Art Nouveau From Mackintosh to Liberty : the Birth of a Style

"Art Nouveau was born in Britain as a by-product of the Art and Crafts Movement and the developing Glasgow Style. The Glasgow Four, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair, evolved from a ghostly, abstract skeletal Symbolism dubbed 'The Spook School' by their critics to a gloriously decorative, richly coloured imagination whose images derived as much from analytical botany as from the influence of Klimt, Toorop and Beardsley. The Macdonald sisters, working together and separately, created strangely inspired metalwork and pictures which perfectly complemented the interior designs of the architects they were to marry. Around them sprang a group of talented artists and designers, such as Jessie M. King, E. A. Taylor, Margaret Gilmour, George Walton, who designed and executed innovative metalwork, book bindings and illustrations, stained-glass panels, embroidery, and jewellery. Admired abroad, their designs disseminated by The Studio magazine and others, the Glasgow line entered and influenced Continental sensibility." "In London the Arts and Crafts movement permeated much of the creativity in the crafts, and affected both teaching and practice in the provinces, leading to a major renaissance in Birmingham. A London department store, Liberty Et Co, in the forefront of the Aesthetic Movement and the dissemination of Japanese and other Oriental artifacts, launched itself into the avant garde with the production of silver, pewter and jewellery whose style was inspired by a Manxman steeped in Celtic lore and design, Archibald Knox. The combination of commercial astuteness and creative originality was the source of the development of Art Nouveau in Britain, to which many of the Glasgow artists contributed." "This book traces the development of style in the crafts, the emergence of idealism in sculpture and painting and its dissemination through book and magazine illustration and graphics, and the creative heights achieved in jewellery, silver, enamelling and other crafts which led French writers to call Art Nouveau 'The English Style.'"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved