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Some Aspects of Art Nouveau in Arts and Letters

1980; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3332370

1543-7809

György M. Vajda, György M. Vajda,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

I suppose there are two ways nowadays to approach the theme of relations between literature and the arts. One would be to investigate the similar artistic manifestations of an epoch, a trend, or a movement by the descriptive method and to examine their style and common intellectual foundations. The other method of approach would be a kind of semiotics, if we consider the arts and literature to be means of communication, systems of signs, or a kind of secondary language. We would try to establish a common idiom of the various arts and the letters by such a method. But here I have chosen the more traditional approach and will refer to some aspects of the features common to the arts and the letters within the style of Art Nouveau. By Art Nouveau I mean the style of the fin-de-sidcle artistic and literary movement. In their excellent book published twelve years ago, Richard Hamann and Jost Hermand were unable to find one single movement that preponderated at the turn of the century.1 Since that time, however, it seems that Art Nouveau has been given priority in research and has gained precedence among the artistic trends of its time.