1.
A new perspective of the history of design and architecture usually implies
other contextual readings than the ones previously adopted. Regarding the
history of Art Nouveau or Jugend-Style, relations has predominantly been made
to the technical revolution of every-day life, the dissemination of a representative,
global, industrial culture or the development of material, such as glass or
steel for durability and supporting capacity.
Other contextual observations have been more or less left in the shadows –
for example: the new-colonialism, the Nietzsche-reception, the emergence of
psychology and psychoanalysis, the rise of a protective middle-class movement
or the spreading of copyright-regulations in capitalist societies in Europe
– although they were highly contemporary issues with Art Nouveau and
may be as informative about the secret or forgotten features of a period in
time.
Having said this, and since I am not an architecture or art historian, I
consequently have taken the freedom not to talk exclusively about architecture.
I will instead, in this lecture, sketch the currents of philosophical and
societal ideas, which underscored the need to reform and rethink design and
art at the turn of the century.
Art Nouveau was a reform-movement for the renewal of society as well as individual
man in that society. When architects and designers in urban, industrial centres
began to express a desire to be modern, they found themselves integrating
cosmopolitan ideas with the immediate conditions in which they found themselves.
If modernity was understood foremost as a need of societal restructuring in
peripheral regions of Europe’s urban network, as in Helsinki, Tallinn,
Riga or Stockholm – modernity in established metropolitan areas like
Paris or Berlin could rather be interpreted as an individual demand of appropriate
aesthetical expression.
These are the two traces I intend to follow: The first one deals with the
manifestation of urban market economy in the “mature” industrial
society in Europe. The other one deals with the individual in this market
society and the strategies of the individual to secure uniqueness and freedom
in – what was conceived of as - the furious turmoil of modernity.
If any general statement of Art Nouveau is appropriate it is that of its flexibility
of meaning.
I will, however, try not to succumb completely to this flexibility myself,
and therefore suggest that the need for societal change as well as the longing
for individual posture is two features attached to the Art Nouveau-movement
that refers to each other, and which can offer us an interesting mirror to
our own contemporary situation.
As central and combining figure for both perspectives I have chosen the German
sociologist Georg Simmel. Simmel is not foremost known as a theorist of design,
but rather as a cultural critic, and above all as a thoughtful reviewer of
urban life in the beginning of the 20th century.
But he also has a lot say about commercial existence and the meaning of aesthetics
in modern society, as he was personally involved in the movements for a rebirth
of cultural and artistic life in Germany around 1900.
2.
I said that the “mature” industrial society was to form the background
for the story I want to tell. What do I then mean by “mature”
industrial society?
The turn of the century was a period of general middle-class prosperity. This
was manifested in exhibitions, in department-stores, communication, banking
and the spreading of new trade- and copyright regulations to order a highly
developed “society of contracts”.
Heavy industry started to move to the outskirts of towns in Europe which gradually
lead to a structural mending of the traditional urban fabric; electricity
emerged as a leading industrial sector and with it followed a notion of power
that was pure, natural, feminine, if you want – and adaptable for commercial
and advertising purposes; a transportation and service-economy began to shape
the urban profile; an awareness of social reforms emerged over political party-lines
and the organized working-class gradually abandoned internationalism in favour
of nationalism.
One can say this in another way: the concept of urbanization had gotten a
qualitative meaning.
Urbanization was not merely referring to the masses of immigrating land workers
pouring into towns, but to the measurements activated to shape a functioning
society based on the belief of a new culture, the life of the modern city
as we still basically understand it today. And all this resulted in a renaissance
of urban self-consciousness in European cities. The “mature” industrial
and urbanized society saw its chance to take back something of what had been
lost during the economic revolutionary decades of the 19th century, and to
bring the further development firmly down on local ground. This endeavour
resulted in an awareness of “place” and a rediscovery of the parochial
as a resource.
This is also one of the reasons why Art Nouveau became a provincial movement.
