ART NOUVEAU. (G. Fahr-Becker), PB, “Ullmann&Kone

With this volume, Gabriele Fahr-Becker delivers a complex portrait of the Art Nouveau phenomenon in all of its fantastic variety. It features different national variations of Art Nouveau in Scotland, England, France, Germany, Austria, the United States and other countries. It offers a comprehensive portrayal of famous individual artists including Louis Comfort Tiffany, Edward Munch, and Rene Lalique. It contains biographies of the most significant artists, and an extensive glossary. The unity of art and life was the expressed goal of the Art Nouveau movement, the prelude to modernity. On the basis of shared ideas its adherents strove for a homogenous style, which nonetheless took on manifold variations in its expression. Dr. Gabriele Fahr-Becker pursues this will to style in architecture, interior decor, furniture design, silver and goldsmithery, ceramics and glasswork, graphic arts and painting. The author leads her readers through the diverse national variations of Art Nouveau in Europe and the United States. Artists and their contemporaries explain the significance of the literary and philosophical as well as cultural and political background by means of many theories and writings. The countless permutations of Art Nouveau are woven into a complex and yet distinctive picture of this artistic movement at the turn of the twentieth century.