HORTA

BELGIAN ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER

Born: January 6, 1861 - Ghent, Belgium

Died: September 8, 1947 - Brussels, Belgium

Movements and Styles: Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern Architecture

Horta is famous for his pioneering work in Art Nouveau and the translation of the style from the
decorative arts into architecture in the early 1890s. Horta's inventiveness with Art Nouveau helped to
make it something of a national style in Belgium by 1900 before its swift demise in advance of World
War I.

Horta's work in Art Nouveau is marked by a keen understanding of the capabilities of industrial advances
with iron and glass as structure and infill. Horta's buildings disclose an honest handling of their
materials' properties, particularly the ability of iron to be twisted and bent into hairpin forms that
extend seamlessly into the accompanying décor, inside and out, making the buildings "total works of
art."

Horta was an adaptable architect who transitioned from Art Nouveau to other styles such as Art Deco as
public tastes dictated. Though Horta was respected during his lifetime for his brilliance with Art
Nouveau, he himself predicted the style's own demise and that many of his works would be demolished
eventually.

Hôtel Tassel, Brussels

The Tassel House, often cited as the first Art Nouveau building. In this townhouse for one of his typical
professional clients from the 1890s - in this case, one of his colleagues at the Université Libre de
Bruxelles - Horta fuses the twin themes of nature and industry almost seamlessly.

As with many of Horta's famed Art Nouveau residences, the heart of the building is the central stair hall,
almost a foregone conclusion given the narrow urban lots that Horta was dealt for these commissions.
Here, the emphasis is on structure, which Horta makes frankly clear in the dull green iron columns that
anchor the space. The thin posts blossom into a tangle of tendrils and vine-like twists at their crown,
which then blend with the vines evident in the mosaic floor and the stenciled whiplash curves of the
plants on the wall surfaces. They are further echoed in the forms of the chandeliers that descend from
the ceiling with flower-petal-shaped shades. The effect is that the exterior natural world (largely
excluded from the tight-knit urban fabric of Brussels) is now permanently brought inside, with the
soothing hues of green, orange, and yellow providing a respite from the bustling noise of the street.
The stair hall is plainly visible on the exterior, with a riveted green iron I-beam serving as its foundation
above the recessed main entrance before blossoming into a luminous set of stained glass windows
containing the blues of water and pinks of flowering plants. In this way Horta creates a subtle play
between nature and industry, with each complementing each other as essential components of the
building.

Stone, glass, iron, wood

HECTOR GUIMARD
FRENCH ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER

Born: 10 March 1867 - Lyons, France

Died: 20 May 1942 - New York, New York, USA

Movements and Styles: Art Nouveau, Modern Architecture

Guimard is by far the best-known French Art Nouveau architect, to the extent that in some French
circles Art Nouveau was referred to as "Style Guimard," a moniker promoted by Guimard himself. His
work is easy to distinguish amongst other practitioners of the style, with plastic, abstracted and
sometimes bizarre vegetal and floral imagery in iron, glass, and carved stone that is usually twisted and
bent into irregular and asymmetrical forms.

Though well-educated at the École nationale des arts décoratifs, and familiar with many of the leading
French architectural theorists, Guimard attended but did not receive a diploma from the École des
Beaux-Arts as was the norm for most French academic architects at the end of the 19th century, and
was often thought of during his lifetime as outside the mainstream of architectural practice.

Guimard's work has recently been discovered to be rather political - particularly pacifist and socialist.
The strange forms in his architecture are intended to function as great kinds of social levelers, favoring
no social or economic class above any other in terms of their familiarity or ability to be interpreted. As a
result, they also constitute a step towards artistic abstraction, one of the great developments of 20th-
century modernism.

Guimard's Paris Métro entrances are his signature work and classic emblems of Art Nouveau, which
combine the movement's embrace of nature as well as the advances of technology, standardization, and
modernization. Their sinuous, unusual forms stand out against the typical street environments, making
them ideal for their functions, and they have become worldwide icons for mass transit design.

Humbert de Romans Concert Hall and School, Paris (1897-1901)

One of the commissions that Guimard received in the wake of the success of the Castel Beranger was a
combination concert hall and parochial school complex in the 16th arrondissement conceived by the
Dominican monk known as Père Lavy, intended to be ready in time for the Exposition Universelle in
1900. Here again Guimard did not disappoint. The lavish building was a tour-de-force of Guimard's
creative powers, with sinuous arabesques covering the surfaces and structures, creating a continuous
sense of movement and animation for the visitor. The heart of the structure was the octagonal concert
hall, with a vaulted roof structure of iron and abundant mahogany paneling, accented by colored glass
of yellow and orange whose effect in modulating the interior natural light must have been spectacular.
The auditorium, focused around a hexagonal stage with room for 100 musicians and 120 choristers,
contained a massive organ. It could seat an audience of 1150 people - one of only two venues in Paris to
accommodate that many spectators - on chairs designed by Guimard with a twisted, mass-produced
iron frame, all painted green with luxurious embroidered cushions monogrammed "HR." Guimard even
consulted noted composer Camille Saint-Saens on the hall's design, producing magnificent acoustic
effects.

