HAMBURG.- In its exhibition entitled “Art Nouveau. The Great Utopian Vision”, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, accompanied by a newly designed presentation of its existing Art Nouveau Collection, retraces an era which produced so much more than whimsically playful ornamentation. Art Nouveau defined itself via reform movements, visions and Utopian dreams aimed at renewing society. The special exhibition throws light on this cultural and historical background and development, drawing together the ideas linking Karl Marx‘s “Das Kapital” and Peter Behrens’s salon grand piano with symbols quoted from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”. It shows reform movement robes, a solar bath for sun-worshippers, photographs of nudists playing sports in the open air or Loïe Fuller’s celebrated light dances. The arts take up the revolutionary changes affecting the private and social life of modern man, sketch new models for living and experiment with technical innovations. Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch and Alfons Mucha reflect the many-facetted perceptions projected onto women. Ferdinand Hodler, Paula Modersohn-Becker focus on the child. And a constantly recurring source of inspiration is nature, especially in the applied arts. Art Nouveau also marks a hiatus for the museums of arts and crafts, which had up to then only shown examples from history. This is the period when they also begin to collect contemporary art. The new design of the Art Nouveau collection of the MKG, today almost unparalleled, takes its cue from the first presentation which its founder Justus Brinckmann compiled in 1900 with the objects he had purchased at the Paris World Exhibition. In addition, with furniture and room ensembles by, among others, Henry van de Velde, Richard Riemerschmid, Charles Rennie Mackintosh or Carlo Bugatti, it illustrates the wide spectrum of aesthetic conceptions and formal language at the beginning of the 20th century. The project shows more than 350 works in all, including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, drawings, ceramics, glass art, book art, fashion, textile art, posters, historical films, scientific and medical-technical apparatus and models.

What kind of life do we want? This was the question those living around 1900, faced by the revolutionary developments and inventions confronting them, asked themselves. Electricity, the theory of evolution, psychoanalysis, X-rays and other achievements bring radical changes to private and social life, simultaneously triggering both euphoria and fear. The arts become a means of forging a better world, and Art Nouveau is the expression of a courageous upsurge of reforming artists all over Europe. They demand a more responsible way of dealing with resources and work, strive towards self-determined working as a way of giving life a purpose. The personal sensitivities of the individual are taken seriously. Rigid gender roles begin to break up. Criticism of man’s alienation from himself in modern industrial society gives an impetus to the longing for untrammelled originality. The child becomes a symbol of innocence, and the quest for the unspoilt leads to away from the familiar, to nature.

The temporary exhibition
The artists of the Art Nouveau are in revolt against the still new culture of consumerism, against shoddy, standardized, mass-produced goods, mostly made under wretched working conditions. They are to be replaced by high-quality products whose beauty would enhance the quality of people’s everyday lives. In the vanguard of the English Arts & Crafts movement, the designer and theorist William Morris lays the foundations for the reform movements which proliferated around 1900. The convinced Socialist creates a counterworld to the British textile industry in his textile and tapestry designs, made by hand using ancient techniques instead of by machine. The tapestry “The Pilgrim and the Rose” evokes the poetry of medieval culture. Morris’s holistic aspiration to quality, from the design of the lettering to hand-pressing it, leads to a renaissance of book art. In his Utopian novel “News from Nowhere” which gives its name to the introductory chapter, Morris paints a picture of a Socialist ideal of life and work. The rarely exhibited “Kelmscott Chaucer” is on show here, one of the most beautiful examples of Arts & Crafts book art. Seductive beauty becomes the central focus of English aestheticism around 1900. Gabriel Charles Rossetti pays tribute to its ambivalence in his painting “Helen of Troy”.

Alongside the Middle Ages, modern artists around 1900 also define other places of longing, allegedly “untouched” by the evils of “civilization”, such as the South Seas. The Yearning for pristine authenticity of life permeates, for instance, the portraits of children by Ferdinand Hodler and Paula Modersohn-Becker. A glass-front cabinet, paintings and drawings as well as rarely seen ceramics by Paul Gauguin are the expression of this active or imagined flight from civilization, associated with the hope of finding a more authentic life. The cultural dialogue with Japanese craftwork, too, plays an important role and runs like a thread through the exhibition as the theme of Inspiration from Japan, in Carl Otto Czeschka’s kimono-like robe for example, whose graphic pattern quotes the marine decorative designs of Japanese dyeing stencils.

