Art Nouveau Sideboards
Art Nouveau Sideboards
Emerging at the very end of the century, the Art Nouveau style produced sideboards which, light, ornamental and organic in conception, was hardly as ponderous as the blocky pieces of the contemporary arts and crafts
movement. These were as heavily formed as they were laden with social significance.
Representing the first major break from the traditions that had shaped so much of 19th century sideboards, the Art Nouveau style flourished from about 1893 to 1910. Its dominant feature, curvilinearity, originated from sources as varied as the Japanese prints that enjoyed wide circulation in the West at that time, the French Louis XV and XVI styles, and the flowing, organic decorations on recently popularized Minoan pottery. In the pictorial world, the English artist Arthur Rackham illustrated fairy tales with delicate etchings of attenuated figures and sinuous tangled trees. The architects Victor Horta in Brussels and Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona created buildings and sideboards characterized by swirling undulations suggesting underwater or plant growth. Horta’s celebration of line and light surfaces seen in his combination of glass and cast-iron at the Hotel van Eetvelde of 1895, was shared by Louis Comfort Tiffany of New York, who in the 1880s began to produce lamps, vases and other furnishings of iridescent glass, which hinted at organic movement and growth with their swirling forms and naturalistic motifs such as dragonflies.
Similarly, Art Nouveau sideboards was characterized by swirling lines and attenuated shapes, and suggestions of such light, natural forms as curved growing plant stems. Although not a unified international movement, the flowing tendencies of the Art Nouveau style were expressed by European sideboards designers including the German Richard Reimerschmird, the Italians Carlo Bugatti and Pietro Fenoglio, the Belgian Henry van de Velde and the Frenchmen Hector Guimard, Emile GaIIe, Pierre Chareau and Louis Majorelle. These designers generally achieved decorative effects through a careful integration of form and surface ornament; rich woods, such as cherry, walnut and mahogany, were flatly carved with decorative rounded panels, whiplash curves and swirling ormolu mounts.
The carved sideboards of Louis Majorelle was exceptionally successful; the cabriole legs he used show the influence of earlier Louis styles, but the attenuated, stretched shapes of his desks and cabinets exhibit a greater freedom and lightness. The rounded, slightly trapezoidal panels and drawers of pieces by Jacques Gruber, and the flowing continuity of line joining crest rail and stiles in the chairs of Pierre Chareau and Sue et Mare, similarly manifested the natural integration of form that defined the Art Nouveau sideboards.
Although the style declined soon after the turn of the century, its very occurrence freed designers from the series of revivals into which the preceding era had been bound. The qualities of lightness, tensile strength, and integration of ornament and form Art Nouveau sideboards embodied foreshadowed the approach to sideboards that 20th century designers would take.
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