Original subtitles

As the 19th century was drawing to a close,

a luxurious, new style was taking Europe by storm.

This was the fin de siecle,

the glamorous, decadent but also anxious end to the 19th century,

and the style was Art Nouveau.

Merci.

Art Nouveau grew out of the dark, restless energies

of the industrial city.

In the age of Darwin and Freud,

it was fixated with nature, sensuality and sex.

In the space of a decade or so,

Art Nouveau went from being nowhere to everywhere.

Lapped up by the burgeoning middle classes of Europe,

it was mimicked and mass produced.

What began as a revolution in the name of truth, beauty and nature,

ended in derision, decadence and decay.

In this series, I'll be visiting the great cities of Europe,

where the work of visionaries like Emile Galle,

artists like Gustav Klimt and entrepreneurs like Arthur Liberty

blossomed all too briefly.

Paris at the end of the 19th century

loved its bullet-straight boulevards,

its imposing monuments and classically inspired architecture.

But beyond the grandeur, the population had exploded

from half a million to 2.5 million people by 1900.

Those elegant boulevards were gridlocked with horses,

carriages and crowds.

Things needed to change.

The city planners came up with a radical solution.

Le Metro, ladies and gentlemen!

Typically Paris, typically Art Nouveau.

The good citizens of Paris were shocked.

Entrances like bat wings,

sinuous metals, sensuous curves.

It was a bold declaration of the new art for the new century.

The first Metro entrances appeared just in time

for a massive celebration in Paris,

the World Fair of 1900.

It was when the city would show off its cutting-edge new style.

At the heart of the fair were two huge buildings,

standing opposite each other, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais.

This is Le Grand Palais. It's exquisite, isn't it?

It's beautiful, substantial,

one of the biggest and best exhibition spaces

you'll find anywhere in the world, never mind Paris.

You'd love it.

Unfortunately, I'm not going there.

I'm going to Le Petit Palais, the small palace over here.

Perhaps they were boasting to their foreign visitors.

"In France, this, all 16,000 square metres of it,

"is what we call small."

Bonjour. Monsieur Chazal, je m'appelle Stephen.

Merci, monsieur.

'Gilles Chazal is director of the Petit Palais.'

Can you give me some idea of the sheer size of the exhibition

in terms of Paris? It was a great, big event, wasn't it?

It was an international exhibition.

It was of course a very, very famous event.

It was from this place to La Tour Eiffel... To the Eiffel Tower.

Yes, yes and along the River Seine.

It was absolutely incredible and it was a discovery for the public,

to look after artworks, but also engines and so on.

Also, it was a change of century, so it was a very great moment.

Designed to showcase the very best of modern art and industry,

the World Fair was France's manifesto for the 20th century.

There were moving walkways and a grand electricity hall.

Over 60 countries exhibited and 50 million people visited.

It was the party to end all parties,

and Art Nouveau was the guest of honour.

Around the city, the dramatic jewellery of Rene Lalique,

the organic forms of Emile Galle's glass

and the alluring femme fatales of Alfonse Mucha

dazzled the Paris crowds.

With all its marble and mosaics and gilt and glass,

this was an opulent luxury showroom for Art Nouveau,

but it was much more than that.

It also held up a dazzling mirror to French hopes and fears

at the turn of the 20th century.

Paris was overcrowded, filthy

and simmering with anti-Semitic tensions.

At the World Fair, Art Nouveau was at the height of its popularity,

and for a brief moment it seemed like an antidote

to the ugliness of the modern age.

But on the cusp of the 20th century, how did this upstart new style

threaten to upstage the conservative ranks of traditional French design?

It was only five years before the 1900 World Fair

that Art Nouveau had begun to emerge

from the licentious bohemian quarter of the city.

In 1895, Montmartre,

the playground on the edge of the French capital,

had become a magnet for artists

looking for inspiration and excitement.

Degas and Toulouse Lautrec painted the local prostitutes and dancers,

and they became emblems of the city's sexual freedom.

Decadent, licentious, drug-fuelled, absinthe-soaked -

there was a downside, as well, of course,

but it was here in Montmartre that the artists of the day,

the avant-garde artists earned their stripes.

Of all the artists who set the scene for Art Nouveau,

Charles Baudelaire was the most subversive.

In 1857 he shocked Paris to its breeches

with his first volume of poetry, Les Fleurs Du Mal.

It's all there in the title, really, isn't it?

The Flowers Of Evil.

He was fascinated by the dark side of nature...

..and human nature.

Sex, death, vampires, lesbians,

and all this at the same time as Anthony Trollope

was writing Barchester Towers.

It was in the back-street drinking dens and hash joints of Paris

that Baudelaire's ideas about nature and art

were handed down to Art Nouveau designers.

Louise, what is Baudelaire telling us about nature?

He embraces all that's artificial, you know,

he vaunts the merit of artificiality over nature,

and that's the beginnings of decadentism, if you like,

a rejection of naturalism and of its values.

Is that because science and industry was giving us so much,

one day we could tweak nature if it suited us?

Yeah, there's a desire to improve on nature.

To take it, to work on it,

and to do something better and something different.

And this leads us into decadence, it leads us into Art Nouveau.

The dancers and performers from Paris' nocturnal world

embodied these dangerous new ideas.

Like moths to a flame, Art Nouveau designers were drawn to these women.

And none was more nocturnal than the divine Sarah Bernhardt.

She was Art Nouveau's ultimate muse.

Bernhardt was celebrated as the greatest actress of her day,

as much by herself as anyone else.

The word bohemian could almost have been invented for her.

Amongst her many lovers she counted crowned heads of Europe.

It's even said she slept in a coffin,

believing that playing dead might improve her tragic roles.

Baudelaire would have been proud of her.

Just look at Sarah there, reclining on her chaise longue with her fan,

her eyes imploring, no, demanding,

that you give her your full attention.

And that dog at her feet represents fashionable Parisian society,

writers, poets, artists for whom Sarah was a muse.

But look deep into Fido's eyes.

I think he's seen things in the boudoir

no animal should be exposed to.

Sarah was about to play a new role

in the Paris debut of Art Nouveau.

It was Christmas Day 1894.

Sarah needed a poster to advertise her new play, Gismonda.

But who to turn to?

Alfonse Mucha was a Moravian artist

who'd worked his way across Europe to study art in Paris.

He really wanted to be a fine artist, not a commercial one,

but he was living hand to mouth.

Then he was approached to create the Gismonda poster.

He put his ambitions on hold and got to work.

This is Mucha later in life,

but today it's his grandson John and John's wife Sarah

who take up the story.

The first poster of Art Nouveau.

Well, it's the first poster that Mucha did for Sarah Bernhardt, yes.

This is indirectly the first step

to actually make art available to the general public,

you no longer have to be rich.

How did it come about?

It came about

in a most extraordinary way,

because what happened was that Mucha,

who was a struggling artist at the time,

was doing a favour for a friend,

he was correcting some proofs at the printers,

and it was at Christmas time so everybody else was off on holiday,

and suddenly the manager of the printers came rushing in.

Sarah Bernhardt had said she had to have a new poster

for her re-presentation of Gismonda in the new year

and she wanted it now.

So there was no-one else to ask, so Mucha got the ask.

So the printer went on holiday, came back from holiday

and said "Where's the poster?"

And Alphonse presented this and the printer had a fit.

Why did he have a fit, John?

He'd never seen anything like this, nothing.

Sarah Bernhardt wanted to see it, so it was rolled up

and the printer took it to Sarah Bernhardt.

Alphonse was depressed because, you know,

he thought he'd made a terrible mistake.

Almost immediately, a message came back from Sarah Bernhardt

that she wanted to see Mucha, so he went to her boudoir,

with a very heavy heart,

because he thought he was going to get a bollocking,

and this is in Alphonse's own words, I mean, true historical fact,

she got up, embraced him and said,

"Mr Mucha, you have made me immortal."

You know, she might have been in her 50s

and have done all sorts of things, but when she was on stage,

she was this woman with a vision, with a purity in her heart.

What Mucha did was that he saw Sarah Bernhardt

and he made her look the way she felt and wanted to be seen.

And that's what he's communicating,

is who she saw herself as.

Then she immediately signed him up for a six-year contract.

This was like a lightning from blue sky.

Mucha's Gismonda captured the moment.

The nouvelle woman was born.

He crowns the divine Sarah with stylised flowers.

Using pale muted shades rather than bold primary colours,

he revolutionised poster design.

The poster appeared on the 1st January 1895

on the streets of Paris.

It caused a sensation from the get-go.

This was the first public declaration of the new art

in the French capital.

The public went wild for the poster.

As quickly as Gismonda was put up, she was taken down again.

Bill stickers were followed and bribed to hand her over.

Mucha became an overnight success.

He moved to a swanky new studio,

where he experimented with the new art of photography.

And he took this wonderful series of photographs of his models.

His new women have definitely burnt their corsets, haven't they?

They stare back at you, brazen and proud of their bodies.

He produced this book, Documents Decoratifs,

a bible which later spread Mucha's style around France and Europe.

