Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau was a world-wide artistic fashion which deeply affected the whole spectrum of the arts in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the early years of this century. It sought to finalize the break with the academicism of traditional art, to raise the status of design and to place art within the realm of daily life. In doing so it provided many of the prototypes for the art of an industrial society, and it was the springboard for some of the most important artistic movements in the twentieth century, such as Expressionism, Futurism, and the International Style in architecture.