Fin de Siècle Art
Small circles at the close of the nineteenth century that stepped away from realism and official salons toward outline, flatness and suggestion, often founding their own societies.
Dictionary entry
- Vienna Secession 1897–1910s / Style
Tightens organic ornament with geometry and flat composition, erasing the border between art and design.
- Cloisonnism 1888–1895 / Style
A manner of painting named after the partitions of cloisonné enamel: flat fields of colour enclosed by heavy contour lines. It brought the way of seeing of ukiyo-e prints and stained glass into oil painting, abandoning shaded volume in favour of colour laid down from memory. The technique that prepared the flatness of the poster.
- Les Nabis 1888–1900 / Style
A group of painters who called themselves prophets, setting out from the declaration that a picture is essentially a flat surface covered in a certain order. They extended interiors and daily life into decorative panels, lithographs, book illustration and stage design, dissolving the boundary between fine and applied art.
- Symbolism 1886–1910 / Style
An international movement that sought to visualise the inner life through forms and colours suggesting dream, myth and idea, rather than describing the outer world. Blurred contours, closed eyes, ornamentalised plants and emblems are placed as presences whose meaning is never spelled out. It created the vocabulary of fin-de-siècle posters and book decoration.
- Pre-Raphaelite 1848–1900s / Style
An English brotherhood that discarded the formulas established after Raphael and tried to return to the clarity of the early Renaissance. Transparent paint over a white ground made the color uncannily sharp, and because every detail is worked to the same degree, the eye has nowhere to rest.