The Liberated Body, its contours no longer defined by fashionable stiffness and the corset, is expressed in the reform of feminine fashion with exquisite robes created by Mariano Fortuny or the successful Liberty brand. The “healing” of the “neurasthenic” city-dweller by exposure to natural surroundings is pursued almost like a cult in European living communes from about 1890 on. The hygienic and aesthetic debate rely on a doctrine of the liberation, strengthening and care of the body as the temple of the soul. The search for the greatest possible naturalness is paralleled by aesthetic optimization through “muscular beauty”. Light and movement become watchwords of the reform in living style, sunlight is even to be ingested with one’s food, nakedness is regarded as social emancipation. The “Root Chair” of the Swiss lifestyle reformer Karl Gräser is set over against an electric “light bath” in the exhibition, which enabled the city-dweller too to participate in the healing medicinal effects of light by means of electric light bulbs.

The interests of other artists, however, are devoted precisely to the new technologies of industrial society, in which they seek new impulses for their creativity. The electrification of everyday life, especially the new forms of light and the film, become important vectors of Modern art. Loïe Fuller, the Light Fairy sets a new standard for the experience of dance with her serpentine dances: she employs veil-like robes onto which she projects light according to a meticulously planned scheme. A kaleidoscopic pattern of constantly changing abstract forms and colours is presented to the eye. At the onset of the media age, Fuller thus becomes a symbol of the transient and the passing moment. In the film, everything will be possible, proclaims Georg Lukács. The new technology rapidly develops from a fairground entertainment into a documentary and artistic genre. In the hands of the Lumière brothers or George Méliès, the illusion machine becomes the instrument of Utopian visions.

The spectacular discovery of X-rays in 1895 makes the body transparent and enables us to visualize the interior of the human being. At the same time another Inward View is being projected: Sigmund Freud revolutionizes our understanding of the human psyche. The cultural image of the soul is being grasped metaphorically in concepts taken from Classical mythology. The exhibition shows classical objects from Freud‘s own collection alongside Fernand Khnopff’s “Hypnos”, Odilon Redon’s painting “The Barque” and Annie Brigman’s and Clarence Hudson White’s mythically transfigured photogravures. Their deliberately blurred focus is the vehicle of meanings dissolved into a mood picture. Investigating the nature of man in Vienna around 1900 means above all investigating sexuality. The tensions surrounding the battle of the sexes span an arc from Gustav Klimt‘s nudes and Edvard Munch‘s drawings to the paintings of women artists such as Elena Luksch-Makowsky or Broncia Koller-Pinell.

The question of the pursuit of happiness in this life generates a new relationship to material things, which is buttressed not only by Marx, but also by Friedrich Nietzsche’s emphatically this-worldly philosophy. His cult book “Thus spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885) is widely revered. The hermit Zarathustra (Zoroaster), who brings mankind his doctrine of the Superman, offers an identification point in particular for artists attempting to reform society. In his criticism of culture, Nietzsche also proclaims the Death of God. Max Klinger’s portrait bust of Nietzsche stands as a foil to works which transmit Nietzsche‘s writings into a visual form. Thus the exhibition shows Peter Behrens’s Zarathustrian salon grand piano from the Haus Behrens on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt as well as Henry van de Velde’s book art for Nietzsche’s central writings or Hodler’s “Gazing into Eternity III”.