Well, these are a bit more candid than those Sarah Bernhardt pictures.

They're beautiful, graphically ahead of their time,

and also, I suppose one has to say, quite risque for the 1890s.

Some of these girls are very demure,

they seem to merge with the wildlife they're pictured alongside,

the flowers, but others, like this, dare I say it, hussy here,

definitely have a bit of "come into the garden, Claude," about them.

What my mother might have called a bit forward.

Champagne,

cigarettes,

Mucha discovered that sex could sell anything.

It could even sell holidays on the newly-developed Riviera.

And the selling point was the nouvelle woman,

the icon of Art Nouveau.

The growing middle class was learning to love spending its money

in bars and restaurants

and the new department stores that were springing up everywhere.

It was spend, spend, spend.

There was a plethora of new products on the market,

and every one of them needed to be advertised.

In the new age of mass advertising, mass production

and mass consumption, Art Nouveau was itself mass produced.

Mucha made Art Nouveau de rigueur, fantastique, formidable.

Wow, or even, mon dieu!

What about this place?

When Georges Fouquet inherited

his father's exclusive jewellery business in 1895,

he wanted some of that Mucha magic.

He started designing jewellery with him,

and commissioned Mucha to create a shop

that would indulge his clients' taste for Art Nouveau luxury.

Can we go back in time?

It's Paris, you're a man of means, you've got a few bob, or francs,

and you want to impress that special person in your life.

Well, this is where you come, this jewellery shop,

for that piece, that rock, for a special occasion.

Maybe a birthday, a Valentine, an anniversary.

But over the decades, what is quite clear

is that the shop itself, the jewellery shop, is the true gem.

It's the gift that goes on giving.

In this shop, Mucha used the full Art Nouveau palette,

curves inspired by the natural world,

feathers, gilt, finery.

Every inch of it decorative and sensual.

Sex and Art Nouveau were intimate, promiscuous bedfellows.

Look at the figure up here.

A beautiful, almost classical pose at first, but then notice,

her arms are behind her head, emphasising her splendid bust,

and even a modern haircut.

She is the femme fatale, a classic symbol of Art Nouveau.

And imagine presenting your femme fatale with this Fouquet brooch.

Now, that would put a smile on her face.

In its early days, Art Nouveau was still the preserve

of the rich bohemian elite of the city.

Amongst them was an ambitious and talented young designer

who would embrace the new style and revolutionise jewellery design.

When the great society jeweller Rene Lalique

was beginning his career in Paris in the 1870s,

jewellery wasn't about design.

It was all about the bling, about the rocks.

And not just any rocks - diamonds.

Diamonds as big as the Ritz in Paris.

Lalique changed all that.

He's probably better known today for his glass designs,

but he trained as a goldsmith

and built his reputation on his pioneering Art Nouveau jewellery.

These days, you have to go to museums to see his precious pieces.

'Philippe Thiebault is curator in chief at the Musee d'Orsay,

'and he has the key to the Lalique jewel box.'

Hello, Philippe, I'm Stephen. Nice to meet you.

Very nice to meet you.

I see you have an interesting object in your hand.

'Before Lalique, valuable jewellery was produced by artisans

'from precious metals and gemstones.

'The bigger the rocks, the more desirable and valuable the piece.

'Lalique turned all that on its head.'

So it's a piece by Lalique, it's a hairpin in horn.

Horn? So that's cheap...

It's very, very cheap,

and it's a characteristic of the art of Lalique,

because Lalique was not very fond of expensive material.

When he chose materials, it was not for the price of the material,

but for the colour, the texture of the material.

So with Lalique, it wasn't the gemstones in the jewellery,

it was the design, that's what added the value.

Yes, yes. It's a very naturalistic piece, you know.

It is engraved to imitate, to suggest, the angelica.

It's a plant, you know.

And here you have little diamonds

to suggest the reflections of the sun on the plant.

Right. It's a very lovely piece.

And the gentleman who bought this from Lalique,

he would be buying this for his wife?

Maybe not, maybe not. Well, this is Paris.

Many men went to Lalique,

and they asked for jewels for a lady.

"Can you make something for my special friend," that kind of thing?

Yes, yes.

What about Lalique, how did he feel about women himself?

Lalique, I think...

We know that Lalique did love many women during his life,

had many mistresses in Paris and London, everywhere,

and it's the reason why he is a good designer of jewels,

because I think he loved very much women.

Some of his pieces are erotic.

We have a box, and you will see at the centre, a naked woman,

and she opens her cloak...

Her cloak? Yes.

And so around her, you have young men, also naked.

They are completely dazzled by the nudity.

Are they? They're falling away, the shock, thrilled.

It's like a goddess, you know.

She is like a butterfly, or maybe like a bat.

Because bats and butterflies were very appreciated

by the artists of Art Nouveau.

Lalique created dramatic jewellery about women, for women.

His world, like so much of Art Nouveau, is a no-man's land,

where the woman reigns supreme.

Lalique's fascination with natural forms of all kinds wasn't unusual.

Collecting and categorising nature was the great obsession of the time.

To study insects close-up, Lalique came here to Deyrolle,

the cabinet of curiosities, in the St Germain district of Paris.

This extraordinary bestiary is really a trophy cabinet

of what was going on in the late 19th century.

There was an explosion in international travel,

in collecting, in taxidermy, in botany.

This kind of stuff was brought home by gentlemen in their swag bags.

In the middle of the 19th century,

Darwin's radical new theories about evolution

and man's place in the natural world

exploded established beliefs.

Nature, savage nature, red in tooth and claw.

This was a new battleground between religion on the one hand

and science on the other.

For designers, it was a badge of modernity,

a new way of understanding the world.

They brought nature into Paris.

But they did so on new terms.

For designers like Lalique, nature was there to be embellished.

The lily was there to be gilded.

Swarms of insects, clouds of butterflies, birds, bats,

they all buzzed and flapped around Lalique's work.

In fact, if it hadn't all looked so beautiful,

it might have been like a Hitchcock film.

This is the art of metamorphosis.

Birds, insects and women dissolve in and out of each other

in weird and wonderful ways.

Nature's sensuous, but sinister.

It's blue skies and bumblebees one minute,

and bats at bed-time the next.

Lalique may have used cheap materials,

but his jewellery was lavish and dramatic -

perfectly designed for the dim electric lights

of Paris' nocturnal world.

This is the world-famous restaurant Maxim's.

Sarah Bernhardt and the literary crowd

partied here till the early hours.

Entrepreneur Eugene Cornuche redesigned it in Art Nouveau style

in 1899 for the World Fair.

He knew that Art Nouveau, famous artists

and a ready supply of courtesans could turn his investment into gold.

Today it has the feel of an upmarket bordello.

They say every man who came here arrived with a woman,

but it was never his wife.

You can practically hear the violins soaring away,

the booming laughter and gossip of the politicians

and the artists and actors and painters who came here,

and the tinkling laughter of their new muses or courtesans.

Pierre Andre, thank you so much for letting me see Maxim's.

You are very welcome in this incredible place.

It is incredible, isn't it? It is.

With its mirrors and gilt,

the spiral staircase.

It is a symbol of what we call in France La Belle Epoque.

It really represents

such a dream in people's minds

that it stays from that time,

and it's still today the same.

Maxim's was Art Nouveau.

Is there a sense that the normal rules didn't apply?

Once you stepped over the doorway of Maxim's... Absolutely.

The only rules correct in such a place

was elegance and glamour.

In Maxim's, many times we had writers, novelists...

Like Marcel Proust, did he come here?

Of course, he came many, many, many times. Sarah Bernhardt?

And Sarah Bernhardt, who was one of our best clients.

It was really the place where you had to come to see and be seen.

It showed exactly all the taste they had at that period,

and the best was all around Art Nouveau.

Maxim's sensuous curves

and women in their gardens of Eden -

they play on the idea of innocence, purity, and, of course sin.

There are mirrors absolutely everywhere in here.

It's like a hall of mirrors from a circus.

Or maybe something a bit seedier, a bit kinkier,

a little bit more sinister.

In 1899, Maxim's typified

much of the Art Nouveau that was being created.

Fashionable and extravagant,

it had come to represent fin-de-siecle decadence and excess.

But there is another side to this story.

If you think that Art Nouveau

is all exquisite vases and curly furniture,

well, you couldn't be more wrong.

Amongst the Art Nouveau designers at the 1900 World Fair,

at least one felt that the new style had a more serious mission.

His stand featured a working furnace,

and surrounding it, a display of glass vases.

They were all dedicated to a cause

which exposed a seismic rift in French society.

The designer behind this display was Emile Galle.

Emile Galle was the troubled genius of Art Nouveau,

he was creative, an innovator, an entrepreneur.

He was also a passionate believer and campaigner for social justice.

That, in the end, would cost him dearly.

Emile Galle is one of the most fascinating characters to emerge

in the story of the French arts in the latter part of the 19th century.

He was absolutely a man of his time, and in that respect,

is a key figure in the story of Art Nouveau.

Philippe, what sort of a man was Galle?

