Anxieties of Influence: British Responses to Art Nouveau, 1900–04
Research Affiliate, Center for British Studies, University of California, Berkeley
In the first four years of the twentieth century, British designers, artists and critics engaged in a heated series of debates about art nouveau. At the heart of these important discussions lay concerns about what made art nouveau ‘new’ or ‘modern’; did ‘the new art’ truly signify a foreign-inspired rupture with the past, and if so, what possible aesthetic (or political) effects might art nouveau have within the borders of Britain? This article undertakes a close reading of the language and metaphors employed in these public debates, and argues that broader cultural concerns about urbanism, corruption, anarchy, nationalism and empire supply much-needed historical context for the understanding of British paranoia about foreign influence in the arts and art education between 1900 and 1904. The debates were also informed by literature employing metaphors of disease to describe social and aesthetic change, and by uncertainty about how to ‘read’ art nouveau and to define a particularly ‘British’ visual, modern aesthetic patrimony in the decorative arts. Furthermore, the article argues that a significant part of British antipathy towards art nouveau lay in art nouveau's overt commercialism, and suggests that Liberty and Company's canny compromise between historicism and art nouveau led to the success of Celtic-inspired design in England between 1898 and 1905.
Key Words: art education • art nouveau • design history • international exhibitions • Liberty and Company • nationalism