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Issues of 2008
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The art nouveau buffets
The Art Nouveau style, being florid, over-decorative and to much extent controversial, captured also the field of the man’s household in its surge for stylistic domination. The new style propagated guided by the idea of bringing beautiful into the ordinary life of a man, making it easier and happier. The trend towards aesthetic transformation of everyday life, the one giving each object the status of a piece of art, led to acknowledging the equal value of all the fields of artistic activity, particularly stating the decorative and applied art being on pair with all the other fields of art.
The Art Nouveau architects and painters set the new forms of the decor of the inner space of a house. The easily recognizable original floral pattern of ductile viscous and asymmetric form filled the walls of the houses. The style eagerly absorbed the forms of previous epochs: from the ancient Egyptian and Celtic to the Eastern. The Late Gothic motives were of particular importance. This can be seen, for example, in the designs of the buildings (the Ruskinian Gothic style) by the famous English architect and designer Edward William Godwin (1833–1886). The importance of decorative patterns of Art Nouveau so much prevailed in creating the form of objects that rational essence of ordinary household things was often hidden under a mass of viscously flowing spreading forms. Of course, Art Nouveau, was widely adopted in cabinet-making, because the idea of creating an ordinary household item in form of a piece of art can be put into practice rather easily in the case of furniture. More to it, furniture was long ago acknowledged as a small form of architecture, maximally reflecting the main features of a style. The dining room furniture including its main item of the buffet, or the cupboard, which was a status object for the owner, was of particular importance in the process of introducing the new style. We must specify that speaking about the buffet, we mean a high structure with a china hutch top (usually of more than two meters high) the top part having two, three or four glassed doors, and the lower part comprising a big sideboard with wooden doors and drawers. This piece of furniture features rather conservative and stable principle design. Using its example, we shall consider the stylistic changes brought by the Art Nouveau masters both to such items and to the furniture in general. The researchers distinguish two main streams in the Art Nouveau style: the French one, together with the Czech and Hungarian subdivisions, was of more decorative character, while the German and English branches tended to the constructivist side of Art Nouveau. The buffets created by typical representatives of these two schools illustrate these above described stylistic differences. Victor Horta (January 6, 1861 – September 9, 1947) was a Belgian architect. Horta is one of the most important names in Art Nouveau architecture; the construction of his HÆtel Tassel in Brussels in 1892–1893 means that he is sometimes credited as the first to introduce the style to architecture from the decorative arts.
The main field of the Horta's activity was architecture. After introducing Art Nouveau in an exhibition held in 1892, Horta was inspired. Commissioned to design a home for professor Tassel, he transfused the recent influences into HÆtel Tassel, completed in 1893. Incorporating interior iron structure with curvilinear botanical forms, which was known as «biomorphic whiplash,» and successfully created the first Art Nouveau architecture. Ornate and elaborate designs and natural lighting were concealed behind a stone faÚade to harmonize the building with the more rigid houses next door. However, he was also a furniture designer. The dining room in the memorial house of the famous Belgian Art Nouveau architect features a buffet in the decorative style. The dining room is a wholesome ensemble and the buffet is an architectural dominant of its space. The Russian Art Nouveau was close to the decorative part of this world style, especially to that part of the Russian Art Nouveau which revived some features of ancient and folk Russian decorative style and had the name of the Neo-Russian style. This subtrend was formed in the workshops of the I.S. Mamontov’s estate Abramtsevo and the village Talashkino, the latter belonging to M.K. Tenisheva, who was a patron of arts, a painter and a collector. Streamlined contour, asymmetry, with flattened carved profiles with matt polishing, free composition of decor design and unrestricted approach in the creation of particular elements: all this was characteristic of the Neo-Russian style in furniture. The main motifs of the decor were stylized flowers, floral stems, leaves, etc. Appolinariy Mikhailovich Vasnetsov (1856–1933), a famous Russian painter, was among those creating such furniture including buffets in the Neo-Russian style. When looking for the representatives of the opposite «constructivist» trend of the Art Nouveau style, we find it worthy to remember about the art of the famous Scottish architect and designer, one of the leading representatives of the British Art Nouveau, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The items by Mackintosh also bore some decoration, but very little of it. Also, the Master often turned the form of an item into an element of the decoration of the room space. In his developing rational geometric functional forms, Mackintosh approached the basics of the future style of Art Deco. His style featured a contrast between strong right angles and floral-inspired decorative motifs with subtle curves, e. g. the Mackintosh Rose motif. A buffet in the Japanese style created by the Master in co¬operation with his wife Margaret Macdonald is a proof of all these words about the balance of functionality and decor. The floral images decorating the buffet created an original accent in the plastic design of the item. Here we have to mention the contribution made by Mackintosh into the introduction of the Eastern (especially, the Japanese) culture to the modern European applied art. Mackintosh attended evening classes (in art) at the Glasgow School of Art. It was there that he first met Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances MacDonald and Herbert MacNair. The group of artists, known as «The Four», exhibited in Glasgow, London and Vienna, and these exhibitions helped to establish Mackintosh’s reputation. The so-called «Glasgow» style was exhibited in Europe and influenced the European Art Nouveau movement. The masters creating pieces of furniture of the «constructivist» type tried to reach the maximum unity of the functional and artistic forms. It led to great simplification of created items, sometimes nearly totally eliminating all the «decorative» features of the Art Nouveau style. Such a small buffet (sideboard) was created by the English architect Edward William Godwin in 1870¬s. It is an elegant representative of the «constructivist» trend in Art Nouveau, the one adhering to the principle of «functionality» practically to the maximal height The elegant and light structure of the buffet is practically free from decor and comprises a pure work on the form. These kinds of buffets, however, were exclusive ones. Usually, the expensive pieces of furniture in the «constructivist» style were decorated in an elegant manner, using expensive materials and mounted decorations. The decor included such elements as colored plywood, pearls, ivory, metals and semi¬precious stones. Austria, Germany and England started the production of furniture of the «constructivist» Art Nouveau type on industrial scale. This line of furniture was the predecessor of many achievements of the contemporary furniture design. Pieces of furniture according to the designs by Charles Mackintosh are still being produced. That’s why it is easy to figure that there are namely the items created in frames of the «decorative» trend of the Art Nouveau style, which are more rare today and can be found mainly at antique dealers. Though genuine old items of the «constructive» style are also rather expensive in antique shops. A number of workshops produce today both the «decorative» and «constructive» Art Nouveau style furniture on orders in accordance with original drawings. This results in the not so high level of prices for the pieces of the original Art Nouveau furniture, excluding, may be, only the items by the most prominent authors, theirs masterpieces mainly being kept for already a long period in the major museums of the world.
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