The turn of one century calls up others, and 2000 was no exception. Museum shows devoted to Style 1900 or Art Nouveau were on view in London, Paris, New York and other cities. It all looked long ago and far away, this pan-European movement pledged to a Gesamtkunstwerk of arts and crafts, in which everything from architecture to ashtrays was subject to florid design, in which the designer struggled to impress his subjectivity on all sorts of object through an idiom of vitalism - as if to inhabit the thing in this crafted way was to resist the advance of industrial reification. As the aesthetics of the machine became dominant in the 1920s, Art Nouveau was no longer nouveau; in the next decades it slowly passed from an outmoded style to a campy one, and has lingered in this limbo ever since. Yet what struck me about this recent parade of Art Nouveau exhibitions was its strong echo in the present: an intuition that we live in another era of blurred disciplines, of objects treated as mini-subjects, of total design, of a 'Style 2000'.

LRB 5 April 2001 | PDF Download