I will in the second half of this lecture talk about Berlin – and great
cities always make great examples, and great exceptions – but to some
extent Art Nouveau or Jugend-Style, as an architectural expression of urban
society, was a movement for mid-sized regional centres in Europe; in Catalonia,
Scotland, Livonia, Bohemia or Bukovina. Longing for being European and modern
and having a centralizing importance – Art Nouveau offered a new language
for many of these regional centres, who could no longer hide their artificial
composition – be it political, social or ethnical.
Nevertheless, attempts to stress the importance of Art Nouveau as an expression of the great ideologies of the time overlook one obvious point: Art Nouveau was a movement within capitalism, depending on capitalistic inventions. The style became partly connected to the “Nouveau Riche”, wealthy urban bourgeoisie industrialist, but also as a public style for new companies and novel organizations. One could say that the style served as an aesthetic vehicle for a middle-class vision of economic liberalism, prevailing through the whole 19th century – namely the vision of “harmonious competition”.
It was a recurrent theme in all liberal reforms, to promote a class-less society
without class-struggle; and an urban environment that was neither revolutionary
nor hostile to progress. The stance was congenial expressed in a text by Georg
Simmel in 1903 called – “The Sociology of Competition”.
Competition has an incredible synthetic power, Simmel wrote, because it is
a struggle about man, and hence about recognition and encouragement. The more
liberal society gets – and not only within the realms of economy and
politics, but within family, association, church and education – the
more will the formation of society depend on competition.
Socialism will fail to promote these characteristics, because individual endeavour
is there restricted to common interests. And where the individualistic principle
cannot flourish, competition will remain undeveloped. The same goes for societies
structured on estates or guilds. Where the individual “chance”
is hold back in favour of mechanic equality, the synthetic power of competition
will grow weak.
The “European moral”, Simmel wrote, is much more accepting towards competition than any other form of antagonism. The reason is that the harshness of competition takes place with the full knowledge that the counterparts do not actually want to “hurt” each other. It is pure objectivity in action, which does not involve the “persons” themselves – thereby allowing the counterparts to form a “cultural unity” of dynamic practice.
The money-spinning character of Art Nouveau suited the material mind-set of the time perfectly. It had a rumour of having revitalizing effects on local economy. With the fresh aesthetic expression, weak industries and branches of handicraft were provided with new motivation. The form could in the most successful examples, serve as an amalgamation of commercial relations, where contacts were made between architects, artists and merchants who wanted to attract the customers with great purchasing power. For contemporaries, the most obvious use of Art Nouveau was in commercial context, as modern decoration of shops and stores. The commercial exploitation of the new style was also one of the most reliable channels to spread it all over the world.
3.
Another way that Art Nouveau was spread was of cause through exhibitions.
Even if this occurred very uneven in European towns, the attention that Art
Nouveau got through exhibitions, made the style partially into a play, a theatre,
a staged attitude – adoptable both for democratic hedonism and bourgeois
pleasure-seeking.
The exhibitions mirrored the liberal market in every aspect; if harmonious
competition was the vision of the autonomous producers and sellers in the
capitalistic economy, the exhibitions were fashioned as “peaceful combats”
where manufacturers and industrialists from different countries could compare
their level of achievements. On the trade exhibition in Berlin 1896, Simmel
wrote that differentiation and plurality was necessary elements of modern
psycho-social existence. No other revelation in modern life come closer to
satisfy these necessitate of diversity and multitude that the aesthetics of
market goods shown at the great exhibitions.
In fact, Simmel saw a straight line between the exhibitions, the department-stores
and the city as a whole. It was now possible for the whole modern world to
be concentrated on one single place. The city has become a copy or a sample
of markets all over the world. And the greatest efforts were made to give
attraction to the vulgarity of the single objects. The department-store, as
a distinct symbol of urban economy, cultivated social distance.
In the department-store, the sales-clerk was quiet, conformed to the method:
“Look today, buy tomorrow!” Instead a price-tag had slipped in
between the customer and the seller, replacing the actual personal encounter
and the discussion about quality and cost.
The relationship between human beings became objectified; the relation instead
“grew into the merchandise”. In the monetary, urban world this
process had gone so far as to give the consumer-product a life of its own.
