Art Nouveau

Plant-like lines, wrought iron and tiles – a new style without precedents around 1900.

Jugendstil, Art Nouveau or Secession was the attempt to break free from the historical styles. Nature became the model: stems, leaves and waves. Iron was allowed to show and to bend, and architects designed everything from the façade to the door handles as a whole. The style flowered briefly, roughly 1890–1910.

Around 1890 young artists in Brussels, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona and Glasgow wanted to free themselves from the borrowed styles of the academies. Nature and Japanese art became the models, and the aim was to design everything in a building as a unified whole. The style was expensive and demanding of craftsmanship, and it went out of fashion quickly, even before the First World War, but it opened the way for modernism.

Swedish Art Nouveau is often restrained. The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Centralbadet and parts of the stone-built city centres of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Helsingborg have Art Nouveau details in wrought iron, tiles and window shapes.