mortiz004

It was a deliberate decision from Aubrey Vincent Beardsley to be the buffoon and harlequin of his age. He was aware that his demise will probably be due to consumption and so he hankered after immediate success. From childhood he was prodigy, in music, literature and draftsmanship. He wrote his first play in 1885, at the age of 13. This was around the same time that his cartoons were featured in his school newspaper.  He became a master of linear Art Nouveau. His line simultaneously strongly suggested a concrete subject matter and reminded us that it was abstract. He created hard contours with his lines. These contours seemed splintered and widely free in their diverging curves. By the time he followed advice given to him by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Purvis de Chavannes in 1891 to take up art as a profession, he was fully conscious of the significance of his line. Beardsley didn’t do any preliminary sketches. He made all his changes with pencil on the same sheet. These line...

With his a rich body of art work beaming with enchanting women, streaming hair and flowing fabrics, Alphonse Mucha became one of the most fascinating artistic personalities of the turn of the century.  Mucha was, too, a universal artist. He was not solely a painter and a graphic artist,   he also practiced in sculpture, jewelry making, interior decorating and utilitarian art. However, his particular talent lay in decorative graphics, which, to this day, remains the base of his fame.  His name has an everlasting link to the Art Nouveau movement. Between the years of 1879 and 1881, he had a job at a Viennese studio as a junior specializing in stag sets. This revealed his undeniably talented understanding of how to arrange scenic events in an effective manner. The theater became a major source of inspiration for Mucha as it gave him ideas that would form his symbolic gesture-language that he applied to his figures and their spectacularly fantastical costumes. He developed a ...

Amongst the many elements that make up the Art Nouveau aesthetic, designers and painters of the time understood that the ornamental element of line determined the whole style. Designs of all genres brimmed with its multi-faceted glory. It could be a line of flowing elegance and grace or one of powerful whiplash infused rhythm and force. It could take on the shape of a stalk with buds or of a vine tendril. But it would always have the organic characteristic of motion and infinite energy. It will always be growing with its asymmetrical undulation into long, sinuous and sensitive linear elements. The rhythms expressed by these lines were unequal, varying and asymmetrical. Before they end, the lines rear themselves again very high in a spiral; much like a musical beat. The lines of Art Nouveau were so confident in their uninterrupted rhythm that psychological analysis of this design element proved it to be narcissistic; stating that it’s always moving in a sort of narcissistic self-delight...