Simmel thereby touched upon factors that had accompanied all the exhibitions
of the late 19th and early 20th century: mass-production, prefabrication and
mass communication. That Art Nouveau would make contact with mass-production
was inevitable. Few commercially successful designers and manufacturers ever
equated with the romantic vision of William Morris, in which one craftsman
would see the pieces through from start to finish. The most successful workshops
in Paris, Vienna or Berlin combined traditional craft techniques with organization
on an industrial scale. In this way a certain degree of exclusivity was preserved,
but at the same time a broader market could be reached.
It is interesting that the emerging style of Art Nouveau took place at the same time as the rising of middle-class organizations all over Europe, not exclusively in opposition to socialism and the working-class movement, but as a protectionist movement, combating the forces of large-scale industrialists. Art Nouveau had indeed high-lightened the intense conflict between value-production and mass-production, at the same time as the style nourished from the divergence between the two. But at the same time Art Nouveau represented enfoldment and technical innovation and the bourgeoise’ emphasize of constant development – and the movement was thereby price-given to the circulation of the market.
4.
Art Nouveau was, like any other modern movement, also political, but political
according to a hidden agenda of economy and aesthetics, difficult to grasp
and never summarised in statements or programs. Let me hang on a while to
the phenomenon of exhibitions around the turn of the century – and take
an example; not the Paris-exhibition this time, but the exhibition in Riga
the year after, in 1901. For Art Nouveau was dominantly present in the Riga
exhibition. It was even more important what profile the style received in
this particular environment and how it revealed itself on local ground –
than that it had renewal potentials.
I said that Art Nouveau was crypto-political, and this point of view is adaptable
on the occasion, in a way we all well recognize today; namely politics dressed-up
as “festivalisation” and “cultural spectacle”. The
Riga-exhibition was a Baltic-German anniversary-exhibition to celebrate the
700-year foundation of the city. The Latvian press instantly stated that they
would have nothing to do with the manifestation, since it only addressed a
minority of the city inhabitants. But a party is a party, and it was obviously
difficult to hold back 400.000 inhabitants of this booming Baltic metropolis
from having a good time due to suspicions of propaganda. For propaganda it
was. The anniversary jubilee provided an occasion for the Riga German community
to profess publicly their support for the economic policy of the Russian imperial
government. And they did so by showing both the rooted tradition of German
trade and enterprise, as well as the elaborated form of future industrial
prosperity.
The exhibition area was separated between the forty pavilions on the old demarcation-line
facing Riga Esplanade and the north-eastern suburbs – and the old town,
which was used as scenery for historic spectacles.
In a speech on the opening ceremony of the first day of the exhibition, Karl
Lovis, professor at the Baltic Polytechnical Institute, emphasized that “…the
development of a country’s industry is unquestionably dependent upon
measures and laws enacted by the government.” And that this was something
which recent history had fully confirmed in Riga. The Russian government had
since the 1890s pursued policies which directly encouraged the development
of industry in Riga. This also had a tremendous side-effect for smaller manufacturers
and artisans and resulted in a prosperous network of commercial partners both
within the Russian Empire and with Europe.
The paradox of Riga was this: the same government whose Russification programme
had had such devastating outcomes on administration, law, higher education
and schools for the Baltic German community followed economic policies which
were materially extraordinary beneficial to that minority. In fact, the economic
bonds served to reinforce the German loyalty to the empire – and the
other way around: the imperial government needed the Riga Germans in control
of the city: to commence the economic modernisation and to prevent social
disruption. On this rather shaky ground, the Baltic Germans wished, as the
traditional representatives of Riga, to be the model of economic success and
reliability on the outmost western boarder of the Russian Empire.
Not everybody, not even within the Baltic German minority welcomed this overwhelming
emphasize on material prosperity, investments and commercial activity. A more
conservative writer like the politician and historian Julius Eckardt, lamented
that the ”material interests” was conducting an increasingly dominant
force in societal changes, and that the feeling for the traditional urban
community of Riga was dissolving.