The elegance of the Art Nouveau design aesthetic increasingly becomes a figurehead for high-quality, up-market products. Morris’s works are already only accessible as expensive collector’s items for a well-to-do circle of buyers. Manufacturers of modern consumer goods as well as theatres react to the demands of the market. That is why the leading poster artists of the movement known as Affichomania in France still influence our view of Art Nouveau to this day. In a gallery especially devoted to posters and advertisements, the exhibition shows masterpieces by, among others, Eugène Grasset, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alfons Mucha. Features of their work are elements of Japonism and oriental subtexts, the hypnotic gaze, sensuous female figures and the dandy. They find their counterpart in the modern tendencies from Munich and Vienna, which follow a more rational approach. Posters for exhibitions are given particular emphasis with a series of posters for the “Cent”.

The Jugendstil Collection in a new design
In museums for the arts and crafts, all the signs point to a new departure in the years around 1900. A new conception marks a radical change from museums as a collection of models to emulate to a collector’s museum: instead of looking back over history, from now on contemporary works are collected. One of the pioneers of this innovative type of curator is Justus Brinckmann, founding director of the MKG. Following his motto “to acquire a selection of the best our time has to offer”, he makes extensive new purchases at the Paris World Exhibition ranging from furniture to examples of bookbinding, thus laying the foundation for the Art Nouveau collection of the MKG. His arrangement of these objects in the so-called Paris Room is based on the idea to give the visitor to the museum “the impression that he is in a living space such as a friend or a collector of modern art might furnish.”

The Paris Room is the central pivot of the newly designed permanent exhibition. It is inspired by this historical conception, which can be reconstructed with the help of photos. In this way the visitor is able to re-experience what it was like to collect contemporary works over 100 years ago. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1900, too, a table centrepiece causes a sensation, and Brinckmann purchases the entire ensemble lock, stock and barrel for his Museum: the “Jeu de L’écharpe” (Game of Sashes), by the French sculptor Agathon Léonard. Working in a medium as representative as it is conservative, table decoration, he celebrates here the most progressive art form of the time: the dance. This centerpiece can be seen for the first time in many years in its table-top choreography in the room devoted to Dancing and Table Culture.

The Austrian capital Vienna, too, is a crystallization point of Modernism. It is here that Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser found the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903. Their manifesto states: “We want to establish an intimate contact between the public, the designer and the craftsman and make good, simple objects for household use. We start from the use a thing is to be put to, our first requirement is that it must be serviceable.” The Wiener Werkstätte recognize, as one of the first design workshops to do so, the importance of branding to secure their own market value and focus uncompromisingly on commercial structures as well as corporate identity and an unmistakable Branding. This also includes the love of square-cut forms and the reduced colour scheme black and white.

Interior decoration as a stage for the individual to present himself is also in flux around 1900. Under the title New Living and Working, two ensembles created by two German protagonists of the Art Nouveau are on show: on the one side Henry van de Velde, the artist-craftsman who works with unique designs customized for his client. On the other, Richard Riemerschmid, the advocate of innovative and series-produced designs. He stands like no other for the democratization of living culture at the beginning of the 20th century.

Thanks to the generous support of the Stiftung für die Hamburger Kunstsammlungen the MKG was able to acquire important new objects for the Art Nouveau Collection over recent years, among them a chair for Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Argyle Street Tea Room and a chair from Carlo Bugatti’s famous “Snail Room”. Each forms the centrepiece of two further theme rooms: Turin 1902: an aesthetic trial of strength and Glasgow: the Tea Room Movement. The first Esposizione internazionale d'arte decorativa moderna is held in Turin in 1902. The two artists make a name for themselves at Turin through their highly distinctive designs. The works by both artists illustrate in completely different ways the quest for a new aesthetic vocabulary and style of ornamentation at the beginning of the 20th century.

Artists: Emile Bernard, Edward Burne-Jones, Peter Behrens, Carlo Bugatti, Jules Chéret, Carl Otto Czeschka, Carl Fabergé, Mariano Fortuny, Loïe Fuller, Emile Gallé, Paul Gauguin, Karl Gräser, Eugène Grasset, Josef Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt, Fernand Khnopff, René Lalique, Richard Luksch, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Madame D`Ora, Louis Majorelle, Paula Modersohn-Becker, William Morris, Alfons Mucha, Edvard Munch, Richard Riemerschmid, August Rodin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Louis C. Tiffany, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henry van de Velde and many others.