Art Nouveau: Art, Design, Modernity in Paris 1889-1914

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7

Art Nouveau, long in the domain of collectors and student posters, is often thought of as a 'decorative' style of whiplash curves and enticing, long-tressed maidens. More recently, historians of culture have re-examined what it meant to produce a 'new art' in Paris on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This option will explore the ways in which Art Nouveau challenged, as well as sustained, myths of Paris as the international centre of glamour and modernity.

The approach is interdisciplinary, ranging across the visual arts and literature. Questions of national identity, changing patterns of consumption, and issues of representation and gender are examined in order to better understand the role of art during these years. At the dawn of the twentieth century, innovations in fine art and design were often prompted by political and scientific developments. These included the rise of the 'new woman' and the evolving new sciences of the psyche (including Jean-Martin Charcot's famous studies on female hysteria). In order to explore these issues in more detail, we will study the work of artists such as Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard and Rodin, the dances of Loie Fuller, and the rise of the department store (in Zola's novel Ladies' Delight). Then, as now, the 'new' could prove threatening, as French eighteenth-century art and the photographs of Eugene Atget will be explored as instances of reaction against the rapidly modernising city.