Art Nouveau Essay

They all stressed the importance of handmade, decorative, ornamental and functional designs. William Morris started the movement as a reaction against the machine and stressed the importance of working with your hands. He didn’t see the beauty in mechanically produced things and neither did Art nouveau artists and Modernista architects. They all collectively stressed the importance of new never before seen structures and styles that would inspire people and bring beauty to a world that was becoming bland and repetitive.

4. According to Pevsner, what sets Modernisme (and Gaudi in particular) apart from the general Art Nouveau trend?

Although Gaudi was one of the lead innovators of Art Nouveau and Modernisme in the world at the time and in Barcelona, eventually his style developed into something completely his own and his originality is un-marveled. His style can be connected to many different types including Spanish, late gothic, Moroccan, Spanish baroque and an important stress on exuberance, fantasy and nature. Gaudi sought to make his creations look as though they had risen from the ground especially that of his life work, Sagrada Familia. He also believed in using what was around him and also recycling things into beautiful creations like the chimney caps of Casa Mila and many other buildings of his. This was sort of his forte and he was amazing at it. This may be in bad taste, but it is brimful of vitality and handled with ruthless audacity.

5. 5. Pevsner's text is more than 75 years old. Its clarity of outline still makes it valuable today. But, how is Pevsner' appreciation about Art Nouveau in general and Modenisme in particular?

Though Pevsner disliked Art Nouveau for its extravagancies, he realized it had shown that a ...

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...content that art should moralize, should point a moral congenial to established society: and, in his weaker moments, Ruskin fell as deeply into this error as any other.”

Can you find any specific instance of this in Ruskin’s reading Traffic?

Ruskin believes that what we like defines who we are. People are only in right moral state when they have come to like doing it. If they still enjoy immoral things, they are still in a vicious state. Art, like people works similar. Tastes for any art is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. A work of art may look good to the eye, but if it is an expression of delight in a prolonged vile thing, the delight is an immoral quality, and therefore a bad taste. A Greek statue however expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. This is entirely a moral quality, it is the taste of the angels.