The role the exhibition played in the city’s further development was tremendous, not least for the building-industry and architectural projects. As I have shortly mentioned here, and Jeremy Howard has analysed in an essay some years ago, features of Art Nouveau was primarily attractive for a new elite in Riga – leading industrialists, publishers, lawyers and banks and insurance companies. Art Nouveau offered a tool for every desire: to be modern, representative and to signalize a belief in loyalty and progress. And as an expression of the market, it did not “belong” to any specific group anymore, national, ethnical, commercial, but precisely because it was modern, it composed a mixture of different strivings of the time.
5.
For the second part of this lecture – I want to change the time just
slightly, but the setting completely:
It is a Sunday morning in January 1903 and the Count Harry Kessler comes to
visit Georg Simmel in his apartment in Berlin. The purpose was to discuss
the foundation of the New League of Sucessionist Artists in Germany (Deutsche
Künstlerbund), an organization in clear opposition towards the mainstream
of historicism and monumentality of the time, and with a purpose to give art
back its freedom. Kessler and Simmel were at this time highly ambitious and
successful men within their different fields. Kessler had been head-hunted
as Museum-Director and head of the Nietzsche-archive in Weimar. He was a man
of wealth, a patron of the arts, diplomat and personal supporter of the Belgian
architect Henry van de Velde, who had completely redesigned Kesslers bachelor-apartment
in Berlin 1898; where Kessler held soirees considered to be the events of
high society in the German capital. Simmel worked as a lecturer at the Berlin
University. Later that year, 1903 he held a lecture at the great city exhibition
in Dresden titled “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, one of the
most important texts of future urban sociology. Both Kessler and Simmel belonged
to the founding-committee of the New League of Sucessionists, along with the
painter Max Liebermann and van de Velde.
Kessler writes about this visit in his diary: “Simmel lives like a Barbarian,
but he doesn’t know it, with a gloomy, petit-bourgeoise furnishing …
only a few Japanese wooden pieces and some photographs moderate the impression.
He gave me a strange proof of his art knowledge in that he showed me a Tanagra-figure
and supposed it was a piece from the 6th. o 7th. decade (B.C). As I pointed
out the free, irregular form, the fixed posture etc to him, and said that
this was not made before 300 B.C – he was quite astound.”
What perhaps seems like a minor flaw of historical inaccuracy on Simmel’s
account – receives the following devastating judgement in Kessler’s
diary: “I feel that a man who lives at ease with himself in such an
environment, and who is so ignorant in the matters of art, is just on a complete
different path towards a new culture than I am. I think it’s not possible
to work together with him. He will simply hold me back.”
In this brief encounter, we can find traces of a variety of conflicts and
discords within not only the artistic and intellectual environment during
the time, but in society as a whole. We have the break-down of a unifying
value-system, a canon of knowledge that had been the pillar in education and
customs – what in German was called “Bildung”. The speeches
of Cicero, the letters of Paulus, the compulsory lessons of Latin-grammar,
or the proper appreciation of a Tanagra-figure for that case – helplessly
eroded as uniting foundation of the educated classes.
The humanistic disciplines, the men of letters, were on defensive. Both art
and philosophy were forced to work on the surface, frustratingly blocked from
having any enduring importance on the scientific community.
Due to the landmarks of physics and science, microbiology and electromagnetic
waves, even the secret dreams of metaphysics had come true thanks to technical
development; the upheaval of time and space, and sovereignty over one’s
own body. Due to this gradual lost of a canon, and due to an economic reality
that encouraged differentiation, a plural society emerged. Not surprisingly,
but consequently, there was an increasing interest in the question of “values”;
for ethics and aesthetics as fundamental substances for authentic human individuality.
---
Before coming back to Kessler, Simmel and the intellectuals of the time –
I will first say something about the preoccupation with individual values:
Around 1900 the thoughts of transformation and break-up dominated European
societies. History and future did not for that reason stand in opposition
to each other, but existed rather side by side, as parallel modes of authority.
