Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History

Cinema by Design

FILM AND CULTURE SERIES

FILM AND CULTURE

A series of Columbia University Press

EDITED BY JOHN BELTON

What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

HENRY JENKINS

Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle

MARTIN RUBIN

Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II

THOMAS DOHERTY

Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy

WILLIAM PAUL

Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s

ED SIKOV

Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema

REY CHOW

The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman

SUSAN M. WHITE

Black Women as Cultural Readers

JACQUELINE BOBO

Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film

DARRELL WILLIAM DAVIS

Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema

RHONA J. BERENSTEIN

This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age

GAYLYN STUDLAR

Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond

ROBIN WOOD

The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music

JEFF SMITH

Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture

MICHAEL ANDEREGG

Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934

THOMAS DOHERTY

Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity

JAMES LASTRA

Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts

BEN SINGER

Series list continues on page 267

Cinema by Design

ART NOUVEAU, MODERNISM, AND FILM HISTORY

By Lucy Fischer

Columbia University Press

New York, NY

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54422-1

Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Cinema by Design is on file at the Library of Congress under LCCN 2016050676.

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Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Cover image: © Photofest

To my husband Mark and my sister Madeleine who accompanied me on many Art Nouveau pilgrimages around the world and made those experiences richer, happier, and more meaningful.

If film must equal the other arts, it is by seeking the same degree of beauty.

—Claude Chabrol, The Taste for Beauty, trans. Carol Volk (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Art Nouveau and the Age of Attractions

2 Art Nouveau and American Fidlm of the 1920s: Prestige, Class, Fantasy, and the Exotic

3 Architecture and the City: Barcelona, Gaudí, and the Cinematic Imaginary

4 Art Nouveau, Chambers of Horror, and The Jew in the Text

5 Art Nouveau, Patrimony, and the Art World

Epilogue: The 1960s and the Art Nouveau Revival

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Illustrations

FIGURES

I.1 Grill on the facade of the Güell Palace

I.2 Detail from the facade of the Musée de L’École de Nancy

I.3 Detail from Mary Watts’s Mortuary Chapel in Compton, England

I.4 Closing title card from Lois Weber’s Suspense (1910)

I.5 Bar scene in Jean Durand’s Zigoto’s Outing with Friends (1912)

1.1 Poster for Thomas Edison’s Vitascope

1.2 Scene from The Wonderful Mirrors (1907)

1.3 Scene from The Living Flowers (1908)

1.4 Scene from Japanese Butterflies (1908)

1.5 Scene from Tales of Hoffman (1951)

1.6 Scene from The Red Specter (1907)

1.7 Sala Mercè

1.8 Scene from Beauty’s Worth (1922)

1.9 Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)

