Art Nouveau furniture and design

Furniture created in the Art Nouveau style is characterized by delicate floral motifs and identified by organic shapes and curved lines. At the beginning of the 19th century, before the Art Nouveau period, the lack of art creativity led to eclecticism. Reproduction of the diverse art traditions of the Greek and Italian Renaissance and the use of artistic characteristics of previous centuries were generally usual. Loving imitated old features and the worthless gewgaw was conventional in the creative affairs. At that time, the useless counterfeits were superior to the innovative artistic designs.

The artists whose ideas were beyond the art rules and those who did not conform to art standards were forced to leave their occupation or became obliged to work in the established mainstream.

In this series of articles, you can get a good idea of the various topics about Art Nouveau furniture design, particularly the works of Émile Gallé and François-Rupert Carabin.

Surely you have heard about Émile Gallé, one of the artists of the Art Nouveau movement. He was the founder of the École de Nancy, or the Nancy School, and worked with Louis Majorelle, another famous French decorator and furniture designer. They worked closely with other artists of crafts, glassware and textile artisans.

In the scope of these articles, I shall pay attention to a furniture detail of Maison Losseau, a private house of Léon Losseau. He renovated his house by Paul Saintenoy, who was a Belgian architect. Numerous other decorators and artists, including the workshops of Émile Gallé, contributed to this project.

Afterwards, I shall write briefly about François-Rupert Carabin, a cabinetmaker and sculptor. He combined those two occupations in one style and applied natural sculptural forms as symbolic elements in interior design.

Text: Lalerou
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Now let’s read more about these artists and their furniture design, as I mentioned above: