The Enduring Pleasures of Art Nouveau via Art in America [Shared]

The Enduring Pleasures of Art Nouveau via Art in America

It is difficult to convey the giddy joy I felt one day in Berlin—that gray grid of a city—upon opening an unsuspecting gate and feeling in my hand no ordinary doorknob, but iron in the shape of a Belgian endive. Its smooth curve fit elegantly in my hand, yet its form was so specific and silly. Three years later, I still look at pictures of it on my phone, longingly.

The gate, should you wish to track it down and feel the same small magic, is outside the Bröhan Museum, which collects Art Nouveau—as well as Jugendstil, the German (and, I’d argue, more beautiful) branch of the movement better known by its French name. Broadly speaking, the Germans leaned toward geometric abstraction and stylization, while the French favored facsimile, committed more firmly to oragnic forms. It was at this Bröhan gate that I realized I had perhaps been wrong to write off Art Nouveau, which I had long found sickly sweet—particularly in its tendency to merge women, nature, and domestic objects into those girl-tree-candelabra hybrids that set off feminist alarm bells in my mind.

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