In 1901, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens proclaimed in a letter to Will Low, “Health—is the thing!” Though recently diagnosed with intestinal cancer, Saint-Gaudens was revitalized by recreational sports, having realized midcareer “there is something else in life besides the four walls of an ill-ventilated studio.” The Medicine of Art puts such moments center stage in order to consider the role of health and illness in the way art was produced and consumed. Not merely beautiful or entertaining objects, works by Gilded-Age artists such as John Singer Sargent, Abbott Thayer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are shown to function as balm for the ill, providing relief from physical suffering and pain. Art did so by blunting the edges of contagious disease through a process of visual translation. In painting, for instance, hacking coughs, bloody sputum, and bodily enervation were recast as signs of spiritual elevation and refinement for the tuberculous, who were shown with a pale, chalky pallor that signalled rarefied beauty rather than an alarming indication of death. Works of art thus redirected the experience of illness in an era prior to the life-saving discoveries that would soon become hallmarks of modern medical science to offer an alternate therapy. The first study to address the place of organic disease—cancer, tuberculosis, syphilis—in the life and work of Gilded-Age artists, this book looks at how well-known works of art were marked by disease and argues that art itself functioned in medicinal terms for artists and viewers in the late 19th century.

Over 300 spectacular pendants, combs, buckles, rings, bracelets, brooches, umbrella handles, penknives, buttons, clasps and scissors in detailed photographs reprinted from rare, turn-of-the-century folio. Elegant, copyright-free illustrations exquisitely detailed with flower, foliage and butterfly motifs. Readily adaptable to any design use.

Distinguished by their lavish sculpture, metalwork or tile facades, Art Nouveau buildings certainly stand out. Art Nouveau buildings are unique, audacious and inspirational. Rejecting historic styles, considered inappropriate for an era driven by progress, architects and designers sought a new vocabulary of architectural forms. Their vision was shaped by modern materials and innovative technologies, including iron, glass and ceramics. A truly democratic style, Art Nouveau transformed life on the eve of the twentieth century and still captivates our imaginations today. Beautifully illustrated, this book explains how the new style came into being, its rationale and why it is known by so many different names: French Art Nouveau, German Jugendstil, Viennese Secession, Catalan Modernisme, Italian Liberty and Portuguese Arte Nova. It covers the key architects and designers associated with the style; Victor Horta in Brussels, Hector Guimard in Paris, Antoni Gaudi on Barcelona, Otto Wagner in Vienna, Odon Lechner in Budapest and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow. There are detailed descriptions and stunning photographs of buildings to be found in Brussels, Paris, Nancy, Darmstadt, Vienna, Budapest, Barcelona, Milan, Turin and Aveiro. Finally, it covers the decorative arts, stained glass, tiles and metalwork that make Art Nouveau buildings so distinctive.

Situated at around 3,300 ft above sea level in the mountains of the Swiss Jura region, the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds experienced significant economic development towards the end of the 19th century, which went hand in hand with much building activity. There are few other places in Switzerland in which the influence of art nouveau is so clearly visible. Significantly inspired by the painter and architect Charles L'Eplattenier (1874-1946), and his art and decoration course at the local school of applied arts in 1905, a local variant of art nouveau developed, the so-called Style sapin or "fir style." Protagonists of this movement accorded special importance in their works to the use of symbolic motifs that reflect the nature of the Jura landscape and especially its fir forests. This book offers a comprehensive survey of the Style sapin and builds bridges into the 21st century. It places the "fir style" within the international context of art nouveau and also addresses in detail the local facets of this movement, which has left traces that are still visible today in watchmaking, applied arts, and architecture. Moreover, it draws attention for the first time to the previously scarcely acknowledged female artists of the Style sapin. Text in French.