Very complex personality,

a poet, one might say, a philosopher, a dreamer,

who found his medium, particularly in glass.

A man with very diverse interests,

he was a great botanist, he had a strong political agenda,

he was a liberal with a tremendous social conscience.

Emile Galle was also an industrialist,

who built from an inherited family business

a very substantial and successful

glass, furniture and ceramics factory.

With his master craftsmen, Galle created stunning prototypes,

while on the workshop floor, designs were mass produced

for a hungry market across France.

Art and industry went hand in hand.

So he was experimenting to develop different techniques,

colouring and texturing the glass,

creating effects within the mass of the glass,

layering colours and cutting back with acid

or engraving to achieve cameo and other effects.

He ended up really being capable of making pieces of glass

of a technical complexity that had never been achieved before.

Engraved with quotations and dedications,

his exhibition pieces go way beyond the purely decorative.

The magic of them is that as well as being virtuosities of glassmaking,

they are always imbued with this magical poetic quality

which is his signature.

He would evoke nature, he would evoke the cycle of life.

He would draw you into a piece of glass

and somehow you could become lost in it.

And you would be as enthralled as if you were looking up at the stars.

You sort of lose a sense of scale within his pieces.

He was truly an artist.

Galle's view of nature was a complex but also a very honest one.

Yes, he could do blue skies and dragonflies,

but he also appreciated what was rank, decaying, dying.

He'd have been just as happy here on an overcast autumn afternoon

as he would have been at the height of summer.

Like Baudelaire, Galle was trying to find a new language

that could express the realities of modern life and death.

I've come to the Ecole de Nancy museum in Galle's home town.

At the end of the 19th century,

Nancy became a power house of Art Nouveau design.

In 1901, Galle formed an association of local designers.

They included the furniture designer Louis Majorelle

and glass designers Antonin and Auguste Daum.

Today they're big names in their own right,

but Galle was the true visionary.

Now, this is your real Galle McCoy.

This is the stuff that everybody loved, his lamps.

Obviously echoing the flowers in the field, the bloom up here,

but what's very interesting about it is he was trying to show nature

as she really was, not just spring, not just bounty,

but also autumn when everything dies and dries up.

So beneath these buds of poppies about to burst,

at the bottom of the plant, these tendrils, these withered pieces

of the plant, the leaves clinging to it, won't be here much longer,

soon to be blown away.

One of the vases that Galle exhibited at the 1900 World Fair

is here at the museum.

It is called Les Hommes Noirs, The Dark Men.

A collaboration with the artist Victor Prouve,

it tells a story of injustice that threatened to destabilise

the government and the country's fragile peace

at the turn of the century.

This vase was dedicated to one man, Alfred Dreyfus.

In 1895, Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer,

was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason on the basis

of documents that had been faked.

In a humiliating ritual, his badges of rank were torn from him

and his sword was broken.

Dreyfus, we know that he screamed, "I am innocent,"

but it was so loud nobody could hear him, you know.

So this small man was just standing alone against

all the anti-Semitic screams, you know, "Death to Dreyfus,"

"Death to the spy, death to the traitor, death to the Jew."

It was really a very, very violent moment he had to go through.

The anti-Semitism that had been simmering for decades in Paris

now exploded.

The daily anti-Semitic paper La France Juive stoked the hatred.

This whole Dreyfus affair cast a very long shadow here in France, didn't it?

Yes, it did.

The concern was the Dreyfus affair came to such a point

that they thought France would be threatened,

the republic, the democracy, or the republic...

Really? It could bring down the whole government?

Exactly. It came to such a climax of anger and passion.

The streets in Paris became very animated with the Dreyfus case.

So it really divided everybody.

It split the whole country.

Some artists took a stand.

The novelist Emile Zola famously attacked the government

with his open letter, J'Accuse.

Les Hommes Noirs was Galle's J'Accuse in glass.

The dark men symbolise French hypocrisy and injustice.

The words on the case ask, "From where do you come?"

"We come from beneath the earth."

When Galle returned to Nancy after the 1900 World Fair,

he paid a high price for his defence of Dreyfus.

He was ostracised by his neighbours and friends,

and his business suffered.

He was defending an innocent against the army, against the church

and against the justice.

Since he was involved in this Dreyfus affair,

he had lost a lot of customers, the business was not working very well,

so maybe he was a bit upset about the future for his wife

and his daughters, and the future of the factory.

As he was the only one who was designing for his factory,

what would happen next?

What would become of Galle?

Do you think, later in his life, Galle regretted the position

he took over the whole Dreyfus affair?

It's hard to tell, but he was so deeply always involved

in those cases that he was defending.

So I think he regretted it only on the commercial side

because of the lack of orders, of commands,

that came after the Great Exhibition in 1900.

But when he was quoting authors like Victor Hugo,

he said, "Art is like a weapon to defend your ideas."

Soon after the World Fair, Galle found out

that he had another battle to fight.

Galle was about to die, he knew he was dying,

so he put a lot of this sadness,

this melancholia, in all his creations.

This is the very last piece of furniture that he produced

in his factory before he died, and it made really a very strong effect

on the people here.

What do you think he's trying to say in this?

It's dawn and it's night-time, the bed, but you could look at it

particularly as the work of a dying man,

as about life and death, in fact.

Yes, that's it, exactly.

Galle used the symbols of the butterflies

and they represent, with the central egg, they represent birth,

the beginning, and they are full of hopes.

But then at the end of the day, they are dead.

And on your back, you can see just above your head,

this night butterfly, the sphinx,

which is slowly falling above you, and it means death.

He is dying and his wings are closing on your head.

It has to make you think of what you make of your life, I think.

Tragically, Galle didn't live to see Dreyfus exonerated in 1906.

He died two years earlier, but in the last years of his life

he'd created some of his most powerful and moving pieces.

Galle had exposed a fault line in French life

at the turn of the century,

but there was a lot more where that came from.

With the population explosion came crime, overcrowding, poverty.

There was disquiet on the streets of Paris,

and the city needed to find new solutions.

For a young architect who was out to make a bit of a name for himself,

a bit of a splash, the time was ripe for trying something utterly different.

Hector Guimard was a young architect with an ego as big as his talent.

Important projects came his way when he was still in his 20s,

and in 1896, when Guimard was not yet 30, he designed the building

that would cement his reputation for bravura, style and ambition.

His mission was to create not just a radically different

sort of building, but a template for a new form of communal living.

Sebastien Cord is an architect himself

and a resident of Castel Beranger, Guimard's most celebrated building.

To see the real Guimard magic you have to get inside the curly gates

to the communal courtyard within.

So you see the courtyard? Stunning, yeah.

Guimard was really young when he built this.

Security code? Yeah.

How long have you lived here?

About five years.

Must be fantastic, since you're in the business of architecture,

to live here. Look at that!

From here you can see the building is asymmetrical,

a crime against architecture in classically proportioned Paris.

Your eye doesn't get bored of it

because there are different contours to it.

That's interesting in the work of Guimard.

It's architecture and art with curving lines.

And the glass up there is beautiful, isn't it?

Is that all original?

Yes.

'Guimard said the logic of nature is impeccable,

'and at Beranger, his visual language is the sea.

'The windows repeated on every floor are stained into voluptuous waves.'

I love these kind of sponge-like bits of stone,

they look like sea sponges, don't they? Is that the idea?

We call it mouliere in French.

'Red brick, anathema to traditionalists,

'butts up against whole stones and engineered stone too.'

Very different to the other buildings I've been seeing in Paris,

the kind of Haussmann buildings, isn't it?

Yes.

'It's Guimard's signature ironwork that gives the building

'its Art Nouveau character and wit.'

It's incredible.

'Why the long face?

'These sea horses press their noses to the walls for good reason.'

It has a structural function also.

Does it? It's holding the wall up. Yes. That's good to know.

I believe another unusual thing is that all the apartments

are roughly the same size?

It wasn't big apartments for the rich. Exactly.

Every level have the same height.

You don't have the rich at the first level

and the poor people at the top.

'Really breaking with tradition, Guimard dared to create

'an apartment block that ignored the social hierarchy of Paris.

'At first, the neighbours called this Castel Deranger,

'and when you step in to the building's vestibule, you can kind of see why.'

That's incredible. It's really like a cave, isn't it?

Yes, it's designed like a grotto.

It's a masterpiece of the building made by Guimard.

Just the gateway is remarkable.

It's marvellous. Really original, in fact.

It's like a harp.

A harp?

These are the strings and you can kind of pluck them.

That's rather beautiful, isn't it?

Maybe not the way I'm doing it, but it could be.

'All the geometry of the structure is submerged in iron curves

'and undulating plaster, as if the building itself were made of water.'

So these are meant to look a bit like trees, are they?

Yeah, it's like trees going from the grotto.

It's like a piece of a garden but also with water...

Like an undersea garden.

It's quite strange.

Yes, it's like Neptune's garden. Yes.

'For many years, the full beauty of this weirdly wonderful entrance

'was hidden under countless coats of gloss paint.