2.1 Poster for L’Atlantide designed by Manuel Orazi

2.2 Scene from Male and Female (1919)

2.3 Scene from The Affairs of Anatol (1921)

2.4 Scene from The Affairs of Anatol (1921)

2.5 Scene from The Affairs of Anatol (1921)

2.6 Scene from Camille (1921)

2.7 Scene from Salome (1922)

2.8 Scene from Salome (1922)

2.9 Scene from Salome (1922)

2.10 Scene from Salome (1922)

2.11 Scene from Madame Peacock (1920)

2.12 Scene from The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

2.13 Scene from The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

2.14 Scene from The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

2.15 Set from The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

3.1 Scene from The Passenger (1975)

3.2 Scene from The Passenger (1975)

3.3 Scene from The Passenger (1975)

3.4 Opening title of Costa Brava (1995)

3.5 Scene from Costa Brava (1995)

3.6 Scene from Gaudí Afternoon (2001)

3.7 Title design for Gaudí Afternoon (2001)

4.1 1920 British film poster by Aubrey Hammond

4.2 Scene from The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

4.3 Mucha-inspired female bust in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

4.4 Lost pendant in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

4.5 Vulnavia (Virginia North) in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

4.6 Personal bookplate designed by Ephraim Moses Lilien

4.7 Exterior of a house in Deep Red (1975)

4.8 Scene from Deep Red (1975)

4.9 Fresco on an apartment wall in The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)

4.10 Scene from Om Shanti Om (2007)

5.1 Scene from Uncovered (1994)

5.2 Apartment building in Uncovered (1994)

5.3 Desk in Summer Hours (2008)

5.4 Scene from Summer Hours (2008)

5.5 Silver tray in Summer Hours (2008)

5.6 Scene from Summer Hours (2008)

5.7 Olivier Assayas in Inventory (2008)

5.8 Facade of Louis Sullivan’s National Farmer’s Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota

5.9 Modernist costumes in Klimt (2006)

5.10 Opening title of Klimt (2006)

5.11 Images of Klimt’s models on swings in his studio in Klimt (2006)

E.1 Restored room in a modern home in Hibernatus (1969)

E.2 Restored room in a modern home in Hibernatus (1969)

E.3 Title from What’s New Pussycat? (1965)

E.4 Villa in What’s New Pussycat? (1965)

E.5 Stained-glass front door in What’s New Pussycat? (1965)

E.6 Costume from What’s New Pussycat? (1965)

E.7 Pepperland in Yellow Submarine (1968)

PLATES

1 Bottle by Émile Gallé

2 Pallas Athene by Gustav Klimt

3 Poster for Job cigarette papers by Alphonse Mucha

4 Tiffany lamp

5 Georges Fouquet’s jewelry shop designed by Alphonse Mucha

6 Metempsychosis

7 New Amsterdam Theatre

8 Dress by Lucile

9 Rookwood peacock vase

10 The Adventures of Prince Achmed

11 Costume by Léon Bakst

12 The Thief of Bagdad

13 Tuschinski Theater

14 Program for the Tuschinski Theater

15 Brooch by Lluis Masriera

16 Palau de la Música

17 The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears

18 Lalique figurine

19 Sullivan’s Banks

20 Klimt

21 Poster by Wes Wilson

22 Yellow Submarine

Acknowledgments

As always with a scholarly project that ranges over many years, there are numerous people and institutions to thank for their help. At the University of Pittsburgh, I would like express my gratitude for Dean N. John Cooper who gave me a special research fund for work on this book that made travel and scholarly related purchases possible. I would also like to thank Ronald Linden of the European Union Center of Excellence for grants that funded travel abroad to visit museums and architectural sites in various countries. Similarly, the University Center for International Studies helped offset the price for the rights of various images that I needed to purchase from museums and private sources to illustrate the book, as well as the subvention cost of including a color insert in the volume. As always, I wish to thank my chair Don Bialostosky for additional funds that were granted to me through the department of English that helped me attend conferences at which I could present my work and receive feedback. Jennifer Florian, Film Studies administrative assistant, has assisted me with this project as with so many in the past—helping to keep track of my grant finances, processing my travel arrangements, handling reimbursements, scanning hordes of materials, and making sure that my unruly arsenal of library books was returned in a timely fashion. I would also like to thank my research assistant Matthew Carlin who helped to assemble bibliographies, locate print materials, check and format footnotes, proofread copy, and format images. I am grateful for the feedback that I received from film studies colleagues in response to various talks that I presented at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Birkbeck, University of London. Finally, I would like to thank Jon Lewis who invited me to edit and contribute to a book on art direction and production design for Rutgers University Press; a section of chapter 3 is derived from the first chapter of that volume.

At Columbia University Press, I wish to thank Jennifer Crewe, director and president, for her assistance squiring the manuscript through the approval process with the board, as well as to express my respect and appreciation for Series Editor John Belton. Furthermore, Jonathan Fiedler was a tremendous help in making sure that my materials were in proper shape for submission. And Paul Vincent assisted with the laborious task of copy editing.

Finally, I would like to thank my family for providing the love, calm, and support that makes all else possible. My husband Mark Wicclair has always been a champion of my career, beginning with my decision to pursue doctoral studies. I am indebted as well to my sister Madeleine Fish, who (like Mark) accompanied me on numerous European trips in which Art Nouveau was on the agenda (whether they wanted it to be or not). My son David Wicclair and his wife Brandi Leigh Wicclair provide continuing joy that rounds out my life.