Sadly, the structure was doomed probably from its conception, as Père Lavy was admonished by his
superiors for commissioning a building so lavish, whose purpose was viewed as suspect as it appeared to
be devoted to secular rather than church functions (the building contained no noticeable religious
iconography, nor except for its name did it hint at having a religious purpose). Its construction required a
huge amount of expensive materials, including marble, along with the stained glass and ample
quantities of mahogany, and was a financial disaster. One month after the dedication on 9 November
1901, Père Lavy left Paris, reassigned by his superiors to Constantinople. The building struggled to turn a
profit as a concert venue and was sold at auction in 1904; its new owners demolished it soon after and
replaced it with a tennis court.

Gustav Klimt
AUSTRIAN PAINTER

Born: July 14, 1862 - Baumgarten, Austro-Hungarian Empire

Died: February 6, 1918 - Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire

Klimt first achieved acclaim as a decorative painter of historical scenes and figures through his many
commissions to embellish public buildings. He continued to refine the decorative qualities so that the
flattened, shimmering patterns of his nearly-abstract compositions, what is now known as his "Golden
Phase" works, ultimately became the real subjects of his paintings.

Though a "fine art" painter, Klimt was an outstanding exponent of the equality between the fine and
decorative arts. Having achieved some of his early success by painting within a greater architectural
framework, he accepted many of his best-known commissions that were designed to complement other
elements of a complete interior, thereby creating a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Later in his
career, he worked in concert with artists of the Wiener Werkstätte, the Austrian design organization
that aimed to improve the quality and visual appeal of everyday objects.

Klimt was one of the most important founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897, and served as its initial
president, though he was chosen less for his completed oeuvre - relatively small at that point - than his
youthful personality and willingness to challenge authority. His forcefulness and international fame as
the most famous Art Nouveau painter contributed much to the Secession's early success - but also the
movement's swift fall from prominence when he left it in 1905.

Although Klimt's art is now widely popular, it was neglected for much of the 20th century. His works for
public spaces provoked a storm of opposition in his own day, facing charges of obscenity due to their
erotic content, eventually causing Klimt to withdraw from government commissions altogether. His
drawings are no less provocative and give full expression to his considerable sexual appetite.

Despite his fame and generosity in mentoring younger artists, including Egon Schiele and Oskar
Kokoschka, Klimt produced virtually no direct followers and his work has consistently been regarded as
highly personal and singular, even up to the present day. However, his paintings share many formal and
thematic characteristics with the Expressionists and Surrealists of the interwar years, even though many
of them may not have been familiar with Klimt's art.

1888-89

The Auditorium of the Old Burgtheater

This was an important commission for Klimt's early career: the Vienna city council asked Klimt and his
partner Franz Matsch to paint images of the old Burgtheater, the city's opera house - built in 1741 and
slated for demolition after its replacement was finished in 1888 - as a record of the theater's existence.
Unlike Matsch's counterpart to this picture, which shows the stage of the Burgtheater from a seat in the
auditorium, Klimt's treatment does the exact opposite - a strange choice, but one that is quite significant
architecturally, as it shows the full arrangements of loges and auditorium floor seats along with the
ceiling decoration. It is typical of the academic style of Klimt's early work, and of the influence on him of
Hans Makart.

When word of this commission was leaked to the public, many people begged Klimt to insert their
portraits, however small, into the picture through special sittings with the artist, as being immortalized
on canvas as a regular attendee at the Burgtheater constituted a tangible emblem of one's social status.
As a result, the painting serves not only as a valuable record of the theater's architecture, but also
essentially as a catalog of the city's political, cultural, and economic elites - over 150 individuals in all.
Among the audience members are Austria's Prime Minister; Vienna's Mayor; the surgeon Theodor
Billroth; the composer Johannes Brahms; and the Emperor's mistress, the actress Katherina Schratt.
Though the subject is appropriate for a history painting, its dimensions (the width, its longest side,
measures less than 37 inches) are diminutive, making the precision of Klimt's individual portraits all the
more impressive. Critics at the time agreed, as Klimt was awarded the coveted Emperor's Prize in 1890
for this painting, which significantly raised his profile within the Viennese art community, and a flurry of
other important public commissions for buildings on the Ringstrasse soon followed.
Gouache on paper - The Historical Museum of Vienna