Arts and Crafts or Art Nouveau? The difference

Arts and Crafts is an English reform movement from the 1860s that wanted to return to honest craftsmanship, with straight oak furniture, visible joints and plant patterns in flat fields. Art Nouveau (jugend) is an international style from around 1890 to 1914 that sought an entirely new world of forms, with winding lines, plants in motion and materials such as bronze, glass and cast iron. Arts and Crafts is mostly about how something is made, Art Nouveau about how it looks.

Facts

Two answers to the same question

Both movements were responses to the same problem: the factories of the 19th century made cheap copies of old styles, and Historicism mixed Gothic, Renaissance and Rococo in the same room. Both Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau wanted something new and drew their forms from nature instead of from the history of styles.

The answers were nevertheless different. Arts and Crafts wanted to return to craftsmanship and to the workshops of the Middle Ages, where the same person both designed and made. Art Nouveau sought a new style for a new age and was happy to call on the help of industry, new materials and costly luxury. They overlap in time and influenced one another, but they can be told apart.

Arts and Crafts: straight, honest and handmade

The movement began with William Morris and the firm he founded in 1861. The furniture was straight, in oak, with visible tenons and simple country forms, like the Morris chair with an adjustable back. The patterns were based on plants and birds, but they were drawn flat and arranged in symmetrical fields; see the guide to William Morris patterns.

C. R. Ashbee founded the Guild of Handicraft in 1888 and made silver with visible hammer marks, and Charles Voysey designed light houses and sparse patterns. In the United States Gustav Stickley made the movement into an industry, with sideboards in quarter-sawn oak and through-tenons. Morris’s home Red House shows the idea of the home as a whole.

Art Nouveau: the line that grows

Art Nouveau was born in Brussels, where Victor Horta began building the Hôtel Tassel in 1893, with ironwork, floors and wall paintings in a single winding line. In Paris Hector Guimard designed metro entrances in cast iron and furniture in which the lines grow like stems, such as his chair in pearwood.

In Nancy Émile Gallé made glass with plants and insects, and Louis Majorelle furniture with water lilies in gilt bronze, such as the water-lily desk. Art Nouveau was often expensive and exclusive, and it did not hesitate to use machines, casting and new materials. The buildings are described in the guide to Art Nouveau in architecture.

The line, the material and the surface

The simplest way to tell them apart is the line. Arts and Crafts is straight and calm: vertical slats, straight legs, rectangular fields. Art Nouveau winds, often in the so-called whiplash line, in which a line swings out and back like a whip. Where Arts and Crafts lays plants flat and symmetrical, Art Nouveau lets them grow and bend.

The materials differ too. Arts and Crafts uses oak, copper, hand-hammered silver and plant-dyed fabrics, and the surface often shows how the object is made, with hammer marks, tenons and wedges. Art Nouveau uses mahogany and exotic woods in marquetry, gilt bronze, etched overlay glass and cast iron, and the surface is polished and seductive.

Where they meet: Glasgow and Vienna

In Glasgow and Vienna the two merged. Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed tall, black chairs, like the chair for Hill House, with straight lines and geometric grids but with the elegance of Art Nouveau. In Vienna the Wiener Werkstätte was founded in 1903 with Ashbee’s workshop as its model and gave Art Nouveau a strictly geometric form; see the guide to the Wiener Werkstätte.

In the Nordic countries the mixture was often vernacular. Carl and Karin Larsson’s home at Sundborn builds on Arts and Crafts ideas, whereas Alf Wallander’s porcelain at Rörstrand is pure Art Nouveau. It is therefore often more rewarding to ask what an object wants than to put a label on it at once.

What to look for: five questions

Is the line straight or winding? Does the surface show how the object is made, with tenons, wedges and hammer marks, or is it smooth and polished? Is the material oak and copper or bronze, glass and exotic woods? Are the plants flat and ordered or in motion? And is the object simple and intended for everyday use, or exclusive and sculptural?

Most objects answer clearly in one direction. More examples can be found under Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau in design history, and Art Nouveau’s path onwards towards Art Deco in the guide to Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

How to recognise it

Exercise

A chair in oak has straight legs, vertical slats and tenons that go through the legs and are visible. Which movement does it probably belong to?