'Sebastian's just completed the painstaking task of returning

'Castel Beranger to how Guimard intended it to be.'

That's great, isn't it? Yes.

It's a pleasant way to enter in the building.

It is.

Pardon, monsieur.

'As the space where residents would meet and greet each other,

'it's the heart of Guimard's masterplan for convivial urban living.'

Here she is with her French bread.

That's what we should have done.

I didn't kiss you. Maybe later!

Let's see how things go. After!

OK, after you.

'Guimard moved in here himself, enjoying his bachelor lifestyle

'and his celebrity.

'A tireless self-publicist,

'he sent out postcards of himself at home with his watery Art Nouveau.'

With an award under his belt for Beranger, Paris was his oyster.

As the city was preparing for the 1900 World Fair,

he landed the commission that would make him immortal.

The city was in gridlock.

The Metro, a new railway fit for a new century was being built -

under the ground.

And Guimard was asked to design the Metro entrances

to add a final decorative flourish to this fantastic new-fangled way

of getting about.

He was a controversial choice,

but in time, Parisians warmed to his flamboyant version of Art Nouveau.

This is Port Dauphine, Guimard's finest surviving Metro station.

It's en route to the Bois de Boulogne,

the woods on the outskirts of Paris, and that seems rather appropriate,

because emerging from the station is like leaving a thicket of iron trees.

Guimard brought nature and art into the very heart of the modern city.

Salvador Dali described his designs as

"those divine entrances to the Metro by grace of which one can descend

"into the region of the subconscious."

Guimard's station, which is actually metallic and dense and brittle,

in this wooded setting, shape-shifts into a giant moth or bug

with its gossamer wings, its many, spindly limbs

and those questing, probing antennae.

He chose cast iron to create drooping stalks and rising branches.

And glass, a vulnerable material for a busy urban structure,

seems to be draped over the iron skeleton.

Guimard designed 141 station entrances,

each on a variation of four basic templates,

as well as a loose interpretation of the letter "M" for Metro.

The Metro entrances, redefining the city,

seemed like the portals to the future.

But when the 1900 exhibition was all packed up, the harsh light of the 20th century started todawn.

This dining room was designed for an apartment in Nancy in 1902

by Eugene Vallin, an associate of Emile Galle.

I've got a theory that this wasn't made by men.

I think it's the work of a species of hyper-evolved bee.

I mean, look at the curves everywhere.

It's as though they looked at what we did with metal and straight lines

and rejected it and everything was masticated out of royal jelly.

Bit freaky for you? Bit acid trippy?

Well, consider, it would be lovely to come here to dinner once,

maybe for a week.

But every day? You would start to feel like Kafka,

who, shortly after this was created, would pen Metamorphoses.

And that was the problem - it was too curly, too decorative,

too dark, too much.

When it arrived in the dining rooms of the middle classes,

the Bohemian elite lost their taste for it.

Like all fashions, Art Nouveau became a victim of its own success.

Like a fickle lover, the city that had once embraced the style

turned against it in the 1920s.

The wonderful Fouquet jewellery shop was dismantled,

and was reconstructed in the Musee Carnivalet in Paris

just 23 years ago.

Even the iconic Metro entrances didn't escape the cull.

Port Dauphine is one of just three glass entrances that have survived.

Sadly, when Art Nouveau dramatically fell out of fashion,

all the others were ruthlessly hacked down.

79 original Guimard designs have been lost,

and Art Nouveau was forgotten until the last decades

of the 20th century.

Today the Metro and Paris go hand in hand again

and the city treasures its Art Nouveau heritage.

The old love affair has been rekindled.

Next time, the roots and hidden gems of Art Nouveau in British cities,

set against a backdrop of scandal and depression,

when artists and designers were on the front line

of sexual and social change.

It's sleek, geometrical.

A vision of aluminium and glass.

It's the last place you'd go looking for Art Nouveau, isn't it?

Isn't it?

This is the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

on the outskirts of Norwich.

Home to the art collection of the British retail dynasty,

the Sainsbury family.

It's also home to the Anderson Collection of Art Nouveau,

one of the largest and finest private collections in Europe.

Art Nouveau emerged at the turn of the 19th century

from the restless energies of the industrial city.

In the age of Darwin and Freud,

it was fixated on nature, sex,

and the newly-liberated woman.

In less than a decade it went from nowhere to everywhere.

And then disappeared completely.

This week I'm in Britain where the decadence of Oscar Wilde

and Aubrey Beardsley scandalised the nation.

Where the sensuality of exotic foreign influences met the genius

of British craftsmanship to create a wholly unique moment in design.

And as brand names such as Liberty's went global,

an extraordinary hidden gem took shape in the crook of a Surrey hill.

Imagine this, the Thames, in the 19th century.

Steam ships take our products all over the world and return

with treasure troves of art and design from the Empire and beyond.

It was a dazzling time, full of progress and change,

but there were also more ominous undercurrents.

Not for nothing is Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, published 1899,

opening on the waters of this river, foul and pestilential.

These days, the river banks are the preserve of hedge fund managers

but back then only artists could be persuaded

to find their accommodation along its shores.

They believed that our burgeoning industrial cities could be reformed

by a beauty revolution.

For Art Nouveau designers, that began with an event

that changed the story of 19th century British design.

In 1854, an American fleet of seven ships and 2,000 men

sailed into the harbour of Nagasaki.

After centuries of isolation,

Japan was forced to open her borders to trade

and Japanese goods started flooding into Britain.

Collected avidly by artists,

these goods inspired a new approach to British design.

New patterns, flowers, plants, birds adorned their work.

There was a new delicacy, a new sensuality.

Japan was seen as everything that the West was not.

Exotic, sensual, uninhibited.

In London, James Abbott McNeil Whistler painted women in kimonos

hinting at the sensuality beneath the silk.

An American who had lived in France and Russia,

Whistler was a troublemaker with a modern international agenda.

He harnessed Japanese style to a movement that insisted that

art had no social or moral agenda.

Art was for art's sake.

A new cult of beauty was born.

There was a whole new style of sensuousness

amongst the Avant Garde.

It was called the Aesthetic Movement

and I've come to find out about it, where else,

but on the sun-kissed boulevards of Shepherds Bush, West London.

Mmm, they're nice!

Hello, Peter. Wow. Do you like my flowers? Lovely. I'm Stephen.

Hi, how do you do? These are for you.

Thank you very much. They're beautiful.

'Design historian Peter Fiell has spent years

'lovingly reconstructing a room in the Aesthetic style.'

Oh, this is fun, isn't it? This is great, Peter.

I feel we should both slip into some kimonos.

Don't know how you feel about that. I only just met you.

We've got sunflowers. I suppose we have. Fantastic place.

I notice there are some sunflowers here, like the ones I brought you.

Yes, well, as you probably gathered,

having gifted me those beautiful sunflowers,

one of major motifs, you know, of the Aesthetic Movement is the sunflower

and it literally represents the sun and warmth and...

Beauty? Beauty.

And you see these motifs recurring time and time again.

'With their exotic sunflowers and irises,

'peacocks and cranes,

'ebonised furniture and willow patterns, the Aesthetes made a break

'with the dense briars and brambles of traditional British design.'

This is what Oscar Wilde meant

when he talked about the house beautiful, wasn't it?

It was critical to be seen as a connoisseur of beauty

and, ultimately, as someone who had refined good taste.

'Whistler and his friend, the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde,

'held court in Japanese-inspired rooms like this one,

'also sharing other foreign ideas

'that they brought back from their frequent trips to bohemian Paris.

'Their scandalous ideas about sex, death and art were beyond the pale

'of God-fearing Victorian society.'

Thank you for these flowers again. It's my pleasure. They look nice.

Tell you what, it needed something in here, didn't it? Yes!

I'll put them right behind you here. That's the perfect spot.

'In 1894, a new disciple joined the ranks of these Aesthetes.'

An iconoclast, brandishing a bold new art,

he captured the avant garde spirit of Paris

and the sensuality of Japanese design.

The illustrator Aubrey Beardsley

was the first exponent of Art Nouveau in Britain.

He was one of the first anywhere.

He burst on to the London scene at the tender age of 19.

His career would be meteoric, dazzling, uncontrollable,

and over far too soon.

The teenage Beardsley heard that Wilde was writing a play

about the biblical temptress Salome.

He produced an illustration on spec

in the hope that he might impress Oscar and his publisher.

In it, Beardsley transforms the sinful Salome

with whiplash curves into a femme fatale.

Here she is clasping the severed head of saintly John the Baptist.

The blatant sensuality and amorality of this image

rivalled anything from bohemian Paris.

Wilde was duly impressed and Beardsley was commissioned

to illustrate the first English edition of Salome in 1894.

His drawings were startlingly new.

They were sensuous. They were international.

They were Art Nouveau.

Beardsley is, I suppose, the most distinctive,

most extraordinary young illustrator that we've ever had in England.

This is called the Peacock Skirt

and it's probably the most celebrated from Beardsley's set of designs.

People would have thought this was very shocking at the time.

It absolutely exemplifies the way in which he'd found

a new way of representing a literary subject.