It was, still, the age of Historicism and history had an enormous impact on
the climate of ideas. Consequently it served both as a model for legitimacy
as well as a springboard for radical ruptures. A vivid awareness of the past
has a slowing affect on mentality and culture. The intellectual composition
of the time thereby reinforced the uncompromising break between inherent knowledge
and values – and the rational, technical and demanding objective world.
It was an important precondition for the Art Nouveau-movement, that society
was conceived of as divided, and that technology had won a position as a self-determining
force. Modernity was something preferably taking place “outside”;
in domains almost independent of the human will. The culture of man was gradually
replaced by the culture of things. The question, not least within humanities
and philosophy, was how to restore or find a new platform for unity and exchange.
And one of the most cherished and promising platforms for this restoration
was art.
The problem of “individual value” was absolute central for Simmel – and the same perspectives about “separation”, “differentiation” and “distance” of individual life reappeared in his sociology as well as in his aesthetical analyses. “Culture” had for Simmel an undeniable material significance. Even the most banal objects of every-day life became parts of a cultural world as people possessed and used them.
But during the processes of modernization, the world of “objective”
culture had an advantage over the “subjective” culture of individuals.
The individual capacity to personally incorporate the material realm of culture
could no longer keep up an even pace with technical, productive and economic
development.
The much slower evolvement of the inner life of the modern individual –
was also the reason – to use Simmel’s words – for the contemporary
“tragedy”: that the world of technology and invention, commerce
and markets always seemed to be so much richer, so much more novel, diversified
and interesting.
Aspects of “cultural consumption” would thereby grow in importance,
he foreseen, and specific “life-styles” would develop out of the
acquirement of material goods. Simmel was not alone in sensing a severe threat
towards individual values and internal bearing due to the restrictive preconditions
of modern society – and due to the cold-blooded rational precision that
money-economy prescribed for social relations.
6.
A few weeks later in this first winter-month of 1903, Simmel payed Kessler
a social call. He had just gone to see the latest exhibition by Eduard Munch
in Berlin. “Now I finally know what he is trying to express”,
Simmel told Kessler: “The fear of life. Munch is aesthetically capturing
a non-aesthetical judgment, the escape of man into himself. Modern life is
forcing itself upon human beings so violently, that they are about to lose
their minds. Everything becomes socialized; objective, technical – and
the individual cannot breathe under this burden. This is also what Ruskin
meant when he raged against the machines. The mechanization is this hostile
element penetrating the personality; it is ruling us nowadays, instead of
being ruled by us.” Kessler refers further to this interpretation in
his diary: “Simmel meant that the situation could change though; in
that the development was taken to an extreme: that technology and mechanization
became so internalized that you didn’t notice it anymore, that it became
a undivided part of being human, and thereby invisible. It was from this point
of view, that he didn’t like van de Velde…”.
Why did’t Simmel like van de Velde?
Well, even within the founding-committee of the New League of Sucessionist
Artists in Germany there existed divergent opinions on what art could accomplish
for contemporary society. For Kessler and van de Velde art must be a part
of life promoting a complete reform of life’s environment. For Liebermann
and Simmel art should be left to its own; as a sanctuary, as a compensation
for a lost completeness in life. Art Nouveau was in this respect, with Simmel’s
worlds, only another object of culture, an artistic asseccoire of consumption
, who was bound to be draw into the realm of consumable attributes for the
“style of life” – which the market restlessly placed at
the disposal of the modern individual.
A couple of decades later, Simmel seemed to have been proven right in his reserved attitude towards the new style, at least for the German case. The journalist Karl Scheffler wrote shortly after the Second World War, that the “Germans that are young today, do not easily understand the resistance that the Jugend-Style promoters ones had to face. … When they spoke about a “New Style”, they thought of nothing less than a changed world, with new behaviour and a new ethos. (…) But the more they strived to a general reform, the more they were locked up in interior arrangements”. The need of a new perception; a turning away from the norms of bourgeoisie life, had united the Jugend-Style artists. But they wanted more than anything else to set their own aesthetical values in their immediate personal environment – as expression of their distinctive, unmistakeable individuality.