Art Nouveau was a style for a new age, but it was also one that continued to look back to the past. This new study shows how in expressing many of their most essential concerns - sexuality, death and the nature of art - its artists drew heavily upon classical literature and the iconography of classical art. It challenges the conventional view that Art Nouveau's adherents turned their backs on Classicism in their quest for new forms. Across Europe and North America, artists continued to turn back to the ancient world, and in particular to Greece, for the vitality with which they sought to infuse their creations. The works of many well-known artists are considered through this prism, including those of Gustav Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley and Louis Comfort Tiffany. But, breaking new ground in its comparative approach, this study also considers some of the movement's less well-known painters, sculptors, jewellers and architects, including in central and eastern Europe, and their use of classical iconography to express new ideas of nationhood. Across the world, while Art Nouveau was a plural style drawing on multiple influences, the Classics remained a key artistic vocabulary for its artists, whether blended with Orientalist and other iconographies, or preserving the purity of classical form.

A comprehensive presentation of the provocative, modernist graphic works of Britain's creator of Art Nouveau This is the first book to bring together the recorded works of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley. Despite his early death from tuberculosis in 1898, at the age of 25, these amount to nearly 1100 completed works of art (plus many related sketches) as well as more than 100 sketches in his letters and the books he owned, and this book includes over 50 that have never previously been published. In his brief career Beardsley made a defining contribution to Art Nouveau in Britain and abroad. He also influenced the early history of modern art, attracting the attention of the young Picasso, for example. His distinctive and innovatory graphic style, combined with highly provocative, often sexual subject matter, outraged critics and led to a period of intense notoriety. Beardsley's drawings span the grotesque, the delicately beautiful, the subtly erotic, and the frankly bawdy, and challenged the moral norms of Victorian society. They enthralled artists and art lovers the world over and continue to enthral today. Linda Gertner Zatlin's text presents Beardsley's drawings with a full record of their making, provenance, exhibition history and references in the art historical literature. This material record is accompanied by often extensive discussions of their themes, motifs and symbolism, as well as their critical reception. Unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness, this study presents Beardsley's work and explores its meanings more comprehensively than any previous work on him; it is likely to remain definitive. This superbly illustrated two volume catalogue, beautifully presented as a boxed set, is both an essential reference for specialists and an accessible and enchanting delight for Beardsley enthusiasts. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Jugendstil, that is Germany's distinct engagement with the international Art Nouveau movement, is now firmly engrained in histories of modern art, architecture and design. Recent exhibitions and publications across the world explored Jugendstil's key protagonists and artistic centres to firmly anchor their activities within the trajectories of German modernism. Women, however, continue to be largely absent from these revisionist accounts. Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design argues that women in fact actively participated in the cultural and socio-economic exchanges that generated German design responses to European modernity. By drawing on previously unpublished archival material and a series of original case studies including Elsa Bruckmann's Munich salon, the Photo Studio Elvira and the Debschitz School, the book explores women's important contributions to modern German culture as collectors, consumers, critics, designers, educators, and patrons. This book offers a new interpretation of this vibrant period by considering diverse manifestations of historical female agency that pushed against historically entrenched conventions and gender roles. The book's rigorous approach reshapes Jugendstil historiography by positing women's lived experiences against dominant ideologies that emerged at this precise moment. In short, the book advocates women as an integral part of the emergence, dissemination and reception of Jugendstil and questions the deeply gendered histories of this key period in modern art, architecture and design.

Borders, panels, scrolls, wall friezes, and other design elements--selected from a rare early-twentieth-century stylebook--contain a vast assortment of motifs, among them tangled ivy vines and voluptuous sprays of tulips and lilies; sea life, parrots, and peacocks; and lovely women with flowing tresses, all sensually rendered in subtle hues. A handy, affordable collection for graphic artists, illustrators, and craftspeople. A browsers delight for lovers of the Art Nouveau style. 300 full-color illustrations.

With its fluid organic forms and its devotion to beauty in design, art nouveau has enjoyed great popularity, both at its inception and during the modern resurgence of interest and enthusiasm. Alastair Duncan tells the story of its meteoric rise from its origins as a reaction by young artists and designers to the traditionalism and revivalism of the mid-19th-century fine and decorative arts. The new art first made itself felt around 1895, in architecture, furniture, glass, ceramics and the other applied arts, and fell into eclipse after World War I, until its rediscovery in the 1960s. The author recounts the history of this important and influential movement in detail, introducing the main personalities - Galle, Lalique, Tiffany and others - and relating their aims and accomplishments to the background from which the movement emerged.