Introduction

The emergence of cinema was part of the euphoria of modernity.

—Viva Paci, The Attraction of the Intelligent Eye

This is a book based upon a passion and a hunch. The passion is for the oft-maligned style known as Art Nouveau; and the hunch is that the form has an intriguing but unacknowledged relation to film history. My passion began during the Art Nouveau revival of the 1960s and 1970s when I found myself buying reproduction jewelry (without knowing the style it represented), and treasuring a set of coasters I received that were emblazoned with Alphonse Mucha poster images. This fervor continued as I became an aficionado of flea markets and found myself collecting antique Art Nouveau jewelry and artifacts (candlesticks, matchbox holders, trays, and vases). My hunch about Art Nouveau and film followed from my prior work on Art Deco and the cinema ¹ (a bond that has been more established in film studies). I thought to pursue the study of design and film one generation further back—to the turn of the twentieth century. However, in searching the indexes and tables of contents of countless volumes on the subject, I found only a scant mention of Art Nouveau.

On the one hand, this was discouraging and made me think that, perhaps, my intuition was unfounded. On the other, it piqued my academic interest and my hope that I might be the first to give the movement its due. This initiated a scavenger hunt—for cinematic traces, remains, hints, and fragments of the historic trend. And while I feel this study will prove my original instinct sound, I have learned why references to Art Nouveau in film studies have been so hard to find. The movement’s presence is often partial or obscured; its account, scattered and elliptical; and its reputation, dubious—having often been relegated to the art historical abject.

Curiously, during the period in which I wrote this book, certain Art Nouveau artifacts (both fictional and real) have garnered oblique attention. Perhaps most noteworthy has been the 2012 publication of The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Anne-Marie O’Connor.² It is a novelization of actual events involving a Viennese Jewish woman whose 1907 portrait was confiscated by the Nazis and subsequently hung in Vienna’s Belvedere Museum. In 2006, after a long legal battle, it was returned to one of Bloch-Bauer’s relatives who sold it to the Neue Galerie in New York City where it is now exhibited. Then in 2015, a feature film, The Woman in Gold (directed by Simon Curtis), was released that concerned the same historical events, bringing additional notice to Art Nouveau. With this reconsideration, however, has come the usual dismissal of the style. Writing about the Klimt painting’s debut at the Neue Galerie in April 2015, Ken Johnson describes its subject as constituting a "fin de siècle decadent dreamer. Furthermore, he opines: For all its optical dazzle and dreamy poetry … [the painting] is not one of the most exciting … of modern times. Flattened to the point of suffocation by its decorative excess, its erotic appeal chastely muted, it has a fusty, languid feeling. Were it not for what happened to it years after its completion, the work would not be nearly so famous as it is today."³ Clearly, his characterization of the painting as suffocating, excessive, and fusty maligns the Art Nouveau style in general.

In 2014 another novel was published that touched on Art Nouveau and the Holocaust. Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure concerns a foray into the forgotten history of Hungarian Jews occasioned by a young woman’s quest for the origins of an antique Art Nouveau locket bequeathed to her. It is a journey that raises questions of inheritance and the reclamation of the spoils of World War II.⁴ Interestingly, the moment that her grandfather gives her the jewelry is tinged by ambivalence. She had previously borrowed the locket to wear on her wedding day, but that union has subsequently dissolved. Waldman describes the scene of gifting as follows: [Her grandfather] weighed the cinched pouch of velvet in his hand … then … tipped the contents of the pouch into his palm. He caught hold of the gold chain. The gold-filigreed pendant dangled. It bore the image, in vitreous enamel, of a peacock, a perfect gemstone staring from the tip of each painted feather. She flinched when she saw it, as if it were not a pretty little art nouveau bauble but something hideous to contemplate.⁵ Finally, years earlier than these recent works, the film Titanic (1997, directed by James Cameron) highlighted the search for an Art Nouveau object—a butterfly hair comb worn by the youthful Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), then returned to her as an old woman, retrieved from the shipwreck. The comb was such a popular item for fans of the movie that replicas of it were made and sold to the public. Here is how the screenplay describes the moment that the elderly Rose rediscovers her vanished treasure, now corroded by the salty ocean: Rose picks up an ornate art-nouveau HAIR COMB. A jade butterfly takes flight on the ebony handle of the comb. She turns it slowly, remembering. We can see that Rose is experiencing a rush of images and emotions that have lain dormant for eight decades as she handles the butterfly comb.⁶