The movement had obvious contradictory facets, which means that the study
of Art Nouveau offers a fascinating insight into the sometimes schizophrenic
mind-set of the age. Through the style it is possible to discover at least
some of the fears, anxieties, hopes and dreams of the turn-of-the-century
society.
And, as I said before, the profile and extension of Art Nouveau was very much
a question of where it settled; on the local context. Why Art Nouveau in Berlin
was observed by contemporaries as an interior style has its reasonable explanations.
The profile of societal influence and power in Berlin was at the end of the
19th century an unhappy mixture of royal residence, court and military city
– and a city of the new industrial middle-classes.
Royal monumentality had occupied the public space of the urban fabric –
its squares, its gardens and buildings of representation to such a degree
that what was left for the bourgeois and their contracted entrepreneurs and
architects to design was located in fashionable suburbs – or the interior
of houses and apartments.
Technical development around the turn of the century had further more promoted
this process.
With the suburbs and an extensive regional train network the city had turned
into a mega-conglomerat, the forth largest metropolis in the world. Mark Twain
who visited the city at this time noted that he one day saw two men lifting
their hats when they meat on the street. Twain concluded: “So there
are at least two people in this city who knew each other since previous!”
Another aspect to consider was the spreading of the telephone. The picture-of-life reporter Edmunt Edel wrote about the saturated social atmosphere in “Neu-Berlin”. Since people hardly ever bumped into each other in the city, the telephone had developed into the essential instrument for arrangements, social gatherings and dinners. The social life of the prosperous urban middle-classes was an in-door-life, where friends and business-partners were invited to share the atmosphere of intimate representation and aesthetic taste.
These intimate, interior settings were Simmel’s own favourite scenery
for the short satirical pamphlets he wrote anonymously or under synonym in
the Munich journal Jugend shortly before 1900. [omslag, Jugend]
One of those had the title: “Money alone doesn’t make you happy”,
where Simmel played with his own serious and opaque thinking on the “Philosophy
of Money”. Money cannot create individual values, and it cannot create
a universal ethical system. In the modern metropolis there are no ethical
ideals – because of the plurality of orientation – only aesthetical
ideals. With this rather pessimistic reference to the central chapter in the
“Philosophy of Money”, Simmel proved to be deeply involved in
the contemporary aesthetical debate, and the meaning of art, design and architecture
discussed for example in the book by Peter Behrens, “Feste des Lebens
und der Kunst” from 1900. Behrens there wrote that “every form
is just one of many symbols of the internal life … every genre of expression
and design is a necessary statement of the mentality of a time-period, the
appreciation of existence in society…”.
Simmel , being both a relativist as well as an evolutionist, did however not
see all too gloomy on the mental life of urban mortals. Due to modern socio-cultural
development human beings had gained an exceptional freedom, unheard of in
traditional, rural society. In fact, “true” individuality could
only evolve in modernity. Indifference and individuality were inseparable
from each other since both factors were essential to the creation of “social
roles”, without which urban inhabitants could not function together.
Simmel refused to state a final judgement on good or bad in contemporary society, or to declare a prophecy of what the future might bring. Every modern individual, he wrote on in an essay on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in 1902, must consider this though: We cannot stop evolution. And in the evolution of society, the struggle will never be quite settled between social democracy and nietzscheanism. Either, you commit yourself to the strivings of rising the level of mediocrity in society – or you acknowledge that the development of man will be measured according to a few, outmost examples, of the human spirit. Either, you let the division of labour and leisure-time comforts provide you with the freedom, and the market with the objects, you need to fulfil your innermost personal wishes – or you rise above the habitual ease of modern existence, and follow your on laws of beauty, vitality and moral structure. But this only a few will achieve, the ones that endure to stand all alone – and thereby, Simmel remarked – they will be of no interest for the discipline of sociology.
Conclusion and outlook
I have almost reached the end of this journey into the intellectual and societal mind-set of the time. What remains are some summary reflections and a couple of concluding remarks on the contemporary preoccupation with Art Nouveau.