There's no suggestion of the background.

He cuts to the chase, as it were. It's just about the figures.

That's the sort of thing he learnt from looking at Japanese prints.

It's also, in a way, stylistically what we now call Art Nouveau,

except that Beardsley was not trying to do exactly the same sort of thing.

He knew what was going on on the continent but he was, actually,

to a great degree, ploughing his own furrow here in England.

'Beardsley's whiplash curves came to define his unique

'Japanesque version of Art Nouveau.'

And this famous whiplash line here, apart from anything else,

that's extraordinarily difficult to do, isn't it, I would imagine?

Just to have the elan and the confidence just to dash that off.

This is something he excels at,

which is this kind of extraordinary calligraphic energy.

He is the great master of drawing with a pen.

And for people who haven't done that themselves,

that's no mean feat, is it?

You don't just produce one of these swirls.

It is actually very difficult to create a drawing

of this kind of faultless technique.

Beardsley's penmanship, if you like, the actual craftsmanship

of working with, remember, a spluttering pen dipped in ink...

'In the finely-drawn decorative details of his work,

'Beardsley's mischief and subversion plays out.

'The devil is certainly in his details.'

Look closely at those candlesticks.

Yes, they are what you think they are.

The publishers actually jokingly said

you had to look at everything through a microscope and upside down

in order to make sure he hadn't smuggled in some kind of indecencies.

Is it the art of a young man? As you get older, do you get more cautious?

I think he moved in a circle of youngish, quite revolutionary

artists and writers who enjoyed teasing the public.

Cocking a snook, if that's the phrase I'm looking for.

Absolutely. It is exactly the word.

'To the London arts establishment

'he was the amoral, alien enfant terrible of his day.'

The Studio Magazine,

the international bible for avant garde design founded in 1893,

featured Beardsley's work and reproduced his Salome illustrations.

His Japanesque figures and decorative curves,

distributed all over the world in the magazine,

were absorbed into Art Nouveau as it emerged on the continent.

Beardsley had arrived.

This was the age of the dandy.

It was the time when what you said, the cut of your jib,

the colour of your button hole, the name of your tailor,

all these things counted for at least as much

as what you actually DID in life.

'Matthew Sturgiss is Beardsley's biographer.'

Hello, you must be Matthew. I'm Stephen. How are you?

Very well, thanks. Fancy a haircut? Well, why not?

Matthew, how important was image to Aubrey?

Was image crucial to him?

Hugely important.

Really both as a reflection and a projection of his art.

He delighted in witty bon mots.

He dressed beautifully.

He was conscious too, of his extraordinary physique

and that became part of his public persona.

'Beardsley's strange haircut and dandified garb

'were cultivated for effect but it wasn't all artifice.

'His gauntness was the result of incurable tuberculosis,

'though not even the gravity of that condition

'stopped his searing humour.'

He once said that, you know, I'm so affected,

even my lungs are affected.

But he knew he didn't have long, so he had to make an impact?

Yes, I mean, from childhood

he'd suffered with tuberculosis

and he realised that time was likely to be short.

I think that did lend an intensity to his work

and the way he worked.

'Beardsley's intense ambition, mischief and hunger for attention

'were a lethal combination.'

Matthew and I have come to the Cadogan in West London,

a hotel that would play a crucial part in the unravelling

of Beardsley's brilliant career.

Would Wilde and Beardsley have taken tea together?

Were they friendly?

What was the nature of their relationship, would you say?

Wilde was the older figure.

He was some 20 years Beardsley's senior.

He was the great artistic personality of the age,

and Beardsley was ever an iconoclast

and although he admired Wilde enormously,

he also enjoyed poking fun at him,

undermining him, pricking his pretensions.

It's extraordinary. You know, at first sight what you have here

is a fantastic draughtsmanship,

and, at the same time, the sensibility of Viz magazine.

Is that fair?

There is certainly an element of that.

I mean, Wilde complained that some of the details were like

the naughty doodles that schoolboys introduced

into the margins of their copybooks.

Wilde had good cause to be suspicious.

In his play, Salome,

Wilde had compared the moon to a fat, pleasure-seeking old woman.

But in one of Beardsley's illustrations,

he gives the moon Wilde's features.

Beardsley, as being someone in the inner cultural circle of the time,

would have known rumours circulating about Wilde's double life,

his attraction to the homosexual milieu,

and so the notion of him being a bad drunken woman

searching everywhere for lovers

would have carried a certain sort of resonance.

And in a way, that was dangerous information to be being leaked out.

In 1894, Beardsley co-founded an arts journal called The Yellow Book

to celebrate new writing and art.

As art editor, he had the freedom to develop his unique style.

Tragically, this startling talent was about to be eclipsed

by a scandal that traumatised 19th-century Britain and Europe.

For nearly four years,

Wilde had been having an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas

who was 16 years his junior.

In 1895, Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensbury,

left a card at Wilde's club calling him a sodomite.

Wilde sued Queensbury for libel, but it backfired.

Queensbury's allegation was upheld

and Wilde was charged with gross indecency.

Now, Oscar Wilde's room is down here, 118.

This is where he had his exquisite collar felt

the day the rozzers came to pick him up on charges of indecency.

Beardsley's Yellow Book comes back into the story here,

with tragic consequences.

Everybody wanted to be in it and most of them were,

with the notable exception of Oscar Wilde.

The Yellow Book was consciously modelled

on the most provocative French fiction of the day -

cheeky novels coming in from the continent in yellow wrappers.

On 5 April 1895, two arresting officers led Wilde out of the hotel.

Under his arm was a yellow book.

It was actually a copy of one of the aforesaid French novels

but nobody noticed or cared.

Journalists reported that Wilde had left the hotel

with a copy of Beardsley's Yellow Book.

The loathing for Wilde was so intense

that a crowd took it upon themselves

to go round to Beardsley's publishers and put the windows out.

His boss, in a panic, fired him.

Not one but two great careers and lives were blighted.

Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour.

The fallout from the scandal across Britain was devastating.

And how important was the Wilde trial?

We hear in the news that such-and-such a case

is the trial of the year, the trial of the century,

but that really was a huge case, wasn't it?

I would say that it's probably not possible to exaggerate

the importance of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895.

It traumatised British and specifically English culture,

transformed the atmosphere in London and really did jump out at the time.

It upset the entire nation. And I would say, in effect,

made practicing as an advanced or an Avant Garde

and Art Nouveau designer or artist

extremely difficult in England after that time,

because Wilde was loosely and broadly associated with that world.

How influential was Beardsley?

How deep did it go? How pervasive was it?

Well, we would say that Beardsley was probably absolutely key

for the style, paramount in fact.

There are lots of English movements around

in the last quarter of the 19th century

and Beardsley pulls everything together to create

what is going to become Art Nouveau. He is the first one to do that.

And the key - the signature, I suppose - is the whiplash line.

That strange tensile shape

that everybody picks up on incredibly quickly

and becomes the dominant image of the late 19th century

in architecture and design.

Despite his wit and bravura style,

Beardsley had crossed a line that he couldn't come back from.

After the Wilde scandal, he was vilified

and his art forced under the counter.

He worked for Leonard Smithers,

an infamous publisher of literary erotica.

Smithers commissioned Beardsley to illustrate Aristophanes' play,

Lysistrata, about a community of women

who deny their husbands their conjugal rights.

Beardsley had nothing to lose.

But then, just three years after the Wilde scandal,

tuberculosis finally claimed him.

Beardsley was just 25 years old.

His shocking version of Art Nouveau had become

the style that dare not speak its name.

But that didn't mean it had gone altogether. On the contrary.

The whiplash curve had got under the skin of British designers.

So they took those curves...

and then added something of their own.

A spray of Celtic mist, just a hint of medieval mystery

to create a version of Art Nouveau that was uniquely British.

While Beardsley had looked to Japan and France for his ideas,

this more polite version of Art Nouveau

drew on British craft traditions

and on the influence of one man in particular.

William Morris - craftsman, poet, publisher, designer,

socialist, all-round Victorian visionary.

He was the driving force behind Arts and Crafts,

one of the most influential movements in all European design.

In his quest for beauty,

Morris invoked the power of nature and our medieval past.

Arts and Crafts may have been inspired by British history,

but Morris was fighting for a brave new future,

one in which beauty triumphed over industry.

It's hard to believe now, but back in Morris's day,

even here, in Hammersmith, the Thames was polluted and ugly.

In fact, it's one of the things that Morris and his cohorts

wanted to change, because their art, their design

wasn't just about prettifying houses.

It was also about revolution.

It was changing the world one wallpaper at a time.

In the 1890s, the middle-aged Morris

used to take his daily constitutional here along the Thames

to visit his close friend and fellow socialist,

the publisher Emery Walker.

Hello, are you Helen? I am, yes. I'm Stephen, very nice to meet you.

Do come through. Thank you, I'd love to.

'Helen Elletson is the curator of Walker's house.

'Full of Morris's designs, it's still a testament

'to the Arts and Crafts vision.'