Like the lost and tainted Art Nouveau objects that circulate in these novels and films, the style itself has often lain dormant and disregarded within the fields of art history and film studies. Perhaps the latter neglect should not have surprised me since the topic of design and cinema has received little attention as media studies has matured. Hopefully, this is beginning to be addressed by the publication of such recent books as my own edited collection Art Direction and Production Design.⁷ The discounting of this field has occurred for a variety of reasons. First, design fits into the vague and unwieldy category of art direction, which can include such diverse crafts as set construction, decoration, model building, sculpture, coloration, and special effects. Second, while design is a visible aspect of the cinematic text, its production history is frequently murky, unavailable, or buried in memoirs, interviews, and archives. Third, film studies has not generally paid much heed to the links between cinema and art, favoring instead its connections to literature, theater, social history, and popular culture.⁸ Finally, in the film studies literature, questions of design have often been subsumed under broader considerations of mise-en-scène (when theorists can agree on what the term means). Such discussions frequently devalue aesthetic elements to emphasize questions of narrative, symbolism, theme, and ideology. Perhaps it is time to question that approach. Here I am reminded of relevant statements by two contemporary theorists. Writing in Mythologies, Roland Barthes opines: Less terrorized by the spectre of ‘formalism,’ historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principles of totality and History. On the contrary: the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.⁹ Similarly, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith asserts that films mean. But they do not just mean.… Too many things that films do evade attempts to subsume them under the heading of meaning.… [It is] time to consider a return to theories of the aesthetics thoughtlessly cast aside a quarter of a century ago.¹⁰

SETTING THE SCENE: AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT

Art Nouveau was a European trend in the applied arts that germinated in England, burgeoned in Belgium, and flourished in France and elsewhere.¹¹ Some have marked the date of its ascendancy as 1895 with a group that coalesced around Parisian art dealer and connoisseur Siegfried Bing, whose shop was called L’Art Nouveau.¹² The movement peaked between 1900 and 1905 and thrived until the start of World War I. Referencing the Great War, Walter Benjamin writes that the movement was like a dream of being awake¹³ that emerged fifteen years before history woke [it] with a bang.¹⁴

While the term derives from its French incarnation, the movement had branches in numerous other countries. In Germany, it was known as Jugendstil; in Austria, Secession; in England and Italy, the Liberty Style; in Scotland, the Glasgow Style, and in Spain, Modernisme. As Patrick Bade says (invoking, in ironic terms, the movement’s international currency), "like some kind of bacillus Art Nouveau spread from place to place."¹⁵ Despite its various national iterations, as Dolf Sternberger remarks, it was a single formal universe that [was] continuous and interwoven.¹⁶ Though unified, Sternberger argues that the movement bracketed numerous contradictions—having both positive and negative aspects. To separate these elements, however, and to attribute them to different trends or phases of development, would be to lose sight of the profound and fertile ambiguity that both attracts and disturbs us.¹⁷

As for the movement’s unsettling features, its appearance was often met with xenophobic hostility. For instance, in Germany it was also called the Belgian tape-worm style.¹⁸ Despite his love for the form, Bade’s use of the term bacillus to describe Art Nouveau’s international migration signals that, in the style’s devotion to aesthetic display, visual excess, and sensory gratification, it was often considered the bête noire of high modernism—the trend one loved to hate. I hope to counter this aesthetic position and argue for Art Nouveau’s central place within the history of the avant-garde.