At the turn of the 20th century, architecture took an imaginative leap. As new construction materials and technologies met such far-flung stimuli as the Far East, nirvana, and the unleashed unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis, buildings by the likes of Gaudi, Horta, Hoffmann, Loos, and Mackintosh instilled structure with the sinuous lines of nature, surfaces with a fairy-tale shimmer, and spaces with an ethereal wash of light or shadowy, mysterious hush. For this dramatic portfolio, printed for the first time ever in a book with five colors including gold, the late architectural photographer Keiichi Tahara traveled across Europe to present the finest examples of this Art Nouveau architecture. From the glamorous facade of the Grand Hotel Europa to the elaborate sweep of a staircase or the perfect poise of a single chandelier, Tahara captures the intricate details as much as the holistic spatial effects of these ambitious, marvelous structures. With an eye attuned to the style's organic detailing, he surveys its floral patterns, vine-like balustrades, and the soft, hollow interiors that seem to summon us into some primordial place. Drenched in sunshine or draped in dramatic shadows, Tahara's pictures excel in evoking not only the unrivaled aura of these buildings but also the particular, fin-de-siecle spirit of their age, caught on the axis of a century, and characterized by reflection and yearning, as much as technological, philosophical, and political advance. Texts by Riichi Miyake accompany Tahara's pictures to describe the buildings' floor plans, designs, and the broader context of their dreamlike environments. Limited and numbered edition of 10,000 copies

Pressure exerted by America in 1854 caused Japan to open its doors after 260 years of isolation. Wide receptiveness to everything Western was the driving force behind the modernization of Japan initiated by the Meiji government, yet it also induced a rapid rediscovery of indigenous cultural values. At early Paris and London international exhibitions, the Japanese decorative and applied arts sparked off the Western fascination with all things Japanese japonisme. In Japan, on the other hand, new technologies were eagerly adopted the government realized that increasing production for export would be an excellent means of promoting Japanese economic growth and thus enhancing Japan's status worldwide. Meiji Ceramics represents the first in-depth study of the development of Japanese export porcelain against a highly charged background of political, economic and cultural factors. Includes 180 artists's signatures. Text in English.

Art Nouveau was a style for a new age, but it was also one that continued to look back to the past. This new study shows how in expressing many of their most essential concerns - sexuality, death and the nature of art - its artists drew heavily upon classical literature and the iconography of classical art. It challenges the conventional view that Art Nouveau's adherents turned their backs on Classicism in their quest for new forms. Across Europe and North America, artists continued to turn back to the ancient world, and in particular to Greece, for the vitality with which they sought to infuse their creations. The works of many well-known artists are considered through this prism, including those of Gustav Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley and Louis Comfort Tiffany. But, breaking new ground in its comparative approach, this study also considers some of the movement's less well-known painters, sculptors, jewellers and architects, including in central and eastern Europe, and their use of classical iconography to express new ideas of nationhood. Across the world, while Art Nouveau was a plural style drawing on multiple influences, the Classics remained a key artistic vocabulary for its artists, whether blended with Orientalist and other iconographies, or preserving the purity of classical form.

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cezanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

Explores the shift in the locus of modernity in fin-de-siecle France from technological monument to private interior. The text examines the political, economic, social, intellectual and artistic factors specific to the French fin-de-siecle that interacted in the development of art nouveau.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's finest work dates from about a dozen intensely creative years around 1900. His buildings in Glasgow, and especially his craggy masterpiece the Glasgow School of Art, are more complex and playful than anything in Britain at that time. His interiors, many of them designed in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Macdonald, are both spare and sensuous, creating a world of heightened aesthetic sensibility. Finally, during the 1920s, he painted a series of watercolours which are as original as anything he had done before. Since his death, Mackintosh has been lauded as a pioneer of the Modern Movement and as a master of Art Nouveau. This book, with illustrations that include specially prepared plans and sections, takes a clear-eyed view of Mackintosh and his achievement, stripping away the myths to reveal a designer of extraordinary sophistication and inventiveness.

Traces the history of Merritt Parkway from the proposals for its construction and design in the early-1920s to its completion in 1940. This book provides a tour of this landmark and also an appraisal of its contribution to the built environment. It is on the US National Register of Historic Places.