And this is just as it was, is it? It is, yes, just as it was

in the Walkers' day.

There's a real sense of peace in here, isn't there?

It's incredible.

What's really striking as a visitor, and what I really like,

is I expected a lot of it

to be behind glass and velvet rope and "do not touch".

It's not like that at all.

It has more the feel of a private home, a time capsule, actually.

It is a family home, it was lived in until 1999,

unchanged since the Walker family lived here.

They were great friends and William Morris in fact said his day

wasn't complete without a sight of Emery Walker.

That's a lovely tribute from one man to another, isn't it? Definitely.

Yes, they used to meet each other regularly

to talk about printing, their shared interest in politics,

literature, so they were very close together.

Morris's hand-printed designs, with their roses,

briars and brambles, celebrate an historic England,

a far cry from Beardsley's exotic whiplash curves.

Morris was very much inspired by the English countryside.

He wanted to go back to the way things were done properly,

the traditional craft methods.

Because, going back to his social beliefs,

he really felt that if you had something beautiful

in your home it would influence your quality of life.

Was he a bit of a champagne socialist, as we might say today?

Or maybe it's a mead socialist, harking back to medieval times?

In the sense that, he was all about giving

beautiful quality products to everybody,

but in practise it was only the middle classes who could afford it?

There is that contradiction with Morris

and he had the best people working for him

and the best materials that went into making the items.

The only way of bringing down the price was to bring in

some form of mass production and factories and machines,

and that was what Morris was against.

He disliked the Industrial Revolution

and what it was doing to people's lives.

Morris's vision was a potent force in British design

at the turn of the century, especially in the south of England.

When the work ethic and historicism of Arts and Crafts met

the sensual curves of Art Nouveau, something magical happened.

You won't find this extraordinary chapel in art history tomes,

but it's a hidden gem created by Mary Watts,

one of the unsung heroines of British Art Nouveau design.

It's screened by these beech trees

and tucked in the crook of a Surrey hill,

but you can just hear the motorway, you'd never know it was here.

It's like a Victorian mausoleum

to the legendary, immemorial figures of Albion.

You half-expect that bell to start tolling at any minute,

and for these incredible, half-true figures

to rise up and answer the call of their nation.

You get a sense here in this churchyard of the sleep of England,

the spirit of England.

Mary designed this extraordinary chapel in 1895

when she moved here from London with her husband,

the celebrated Victorian painter George Frederick Watts,

who was 32 years her senior.

Mary had been his student.

She idolised him, calling him "signor"

as a mark of respect and deference.

For the first years of their marriage

she lived in his shadow in the society of London's great and good,

but when the couple built a house just down the road from here

in Compton, Surrey, she really came into her own.

Look at this lovely sun-dappled, enchanted and enchanting frieze

on the front of the chapel.

Look at these very English-looking maidens got up as angels

and it's a light slumber as they preside over classic

Christian and British virtues of courage and patience.

But everywhere the scene is enfolded

by this riot of Art Nouveau motifs.

They're enclosed in this thicket of curvy, sinuous lines.

The peacock is displaying his feathers,

a great chain mail behind him, and there are these knotted vines

which veer off in all directions, their arrow-headed points.

Mary was a member of something

called the Home Arts and Industries Association

that was founded on the Arts and Crafts principle

that anybody could learn our ancient craft skills.

She held Thursday evening terracotta classes

for the local villagers to make the exterior decorations of the chapel,

finally completing them in 1898.

This is an early form of socialism, if you like, set in clay,

because Mary Watts, although she was the guiding artistic brain

behind this and did a lot of the work herself,

was leading the common people, the everyday folk of Compton in Surrey,

guiding their hands through the process.

So what you see here is an Arts and Crafts sensibility

but the languishing sensuality of Art Nouveau.

And if you think the outside's impressive, prepare yourself...

This is dumb-striking. It's not what I expected at all.

It's a kind of fairy grotto or secret cave,

as if some strange druid Celtic sect had been walled in here

and these were their folk memories

that they were implanting on the walls.

At the same time it's like a crazy prog-rock version of heaven.

If you had all the early Genesis LPs

and your time was up, this is your Nirvana, to mix bands.

Just this splendid explosion

of vines and drapes and fronds.

It's also got this great sensuality, these writhing plants.

What could be more earthy?

It's a Christian mortuary chapel, but there's something almost pagan

and pre-Christian about it.

I don't know whether to light a candle

or cover myself in woad and dance naked.

Hello, Rebecca, how are you? I'm Stephen.

Do come in and join me. It's chilly, isn't it? It is, yes.

Very nice to meet you. Now, what have you got there?

I've got a photograph of my great-grandmother. May I handle it?

You may, yes. This is my great-grandmother, Alice Jacobs.

So that must be Mary?

That's Mary, the designer of the chapel.

So this place has a special family connection for you, doesn't it?

It does, yes. I've been coming up here all my life.

And because it's so extraordinary and a little bit secluded,

it could almost be as if your great-grandmother

had just stepped away from here. Do you have that sense?

Absolutely, yes. Definitely. It just hasn't changed over the years.

You can come in here and definitely feel

like you were here 100 years ago.

I love it.

And I actually think it's quite life-affirming.

Which is odd, considering it's a chapel of rest, isn't it?

Yes, but I don't think the Watts saw death as a bad thing.

Watts painted pictures of death as a young woman,

not as a scary old crone.

After years of hard work,

the chapel interior was finally completed in 1904,

the year Signor GF Watts died.

Mary survived him by another 34 years

and went on to establish the Compton Pottery

with her local craftsmen.

The chapel was little known in her time,

but with these terracotta pots,

Mary's unique version of Art Nouveau reached a much wider audience.

They were admired and sold to the masses

by an influential family friend, Arthur Lasenby Liberty.

Liberty, who'd built a global empire of department stores

at the end of the 19th Century,

was the key figure in the mass production and spread

of this British version of Art Nouveau.

By the beginning of the 20th Century,

the very name Liberty had become a byword for the style.

This is Liberty's department store in the West End of London.

With its half-timbered Tudor-bethan facade,

it's managed to persuade tourists and shoppers alike

that it's quintessentially English and that it's been here forever.

That's wrong on both counts.

Liberty was a humble warehouse manager

when he opened his own shop in 1875 using a loan from his father.

With his canny knack for spotting a cultural trend,

he became the art lover's retailer.

First an importer of exotic decorative arts,

he soon began retailing the work of British designers

under his own name.

The famous Liberty peacock print is still popular today.

Selling silks, clothes, rugs, jewellery and furniture,

Liberty's empire quickly expanded.

Anna, it feels as though we're in an Eastern bazaar here.

We're not, though. Where are we?

We're in the Liberty carpet department,

but, actually, that's one of the departments

that very much reflects

Liberty's origins as an oriental importer

when he first started in 1875. Liberty was an entrepreneur.

He knew that he couldn't stay in the same style.

He needed to grow his business, and he was one of the early people

to sell products that we would now describe as Art Nouveau.

So what do we have here in your book of swatches?

Well, let's have a look and see.

Here we've got a very typical Art Nouveau Liberty style.

Why is that Art Nouveau?

The stylised flowers.

There is that sort of... You can't quite see it on here,

but I know that the repeat has that sort of movement.

The famous wavy lines? Yes, which is very Art Nouveau.

And it has that sort of feel of hand block printing,

to look as if it's been done by hand.

We have another one, which is quite weird, I think.

That's quite different, at first sight, to the last one,

but this is still Art Nouveau you'd say?

I think that's still Art Nouveau,

and it's still doing that sort of shape.

These Art Nouveau fabrics with their Arts and Crafts handmade look

became the pinnacle of bohemian taste.

With Liberty, you could have the Art Nouveau dress, the rug,

the chairs, even the garden pots.

Liberty actually got all the top designers to design for him.

That, I think, shows what a charming person he was

because he didn't credit them.

He paid them, but he wouldn't have credited them,

because he sold his designs as Liberty designs.

He was an entrepreneur.

That's a mixed blessing for them.

They're getting the pay, but not the credit.

History has forgotten them, rather.

Well, I have no idea who's designed this,

because, yes, that's gone, that history.

Which is frustrating for you?

Very frustrating for me. It must have been rather frustrating

for the person who designed it!

One of Liberty's most important anonymous designers

was the painter and teacher Archibald Knox.

'Patch Rogers, a guardian of the Liberty legacy,

'has some Knox treasures to show me.'

And you've brought somebody to look after it? That's very serious.

Hello, I'm Stephen. Very nice to meet you. Hello, sir.

How are you? Good.

'Knox grew up on the Isle of Man,

'a tiny island in the Irish sea.'

Inspired by its ancient Celtic crosses,

he designed Art Nouveau silver and pewterware for Liberty

that was characterised by a Celtic twist.

So what about this clock, Patch?

It's got a playful quality, hasn't it?

It has. It's got that slightly kind of animated look,

I think, and I think Knox was drawing inspiration very much

from his Celtic origin.

Being on the Isle of Man, he would have studied the Celtic crosses

in the cemeteries and churchyards

and was drawing inspiration from that. I mean, it looks like a cross.