I have taken Simmel as my cicerone since his thinking is so very much marked by the currents of the time. He does not primarily discuss structures of power, large scale processes or institutions, but his interest was set on the level of human relationships; where conflicts and negotiations always resulted in new circumstance, and new creations. The turn of the century demonstrated in every field this extraordinary longing for synthesis; for reconciliation and a new beginning. In this respect, Art Nouveau established itself for a short period of time as an instrument of reform, located between various fields of society: art, science, politics and economy – but still as a manifestation of what characterized this society; namely its commercial foundation.
With modernization around 1900, the awareness and acquisition of time and space became much stronger bound to the development of technique and economy than ever before. Transfer, acceleration and the overcoming of natural distances changed the individual art of perception as much as it changed the empirical knowledge of society. But there are no such thing as technical and economic change in itself – in the meaning of abstract forms of facts and construction. Today, Simmel’s dream of the complete internalization of technology has largely come true – we are through and through technical creatures, integrated machines; and the innovations that we buy and connect to, are as “invisible” as they can be, since they must come in “cultural disguise”, so to speak – as a package of meaning – and be restlessly locked up in every-day, routine behaviour of individuals to acquire importance; – social, symbolical as well as aesthetical importance.
This is also, I would argue, a likely reason why the interest in Art Nouveau has grown so strong during the last decades. We are aware that we are living in a decidedly consumist and capitalistic environment, and fully understand that commercial enterprises are a large part of our individual lives. Since this is partly a relentless and not even rational reality, the desire to provide it with at least beauty and superficial vitality is a necessary feature of economic endeavour. One of the more fascinating paradoxes of Art Nouveau was exactly this longing to combine and fuse contradictions: the acknowledgement of the dependence of material existence – and – at the same time, to stage this fabric full of mythical features – of transcendence and belonging.
~
Lecture held at the exhibition "Architecture 1900" at the Stockholm Museum of Architecture, 2005.
References:
Escritt, Stephen; Art Nouveau (London 2000).
Greenhalgh, Paul; Ephemeral vistas. The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions
and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester 1988).
Greenhalgh, Paul; “The Style and the Age”, in: Paul Greenhalgh
(Ed.); Art Nouveau 1890-1914 (London 2000).
Gropius, Walter; “Die Entwicklung moderner Industriebaukunst”,
in: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, 1913.
Howard, Jeremy; “Style and Patronage in Latvian Architecture and Design
of the Debut-de-Siècle Period”, in: Grosa, Silvija (Ed.); Jugendstils
– Laiks un Telpa. Art Nouveau – Time and Space, Jumava (Riga 1999).
Kaschuba, Wolfgang; Die Überwindung der Distanz. Zeit und Raum in der
europäischen Moderne (Frankfurt a.M. 2004).
Kessler, Harry Graf; Das Tagebuch, Band III, 1897-1905. Herausgegeben von
Carina Schäfer und Gabriele Biedermann (Stuttgart 2004).
Krastins, Janis; “Latvian Art Nouveau in the European Context”,
in: Grosa, Silvija (Ed.); Jugendstils – Laiks un Telpa. Art Nouveau
– Time and Space, Jumava (Riga 1999).
Krastins, Janis; Ríga. Jugendstilmetropole / Art Nouveau Metropolis
/ Jugendstila Metropole (Riga 1996).
Scheffler, Karl; Die fetten und die mageren Jahre (Leipzig 1946).
Simmel, Georg; „Zur Psychologie des Geldes“ (1889); in: Gesamtausgabe,
Bd. 2 (Frankfurt a.M. 1989).
Simmel, Georg; Philosophie des Geldes (1900), Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 6 (Frankfurt
am Main 1989).
Simmel, Georg; ”Soziologie der Konkurrenz” (1903), in: Gesamtausgabe,
Bd 7. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901-1908, Band I (Frankfurt a.M. 1995).
Simmel, Georg; ”Zum Verständnis Nietzsches” (1902), in: Gesamtausgabe,
Bd 7. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901-1908, Band I (Frankfurt a.M. 1995).
Simmel, Georg; Grundfragen der Soziologie (Individuum und Gesellschaft) (1917),
in: Gesamtausgabe, Bd 16 (Frankfurt a.M. 1999).