- Tiles & Styles, Jugendstil & Secession: Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts Design in German and Central European Decorative Tiles, 1895-1935 Hardcover - January 8, 2016By Ken Forster
- Hermann Obrist: Sculpture, Space, and Abstraction around 1900By Museum Bellerive Zürich and State Collection of Prints and Drawings Munich
- Bruno Paul: The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist Hardcover - December 16, 2005By William Owen Harrod
- Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century Paperback - September 9, 2002By Stanford Anderson
Important Art and Artists of Jugendstil
Leather Screen (1887)
This folding screen depicts richly colored poppies and their green curvilinear foliage along a river that, beginning at the lower right, twists sinuously in a tightening whiplash in the upper left and middle panels. The flared petals of the orange blossoms on unrealistically thin and extended tendrils seem to float serenely in the golden space. The asymmetrical composition creates a sense of dynamic movement. Influenced by Japonisme, the screen echoes the gold leaf background of the late 16th-century byōbu of the Kanō School, but it innovatively uses the materials of German crafts. The screen uses leather for the panels, and small gold rivets surround each of the three panels.
Christansen had diverse training, working as a decorative painter and in an interior design shop, studying in Italy and at the Academie Julian in Paris. Influenced by the Nabis, he felt art was a synthesis of nature expressed in personal symbols. At the same time, the artist was increasingly interested in artisan crafts, particularly textiles and graphic design, all of which employed his hallmark bright color.
Andromeda (1898)
With intense almost garish color, influenced by Alphonse Mucha and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, this work depicts a nude Andromeda, entwined by the crimson and green coils of a gigantic sea serpent, against a flame-like background where gold whisps extend in sinuous curves. Depicted in profile, the nude leans almost casually with her left elbow on the creature's back, as her right arm elegantly extends to stroke the back of its neck. Its massive form rising out of the waves in the lower foreground, the serpent makes an s-curve through the pictorial plane, and its head, with green glowing eyes, faces away from the viewer. Reconfiguring the classical Greek myth of the princess rescued by the hero Perseus when she was left to be sacrificed to a sea monster that was terrorizing her city, the image's overall effect is erotic, suggesting feminine power to seduce and command. Out of the background flames, the title of Die Jugend forms at the top, showing the artist's innovative approach to typography.
Christiansen's use of color and his hand-letter fonts were distinctive additions to Jugendstil, and his images, frequently depicting beautiful women, often appeared in Die Jugend. An early member of the Darmstadt Art Colony, he was known for his versatility, as he worked in a wide variety of applied arts, saying, "I take my work as an artist as general as possible."
Der Kuss (The Kiss) (1898)
This color print, showing a couple in profile kissing, accentuates the whiplash curves of their intertwining and voluptuous tresses, and as art historian Peter Raissis wrote, it "not only conveys the intensity of the lovers' abandonment in each other but also seems to suggest the ancient understanding of the kiss as an intermixing and exchanging of souls."
Behrens' image reflects the influence of Symbolism, as seen in Edvard Munch's painting The Kiss (1897), but rather than reflecting that work's emotional ambivalence, described by art historian Reinhold Heller as conveying a "loss of individuality, a loss of one's own existence and identity," this image creates feeling of oneness. The figures become androgynous, and the curving lines of their eyebrows, chins, and lips flow into one another. The image moves away from representation by depicting the lovers as disembodied heads and emphasizes the pure flat pattern. Behrens' work also reflected the continuing tradition of the woodcut, a distinctive element of German art dating back to the Renaissance, which raised graphic art to the level of fine art. Appearing in a 1898 issue of Pan, the image pioneered a central motif of Jugendstil that became influential outside of Germany, as seen in the Austrian Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss (1907-08).