With his marketing nouse,

Liberty gave these designs faux historical names -

Cymric silver and Tudric pewter.

Other designers worked on the ranges,

but Liberty spotted Knox's outstanding talent

and worked closely with him.

This is the earliest piece, this is about 1899.

You have the sort of cleanness of the silver

and then you have these applied handles, in a very organic,

sinuous line, giving you that very much Art Nouveau feel.

You also had the rivets, which was a way of showing craftsmanship.

The silver pieces were handmade, but not by Knox himself.

The pewter, designed by Knox to mimic the handmade look,

were actually machine-made, a crime against Arts and Crafts principles.

But with his lower production costs and a big retail market,

Liberty was laughing all the way to the bank.

How did he market them? Through mail order, catalogues.

Obviously through the store,

but at the time, you had stores in Paris

and other places as well. I think there was one in Buenos Aires.

Right, so the mail order was the internet of its day? Absolutely.

As the catalogue says,

"Designed and worked exclusively by Liberty & Co."

Smart.

The ranges were so successful that in Italy

Art Nouveau became known as Stile Liberte.

Knox's career, not surprisingly, took a different course.

He stayed friends with the Liberty family, but he was a retiring man.

Never publicly credited for his designs in his lifetime,

he ended his days unknown, back on the Isle of Man,

painting watercolours.

His tombstone reads "Archibald Knox, artist,

"humble servant of God in the ministry of the beautiful."

I'll raise a pewter tankard to that.

Other retailers wanted to cash in on Liberty's Art Nouveau success.

When Harrods was redesigned in 1902,

the owners hired a fashionable young ceramicist

to give their meat hall the new look.

Born in Barnsley and trained as an architect,

William Neatby worked with Doulton's tiles

and borrowed from the medieval churches of his Northern childhood

to create this extraordinary frieze.

This is a kind of idyllic scene of an Arcadian Albion

that never quite was,

a 19th-Century view back to medieval England.

It's almost like the storyboard for a panto

because they have this 19th-century view

of how the medieval Briton dressed,

its doublet and hose, nice dinky little pixie boots,

lovely hats, but they're all spotless and pristine.

You have to love the whimsy and nonsense of this.

In Neatby's panto of rural life, the happy hunter always bags his duck.

Neatby's brilliance lay in the graphic quality of his work

which complimented its surroundings rather than competed with them.

Neatby spares us the horror of Bambi's death scene

so we don't have that distasteful thought in our heads as we stand

at the counter and pay for the weekend joint.

Morris and Beardsley must be chuckling in their graves.

Chicken anyone?

Many shopping arcades were thrown up at the end of the 19th century

and Neatby's colourful ceramic schemes became a popular

cutting-edge adornment to the new retail experience,

as here in Norwich.

If you were part of Norfolk's fashionable society then this arcade

was the place to see and be seen and maybe splash the cash.

You wanted something to attest to your taste, to your sense of

what was hip and happening so why not pick up Art Nouveau fabrics,

perhaps a nice piece of silverware from Liberty's

or maybe even get the fireplace tiled

with Doulton's finest ceramics, that was the thing to do.

Neatby was head of architectural tiles at Doulton's ceramics

when its Art Nouveau ranges were selling like hotcakes.

Most of them have been torn down from fireplaces and doorways now,

but this arcade preserves some of that legacy.

Today, Art Nouveau remains highly collectable

and can secure huge prices at auction.

I've come to central London to visit auctioneers Christie's

who are putting on a sale.

There are more fancy goods in these parts

than you can shake a silver-topped cane at.

Small wonder the antiques trade, as practised around here,

is at its most luxuriant, its most subtle, its most refined.

Hello, Colin.

Good afternoon, Mr Smith.

Here's a fine range of Knox pieces

with their Celtic Art Nouveau swirls.

And glass by the great French designer Emile Galle.

But the Art Nouveau story also played out in Scotland.

Silver Apples of the Moon by the Glasgow-based artist

Margaret MacDonald was created around 1912.

It's a example of what's been called "Scotto-continental" Art Nouveau.

Catchy.

It's a lot that I personally am passionately in love with.

If I could take it home I would, I absolutely love it.

What can you tell me about the Art Nouveau quality of this work?

Very much, we have a fascination with nature

and the human relationship with nature.

The woman metamorphoses from a berry to a trout, to a woman,

then dissipates into nature again.

Also, there's a deep underlying mystery about the work.

But also we have this sense of the bejewelled maiden,

but actually, very much, she's the femme fatale at the same time,

which you can pick up in the slightly spooky hands.

Very spooky actually.

They're very skeletal and elongated

and just the positioning of them is quite... Quite haunting.

Yes.

And there's a good reason why this lot is raising pulses at Christie's.

MacDonald's work is actually rather rare and the last time a piece

of hers came to sale, it changed auction history.

The White Rose and the Red Rose was estimated

at between £200-300,000.

But actually on the day the bidding war was fierce and very exciting.

The sale room held its breath and The White Rose And The Red Rose

finally realised 1.7 million,

which was very, very exciting... That's extraordinary!

..and a world record.

During her lifetime, Margaret MacDonald

was derided in Britain far more than she was appreciated.

She worked in the shadow of her more famous husband,

the Art Nouveau architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

They met when they were both studying

at the old Glasgow School of Art in the 1890s.

Along with her sister, Frances, and her husband, Herbert MacNair,

they were known as "The Four".

This is the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow -

during a period of intense collaboration in the 1890s,

The Four designed these posters.

The long, stylised figures

were inspired by Aubrey Beardsley illustrations,

which they'd seen in The Studio Magazine.

But the press went in with their hatchets,

dubbing their strange new style "the Spook School", and it was

the two women, Margaret and Frances, who got most of the stick.

One pundit even wrote a witty verse about them.

"Would you witness a conception of the woman "really" new

"without the least deception from the artist's point of view.

"See the Art School exhibition in the Rue de Sauchiehall,

"They don't charge you for admission for they haven't got the gall."

Margaret and Frances struggled to get work but Charles and Herbert

had day jobs with a local firm of architects.

Charles started work on the design that would immortalise him -

the Glasgow School of Art, as we know it today.

Mackintosh's masterpiece,

and the pinnacle of what we now know as the Glasgow Style.

Mackintosh, quite rightly, takes the sole credit for

this astonishing building, but the groundwork for the style had

been laid during his collaboration with The Four.

Here are those long Japanese forms again -

and Art Nouveau decorative flourishes,

but Mackintosh elevates them to the towering scale of a Scottish castle.

This is such a theatrical space,

with the gallery and the lighting effects.

Rennie Mackintosh was a real architectural impresario.

He cast such a shadow

it would be difficult for anyone to emerge from it.

And Margaret never did quite manage to.

After their marriage in 1900,

her collaboration with Charles intensified.

They moved to a smart new town house

which they redesigned in the Glasgow Style.

Today you can find it at the Hunterian Art Gallery,

just as if the couple had got up and left it

to go out and buy some oatcakes.

Now, remember the art school, and look at this...

Walking through this intimate space

I feel like Goldilocks when the three bears were out.

I keep expecting the Mackintoshes to come back with their groceries.

The couple created this as a home in 1906,

but also as a showcase for their style.

Here's that long Japonesque shape again in the chairs

and the writing desk, but now there's a new motif -

the Celtic rose that's become

an emblem of the Glasgow Style and of the city itself.

It's tremendously pristine, isn't it? And calm and minimalist

and rather soothing, as if perhaps a fresh drift of snow

was banked up against the windows.

But this was Glasgow,

one of the great industrial centres of the world.

Within earshot, factory hooters were going off, steam locomotives

hammering to and fro, and on the Clyde, the noise of the rivets

being punched into the steel hulls

of the ships that dominated the world.

But you'd never guess any of that was going on

from the sanatorium hush of this space.

For them, it was a refuge, a spotless, germ-free environment

in which they could be together and celebrate their love

and, as lovers have done through all eternity,

shut out the rest of the world,

almost hermetically in this case.

Margaret worked in metals and fabrics

but I've come to talk to Pamela Robertson,

curator of the gallery, about the panel above the fireplace.

Isn't this the panel

that went for nearly two million quid not so long ago?

Well, actually it's not.

It's not? Oh. It looks very like it,

but the one that was at auction is a duplicate version of this one.

This one came to the university through Margaret MacDonald's family.

And then the other version,

which was owned by a great Viennese collector, Fritz Waerndorfer,

and went through his family and then out into the open market,

and that was sold at auction for that world record price.

What about this panel?

I mean, first of all is this how Margaret intended us to see it?

Largely, yes.

I mean it's astonishing, given that it's made of gesso,

a sort of plaster-based medium and is very fragile,

that we see it pretty much intact.

'During her lifetime, Mary's innovative decorative panels

'made a huge impact on continental Art Nouveau.'

The May Queen, exhibited in Vienna in 1900, impressed

the golden boy of Viennese Art Nouveau, Gustav Klimt himself.

He struck up a friendship with the Mackintoshes,

and particularly with Margaret.