While the various strains of Art Nouveau were certainly not identical, they did share certain thematic, iconographic, and stylistic patterns—as filtered through diverse traditions (Jugendstil and Arts and Crafts, for instance, were more restrained and minimalist than French Art Nouveau). In addition to linking various contemporaneous design schools, Art Nouveau also drew on important predecessors. In France, it borrowed from Rococo and Baroque styles as well as the Decadent and Symbolist movements, and in England from the Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite groups. The movement’s influences went further afield both temporally and nationally to the Gothic, Japanese, Islamic, and Celtic modes. Nonetheless, it sought to break away from Classicism and Historicism. As Silvius Paoletti wrote in 1902: To take the place of pitiless authoritarianism, rigid and regal magnificence, burdensome and undecorated display, we have delicate and intimate refinement, fresh freedom of thought, the subtle enthusiasm for new and continued sensations.¹⁹ Similarly, John Heskett asserts: A common feature [of the movement] was the intention to create wholly new forms representative of the age, and it thus marked a significant rejection of the constant reference to historical precedent which dominated nineteenth century visual culture.²⁰

STYLE, THEMES, AND TROPES

Whiplash Curve

On a formal level, Art Nouveau was famous for the so-called whiplash curve—an intricate, sinuous, dynamic line that countered staid linearity (see figure I.1).

This serpentine involution²¹ (or what György M. Vajda has called an arching, undulating, wave)²² can be seen, most famously, in the scrolled ironwork for the 141 Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard (only three of which, regrettably, survive). The system opened in 1900 in conjunction with the Paris Exposition, an event that heralded Art Nouveau’s arrival.²³ It seems significant that Art Nouveau, which some have seen as the first modernist movement, is linked to the new urban technology of the subway. Supposedly, Salvador Dalí said (by way of a compliment) that, through Guimard’s portals, one descend[s] into the region of the subconscious.²⁴ The whiplash curve is also apparent in the floor and wall designs of Victor Horta’s groundbreaking Hôtel Tassel (1893) in Brussels, and in the tangled, windblown hair of the woman in Charles-Émile Jonchery’s bronze bust, The Wind Blows (c. 1900).

I.1  This grill on the facade of the Güell Palace by Antoni Gaudí incorporates Art Nouveau’s iconic whiplash curve. Photograph by Lucy Fischer.

Using psychoanalytic language, historian Klaus-Jürgen Sembach sees the whiplash curve as a sublimation of how every area of life seemed [then] to have been set in motion.²⁵ On a similar note, Albert Valbert talks of how, in the modern era, people were not solely complicated beings but agitated ones as well.²⁶ Furthermore, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin writes in 1927 of living in: a mobile age, in an age of shifting and change.… Objects and values incessantly move with a mad rapidity, shift, turn round, clash, struggle, appear, disappear, diffuse, without a moment of rest and stability.²⁷ Art Nouveau’s dynamic curve was also tied to the era’s modern dance—most notably, the choreography of Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan.²⁸ While Art Nouveau’s curves were graceful, their overlapping, interlocking swirls could also connote perversity and entrapment—indicative of the movement’s bipolar sensibility. (In contrast, it seems no accident that phrases associated with unwavering lines signify moral righteousness: straight-laced, straight and narrow, and straightforward). In favoring the curvilinear, Art Nouveau also took inspiration from the Islamic architectural arabesque which was used in the exotic gate (designed by René Binet) that served as the entrance for the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Clearly, the movement’s love of the whiplash curve was an aspect of its commitment to emphatic decoration—a trait that was subject to much censure. A columnist for the New York Times in 1921, for instance, critiques Art Nouveau’s superfluous ornamentation and unnecessary lines which create disturbing vibrations.²⁹ However, Surrealist André Breton appreciated this element, writing that in Art Nouveau: we find … discordance in the details; the … impossibility of repetition … [the] delight in the never-ending curve (whether it be the growing fern or ammonite, or embryonic curl); the … profusion of minutiae, the contemplation of which seduces the eye away from pleasure in the whole.… From one point to another, in terms of plastic design, down to the very smallest feature, it is the triumph of the equivocal; in terms of interpretation, down to the most insignificant detail, it is the triumph of the complex.³⁰ In Breton’s final phrase, we are reminded of Ben Singer’s notion that one of the major features of modernity was sensory complexity and intensity.³¹

