Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style by Debora L. Silverman

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews 601 results, although welcome, sit rather uneasily in relation to the rest of the volume. The Science of Art is a valuable compendium of optical theory and practice as it relates to Western art. Kemp’s survey of the literature on the subject seems to be complete. My only reservations have to do with some of the assumptions that lie behind Kemp’s approach. In confining himself to the “optical themes in western art,” his story of perspective flows from painting to painting and artist to artist. Please note that the book is not, therefore, a history of perspective or of color theory. While military science or architectural history, for example, may have provided the critical spur for the development or dispersion of certain perspective techniques, they are outside Kemp’s range, although not necessarily outside that of his subjects; the interchange between military and artistic practice, for example, remains to be written. Finally, given the grand questions that have been raised about the meaning and value of perspective (Panofsky, Gombrich, Bateson), it is a shame that an expert such as Kemp should have confined his more speculative philosophic remarks to a brief coda. Nicholas Adams Dr. Adams is professor of architectural history in the Department of Art, Vassar College. He is editor of Corpus of the Architectural Drawings of the Sangallo Circle (Architectural History Foundation, forthcoming). Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. By Debora L. Silverman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Pp. xv + 415; illustrations, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $39.95. Debora Silverman’s book focuses attention on how the term art nouveau, used in reference to the iron architecture at the 1889 French exposition, became identified with a freely curving decorative-arts style rooted in craft production and expressive of highly individual­ ized, subconscious feelings. The shift was the result of a decade-long search by a group of French intellectuals, artists, and Republican officials for a culture that “resonated with eighteenth-century heri­ tage and late nineteenth-century discoveries” in science, psychology, and technology. At the heart of the matter was the conviction that national well-being and prestige, as well as individual identity, de­ pended on the production of a modern artistic style that came to terms with the machine. Thus, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France not only skillfully weaves together complex threads of politics, psychology, and style, but provides a conceptual framework for integrating the history of the special relationship between art and technology in France with the intellectual history of the period. The text is comple­ mented by black-and-white photographs and a section of color photographs that amplify rather than illustrate ideas. 602 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Led by the Goncourt brothers, the French elites sought an alterna­ tive to the spiritually deadening industrial culture in an imaginative revival of 18th-century crafts. Their interest was fueled by a pressing concern to create highly personalized, organically designed domestic spaces as a buffer from the nervous exhaustion and mechanized routine of urban industrial life. The decline of France’s status vis-à-vis other industrial countries and new diplomatic alliances led some members of government circles to identify French craft production as a national patrimony whose revitalization would be the country’s salvation. Unlike the rapidly industrializing societies of England, Germany, and the United States, craft production in France after the Revolution of 1789 had remained well developed and could boast a highly skilled work force supported by wealthy patrons and the state. Producers of luxury crafts were open to modernizing their products through the use of new technologies such as mechanical saws. A private organization, the Central Union of the Decorative Arts, helped shift the character of design by urging that women take the lead in luxury-craft production and consumption and called for a feminization ofartistic expression. Decorative-arts reform culminated at the 1900 Paris exposition with Siegfried Bing’s Pavilion of Art Nouveau. Silverman’s book is rich in ideas that help move the question of the relationship between art and technology from the periphery to the center of discussions about the role...