Style Guide: Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession

An illustrated overview of the style. Available through ProQuest Ebook Central (login required).

.Influenced by Art Nouveau, this movement (created in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, and Josef Hoffmann) was not an anonymous artistic revolution. Defining itself as a "total art", without any political or commercial constraint, the Viennese Secession represented the ideological turmoil that affected craftsmen, architects, graphic artists, and designers from this period.

Scholars in art history, anthropology, political science, history, and feminist media studies explore antimodernism as an artistic response to a perceived sense of loss - in particular, the loss of 'authentic' experience. Embracing the 'authentic' as a redemptive antidote to the threat of unheralded economic and social change, antimodernism sought out experience supposedly embodied in pre-industrialized societies - in medieval communities or 'oriental cultures,' in the Primitive, the Traditional, or Folk. Available through ProQuest Ebook Central (login required).

Argues that Mackintosh's originality was grounded in a highly subjective "poetics of workmanship", in which the structure, features, interiors and furnishings of each individual building became subject to a unifying system of forms, metaphors and unconscious associations. Available through ProQuest Ebook Central (login required).

An illustrated overview of Gallé's life and work. Available through ProQuest Ebook Central (login required).

A survey of Mucha's career, illustrated with over one hundred lustrous images, from early Parisian advertisements and posters for Sandra Bernhardt, to the famous historical murals painted just before his death, at the age of 78, in 1939. Available through ProQuest Ebook Central (login required).