While some reduce such Art Nouveau features as the whiplash curve to mere surface embellishment, throughout this book they will be read for their deeper meaning. Even Siegfried Kracauer, who attacked the ornament as an end in itself, admitted that the position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from the epoch’s judgments about itself.³² We take his words to heart.

Nature

The natural world (in all its forms) was a dominant subject in Art Nouveau—especially its vegetative aspects (flowers, vines, trees, plants). Here, from a scientific perspective, one sees the influence of Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist, naturalist, and artist who, in works like The General Morphology of Organisms (1866) and The History of Creation (1868), described and named thousands of new species that he had discovered.³³ Similarly, Swiss botanist and artist Eugène Grasset published a multivolume influential tome entitled The Plant and Its Decorative Applications (c. 1898).³⁴ Art Nouveau’s love of Nature was also influenced by Japanese landscapes and decorative objects, not surprising in an era that first saw the importation of Asian works of art.

Animals, too, were frequently pictured in works of Art Nouveau, especially colorful ones like multihued butterflies, iridescent beetles, or flamboyant peacocks. While these were highly romanticized creatures, others were selected for their disquieting auras—for instance, the bat (as in a 1903–1904 vase by Émile Gallé), the moth (as in a 1905 Daum vase), the snail (as in a Daum vase of 1910), and the spider (as in Tiffany’s web-patterned lamp).³⁵

It was not only high-end Art Nouveau items that bore the stamp of Nature but also more prosaic consumer goods. An In the Shops column from the New York Times of 1904 talks of buckles decorated with nocturnal beings like bats and owls,³⁶ while a similar column from 1902 mentions handkerchiefs decorated with flowers and stems.³⁷ In 1913, a New York Times article talks of Parisian wall coverings whose patterns range from the primmest, stiffest of Art Nouveau flowers, to great sprawling figures of bird, beast, flower and fruit.³⁸

Beyond the opposition of benign and malign organisms, the movement’s interest in Nature was otherwise two-sided. On the one hand, it had a scientific thrust, with many artists utilizing microscopes and subscribing to scholarly journals to assist them in their work. On the other, it bore a spiritual, almost pantheistic, sensibility.³⁹ This tension is apparent in a statue by Ernest Barrias entitled Nature Unveiling Herself to Science (c. 1895) which depicts a woman partially shrouded in cloth.

Clearly, within the scientific realm another influence on Art Nouveau was the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), which gave the animal and vegetable world new prominence.⁴⁰ Particularly interesting was Darwin’s analysis of the role of colorful ornamentation in sexual dynamics. For most creatures, it was the male who displayed such traits to attract a mate; but in human beings, it was the female who exhibited them to entice the male. Clearly, Art Nouveau’s enchantment with decoration aligned with the import of Beauty in both the biological and cultural realms.

In keeping with this, color was emphatic in Art Nouveau compositions. Vajda speaks of its orgy of colors, of the beauty of colors, [and] the dance of the senses.⁴¹ While sometimes associated with a mute palette that came to be known as greenery yallery (and included tones like mustard, sage green, olive green, and brown), this spectrum was frequently offset by richer shades like salmon, lilac, violet, purple, and robin’s egg and peacock blues. One need only think of the stained-glass windows and illuminated lamps produced by Louis Comfort Tiffany (Plate 4), or of the enamel and bejeweled brooches and pendants by Georges Fouquet to recall Art Nouveau’s romance with sumptuous tones. Again, more pedestrian consumer items also reflected the movement’s love of hue. A New York Times