Short History of
Art Nouveau

Part 2

A wider attention was brought out to Art Nouveau during the World Exhibition held in Paris in 1900 and by the opening of its subway "le Metropolitain", the entrances of which were created by French architect-designer Hector GUIMARD.

At the beginning of the new century, the expansion of Art Nouveau was massive in Western Europe, it developed especially in the provincial cities, as capital cities resisted to the new art, in Glasgow more than London, in Darmstadt or Munchen more than Berlin, Nancy more than Paris, Barcelona, Milan, but also in Prague, Vienna, Helsinki and of course Brussels.

The works and aesthetics of artists-designers such as the painter Gustav Gustav KLIMT and the architect Josef HOFFMANN, the designer Josef Maria Joseph Maria OLBRICH in Austria; the Scottish architect Charles Rennie MACKINTOSH; the "visionary" Catalan architect Antoni GAUDÍ I CORNET; the Spanish fashion designer established in Italy Mariano FORTUNY Y MADRAZO; the German illustrator Otto Eckmann and the architect Peter Behrens; the originator of the ornamental Floreale style Giuseppe Sommaruga or designer Carlo Bugatti in Italy, and many others, were broadly exposed on the international cultural scenes and their styles became widely known.

The Art Nouveau Movement reached at a later stage the cities of Chicago Boston and New York in northern United States, where Louis Comfort TIFFANY is considered the only original Art Nouveau artist in the decorative field and Louis Sullivan in architecture, is considered the precursor of America's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd WRIGHT.

The First World War (1914-1918) marked the end of the Art Nouveau style.

The world had changed and with it the mentalities.
The elegance, sensuality, flamboyance of Art Nouveau was going to be substituted by more rational styles as Art Deco and Bauhaus all influenced by one of the major cultural and artistic movements of the 20th-century.