.

Sources: V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style · Tate: Art nouveau · Getty AAT: Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is recognized by long, sinuous lines, above all the S-shaped “whiplash” curve, and by flowing shapes taken from flowers, leaves and tendrils. The V&A lists delicate tendrils, organic forms, swooping, swirling lines, eccentric geometry and exotic bodies among its motifs, and says women became its dominant theme. In posters and prints, artists used flat areas of color and strong outlines, which the V&A traces to Japanese woodblock prints.

Sources: V&A: Art Nouveau · V&A: The Whiplash · V&A: Art Nouveau and the erotic · V&A: Divan Japonais, poster by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

The Art Nouveau period ran from the early 1890s to the First World War. Tate says the style emerged in the 1890s, was brought to a wider audience by the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, and was killed off by the First World War. The Getty's art vocabulary dates its flowering to about 1890–1910.

Sources: Tate: Art nouveau · Getty AAT: Art Nouveau · V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style

Art Nouveau started in several European countries at once in the 1890s, and the V&A names Brussels, Paris and Munich as its centers. In Belgium the term was already in use in the 1880s, and the architects Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde made it a style for whole buildings, down to the door handles. It also took hold in Vienna, Glasgow, Spain, Italy and the United States, each under its own name.

Sources: V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style · V&A: The Whiplash

Art Nouveau had a different name almost everywhere. In Germany it was Jugendstil, after the Munich magazine Jugend, founded in 1896; in Austria Sezessionstil, after the Vienna Secession; in Spain it was part of Modernisme; in Italy it was Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale, after the London store Liberty & Co.; and in the United States it was the Tiffany style, after the glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany. In France, the V&A adds, it was also called Le Style Métro and Le Style nouille, the “noodle style.”

Sources: V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style · Getty AAT: Jugendstil

Famous Art Nouveau artists include the poster designer Alphonse Mucha, the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt, the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and the Paris poster makers Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The V&A names Beardsley's drawings, Victor Horta's architecture and Mucha's posters among the most familiar examples of the style, and Tate adds Hector Guimard's Paris Métro entrances, Tiffany glass and the furniture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In Vienna the painters and designers of the Secession, Klimt and Koloman Moser among them, made it their own.

Sources: V&A: Art Nouveau · Tate: Art nouveau · V&A: A short history of the poster · V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss and his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I are the best-known Art Nouveau paintings. The Belvedere in Vienna calls The Kiss one of the icons of Viennese Jugendstil, and the Neue Galerie in New York says Adele Bloch-Bauer I, known as the Woman in Gold, is emblematic of his golden style. Other famous Art Nouveau paintings include Klimt's last portrait, Lady with a Fan, and Ramon Casas's picture of himself and Pere Romeu on a tandem, painted for the Barcelona beer hall Els Quatre Gats.

Sources: Belvedere, Vienna (Google Arts & Culture) · Neue Galerie New York: Gustav Klimt · Belvedere: Lady with Fan, Gustav Klimt's last works · Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Art Nouveau posters are the color lithograph advertisements and theater posters made in Paris, Brussels, Vienna and beyond from the 1890s. The V&A credits Jules Chéret with the first color lithograph posters, in 1866, calls Toulouse-Lautrec the best-known name of the French heyday of the art poster, and says the Art Nouveau style, popularized by Alphonse Mucha, took the poster world by storm. Mucha's 1895 poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Gismonda was an overnight sensation, and collectors stripped copies from the hoardings to hang at home.

Sources: V&A: A short history of the poster · V&A: The Whiplash · V&A: Gismonda, poster by Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) was a Czech painter and designer whose posters, the V&A says, popularized the Art Nouveau style and took the poster world by storm. He came to Paris in 1887 and took up posters for financial reasons, but he called the medium “an art for the people.” His 1895 poster for Sarah Bernhardt's Gismonda was an overnight sensation, and Bernhardt contracted him to design more posters, sets and costumes. Mucha resisted being labeled an Art Nouveau artist, but his women became, in the V&A's words, an ever-present and much-copied leitmotif.

Sources: V&A: Job, poster by Alphonse Mucha · V&A: The Whiplash · V&A: A short history of the poster

Gustav Klimt's best-known style is his “golden style,” in which figures sit in flat fields of gold and silver covered with jewel-like patterns. The Neue Galerie in New York links it to the Byzantine mosaics he saw in Ravenna in December 1903, which he called of “unprecedented splendor,” and the Belvedere calls The Kiss the high point of this “Golden Epoch.” Klimt led the Vienna Secession, the group founded in 1897 that, the V&A says, first popularized Art Nouveau in Austria; Tate calls him one of the greatest of all Symbolist painters.

Sources: Neue Galerie New York: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I · Neue Galerie New York: Gustav Klimt · Belvedere, Vienna (Google Arts & Culture) · Tate: Secession · V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style

Art Nouveau was inspired above all by nature: the V&A says its whiplash line was derived from studies of the natural world, including deep-sea organisms and botanical gardens. Japanese art was a second source, in the flat colors and outlines of posters and in the prints sold by Siegfried Bing, whose Paris gallery gave the style its name. In Britain, the V&A adds, it was largely indebted to the Arts and Crafts movement and to Aestheticism.

Sources: V&A: The Whiplash · V&A: Art Nouveau and the erotic · V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style

Arts and Crafts looked back to handmade craft and traditional design; Art Nouveau set out to invent a new, modern style. The V&A says the Arts and Crafts movement, inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris, wanted a revival of traditional handicrafts, a simpler way of life and better design for everyday objects, and Tate adds that its wallpapers and fabrics treated plant forms as flat pattern. Art Nouveau, which in Britain was largely indebted to it, turned plant forms into fluid, serpentine lines and used modern materials such as iron and glass, as the Getty's art vocabulary notes.

Sources: V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style · Tate: Arts and crafts · Getty AAT: Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau ended with the First World War, which, in Tate's words, killed it off. The V&A says its opulence and ornament were already being shunned in favor of sleeker, mass-produced forms, and that the stark style of Modernism took its place. Its erotic content and its link with decadence also turned people against it. In posters and design it was followed by the more angular Art Deco, which Tate calls both its successor and a reaction against it.

Sources: Tate: Art nouveau · V&A: The Whiplash · V&A: Art Nouveau, an international style · V&A: Art Nouveau and the erotic · V&A: A short history of the poster · Tate: Art deco

Yes. Every artist on this page died by 1939, so their works are in the public domain in the United States and in countries where copyright ends 70 years after the artist's death. You can download them free and use them for anything, including commercial projects. A few countries have their own rules on photographs of artworks, so check them if you publish outside the U.S.

Sources: Cornell University Library: Copyright Term and the Public Domain