The Art Nouveau Revolution – Poster Art in the Golden Age

Prefiguring the revolution of Art Nouveau, the reform-spirited sculptors, designers, graphic artists, painters and architects of the Arts and Crafts movement—whose standard-bearers were the British John Ruskin and William Morris—attempted to do away with the boundaries between fine and applied art. As a response to such phenomena of the second half of the 19th century as rapid industrialization, heightened urbanization and the decline in the quality of goods, they proposed to revitalize traditional artisanship. The need to fuse fine and applied art in different media rose across Europe, and during the period from the 1880s to the eve of the First World War, Art Nouveau became an international and greatly influential movement, whether the distinctive, innovative style was called Secession,
Jugendstil, modernisme, modernismo, szecesszió, stile Floreale, stile Liberty or Skønvirke. The means of expression favoured by its practitioners were stylization, ornamentation, decorative vegetal and natural shapes, the motifs
of folk art and flat representation. The new paradigm dramatically reshaped architecture, the design of furniture and jewellery, fashion, glass art, painting, printmaking and applied graphic art. The emergence and widespread use
of a new type of high-pressure printing technology, lithography, was key to the appearance of artistic advertising posters. The lithographic process made it possible to print multicolour advertising material in large quantities.
Japanese visual art—in particular woodcuts and illustrations—was very popular in Europe from the fourth decade of the 19th century and had a decisive influence on poster art. In Paris, at the heart of the new art of the poster, the
walls and advertising pillars in the city centre became inundated by the result of industrial production and growing competition: the thousands of vivid advertisements that promoted different products or forms of entertainment.
The posters of Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset or Alphonse Mucha conveyed the exuberance and pulsation of nature with curved shapes, stylized floral patterns, idealized female figures and symbolic formations.
The new, unconventional trend in poster art reached Hungary by the turn of the century. The period after the Millennial Celebrations of 1896 saw a profusion of posters that broke with historicizing and academic approaches and waived the use of light and shadow effects and classical perspective. In addition to the flat motifs of lush vegetation, the artistic posters owed their decorativeness to a catchy, humorous quality familiar from newspaper illustrations and caricatures and sensual female figures with some mystical or symbolic function.
The exhibition is based mostly on a selection from the international poster art collection of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts’ Library, Archives and Art Collection, which was catalogued in 2001. Along with works by such key figures
of poster art as Eugène Grasset, Bruno Paul and Alphonse Mucha, we are proud to present masterpieces by Ferenc Helbing, József Rippl-Rónai and Géza Faragó, courtesy of the Poster and Small Print Collection of the National Széchényi Library. Also, we draw on our own collection to show works of an art nouveau spirit by Károly Ferenczy, Béla Czóbel, Ernő Schubert and Tibor Boromisza.