And the unlettered eye might say this reminds me

a lot of Klimt, but actually the artistic boot's on

the other foot there really, isn't it?

I mean she influenced him, is that right?

There was a bit of a dialogue but I think you can certainly say

it started with her and Mackintosh's work

when they both exhibited large-scale decorative gesso friezes

in Vienna at the Eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition.

And that notion of large friezes facing each other across a room,

decorative, as this panel is,

certainly had a profound influence on Klimt

and his later decorative work.

Two years after The May Queen, Klimt created the Beethoven Frieze,

the first of his own decorative panels.

Despite her connection to Klimt,

one of the giants of 20th century Art Nouveau,

Margaret MacDonald is still not widely appreciated

in Britain outside the gilded world of art galleries and auctions.

Speaking of which, it's the day of the Christie's sale.

Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, Silver Apples Of The Moon.

I point out that this is on vellum, and not paper.

Lot 68 will open at £30,000...

The couple never received

the recognition in Glasgow that they won on the continent.

Charles' last commission in his home town was in 1906.

They moved to London in 1914 and then to France

but their fortunes never looked up.

Margaret didn't work after 1921

and when she died her entire estate was worth only £88.

Any more? At 85, still with you.

90,000.

95,000.

And selling at £95,000.

No more? 95,000.

It's yours.

How times have changed.

After Margaret MacDonald's death in 1933, it seemed like the last

of British Art Nouveau had gone with her,

but our story doesn't end there.

It was 1966, Beatles, Carnaby Street, Flower Power.

So who do you suppose the V&A dedicated

a prestigious exhibition to?

None other than the pioneer of Art Nouveau in this country,

Aubrey Beardsley himself.

That's right. He was reinstated as an icon of trendy, happening London.

Victorian Britain associated Beardsley's sensuous curves

with degeneracy, but in the sexually liberated '60s, they chimed

with the swirling psychedelia and with the hippie movement.

Gerald Scarfe, himself a child of those days, is today

the celebrated political caricaturist of The Sunday Times.

He acknowledges his own debt to Beardsley,

the once defamed pioneer of Art Nouveau.

This one I did for The Sunday Times of Stalin here.

I picked up really on Beardsley's ability to have these very,

very fine lines and these dramatic blocks of colour which, you know,

picks that drawing up.

But this, I hope, does have some sort of impact because he was

part of my consciousness at that time and people compared me

to Beardsley, so I was extra interested and wondered why.

So that whack of black I sort of learned from him.

That was, you know, a good way to do it.

'When Beardsley was the talk of the town again in 1967,

'Scarfe was commissioned by the New Statesman to create

'a caricature of the iconoclastic illustrator, and this is where

'viewers of a sensitive disposition should please avert their eyes.'

Well, I mean, in true caricaturist style,

I have exaggerated everything.

I have exaggerated Beardsley's exaggeration.

And I think, you know, that may have to be censored for the BBC.

But, I am pretty certain that will have to be, that bit there.

There we are, darling Aubrey.

When Scarfe was in his Beardsley phase in the 1960s,

a wealthy and influential couple,

on the crest of this new wave of Art Nouveau,

started a collection of their own.

At the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich,

the team is preparing to put it on show.

It was collected by Sir Colin Anderson and Lady Anderson

over a period of years, starting in the '60s,

which classically is when a lot of the contemporary,

the great Art Nouveau collections started coming together.

There was a big revival then, of interest?

Huge revival. I always think it's based on the Beatles' lyrics.

A lot of the Beatles' album covers used Art Nouveau.

It was big revival alongside pop art.

And at the beginning of the 21st century,

the significance of the style is being reassessed again.

The main point, I think, in a way,

is to rescue Art Nouveau from the 19th century and show it

as being the first modern style, the first attempt self-consciously by

designers in England and in Europe to make something modern -

the modern age really begins with these designers

and what they were up to.

It's hard to exaggerate now

just how bold and ambitious Art Nouveau was in its heyday

just over a century ago,

when a more insular society was wary of anything

too cosmopolitan, too foreign.

Art Nouveau was the first truly international style,

bridging the old century and the new.

These days, we understand that for a design movement to be successful

it has to be global, it has to be international,

and we recognise that "foreign" and "new" aren't dirty words.

Next time,

I'm in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt and a gang of rebellious artists

won their artistic freedom and transformed the city in

an art revolution that was sealed with a kiss.

As the 19th century drew to a close,

a radical new style swept across Europe.

Victorian rectitude was washed away

as bohemian artists unleashed a wave of curling, sexual, sensuous art.

Smog-filled cities were splashed with colour and vitality

as idealistic architects put nature at the heart of the metropolis.

And nymph-like women were adored, adorned

and finally allowed to let their hair down.

This revolutionary new style was called Art Nouveau.

It blossomed when ideas met artists,

in Paris, London, Brussels and Glasgow.

But it was the idealistic artists of Vienna

who had the most intense and passionate affair

with the new style.

This city was home to an amazing combination of art,

ambition and intellectualism.

Its cafes and salons were a ferment of radical politics,

sexual deviancy and blasphemous ideas,

and in this hothouse bloomed some of the most beautiful works

of Art Nouveau the world has ever seen.

This story of Viennese Art Nouveau

is a story of beauty in an ugly time.

A city that discovered psychology

just as it was having a nervous breakdown.

An artistic rise and fall.

And what was meant to be a prelude turned out to be a finale.

MUSIC: "Waltz No 2" by Dmitri Shostakovich

You know, every year millions of us come here to Vienna

to look at Klimt's The Kiss. It's an absolute tourist must.

Do you like that? Yes. Yeah, it's good.

For most on the Viennese tourist trail,

it's all kiss and no tell.

But there's so much more than Klimt.

There was the architect, Otto Wagner,

whose decorative buildings transformed the city.

There was the designer, Josef Hoffmann,

whose exquisite geometric patterns redefined Art Nouveau.

And there was an eccentric supporting cast of renegade artists.

Together, they dared to take on the establishment

and won their creative freedom.

The whole world flocks to Vienna to see the fabulous Art Nouveau,

and what's more, everybody gets to take a little bit home

with them too, in the shape of a fridge magnet, a dish towel

or some souvenir like that.

Klimt Barbie, anyone?

No?

But to go home with a deeper understanding of the art

and the city, we have to leave the gift shop behind,

and ask ourselves, "Who were these eclectic artists?

"What caused an old European city to embrace a radical new style?"

Well, the story begins with a bizarre catalyst in the 1880s

When a terrible tragedy,

a right royal scandal,

forced the city to re-examine its precious Viennese values.

Let me take you back to the days of Old Vienna.

Once upon a time...

January 1899, to be precise...

Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire,

went for a walk in these woods with his lover.

They never came back.

It was complicated. His lover wasn't his wife.

Rudolf was in an arranged aristocratic marriage but unhappy.

No, she was the teenage Baroness, Marie Vetsera,

who adored her Prince.

But their affair ended in horror.

He took out a gun and murdered his mistress

before turning the weapon on himself.

GUNSHOT

The death of the Crown Prince triggered a cultural crisis.

Vienna was shocked to its very core.

Thinkers and artists, like the designer Josef Hoffmann,

architect Otto Wagner and painter Koloman Moser, met in the cafes

and bars and wondered what had happened

to the city's moral compass.

It was a seismic scandal in a turbulent time.

And the shockwaves made the traditional Viennese values

look increasingly fragile and old-fashioned.

There was a very stifling conventionality,

a very, very stifling official culture, this imperial rigidity.

The picture of the Emperor everywhere, overlooking every room.

But at the same time, you know, there were...

People simply exercised their life choices,

but that had to be away from what is admitted publicly.

You were not supposed to touch your wife in public,

but you could have a lover somewhere

installed in a little apartment, as long as it didn't become public.

So there was a sort of institutionalised hypocrisy.

The imperial identity was very important,

but it was really a paste-on, it was a facade, if you want.

You had to have the official facade that was not questioned,

and what you did behind it was your own business. It was up to you.

Behind the facades, the city was daring

to question its long-held assumptions.

Shouldn't Viennese art be celebrating sensuality,

rather than denying it?

Should its artists not be more honest about psychology,

sex and death?

After all, in other European capitals,

artists were daring to try something new.

La Belle Epoque-era Paris

was in the thrall of what they called l'Art Nouveau.

In Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh

was designing his inspirational School Of Art.

And with new printing presses rolling,

influential art journals from across the continent

made their way back to the banks of the Blue Danube.

Viennese artists were desperate to waltz to a new beat.

C'mon people, get with the programme. It's the 1890s.

The age of mass rail travel,

popular printing presses and international exhibitions.

Do you come here often? You're a lovely mover.

An idea could take off in Europe

and sweep through the continent in literally months.

In many ways, Vienna's artists were the last to arrive

at the Art Nouveau Ball.

Because there was one seemingly insurmountable hurdle...

The all-powerful committee of the Association of Austrian Artists.

Or as it was known locally, Das Kunstlerhaus.

Such was the stranglehold of the Kunstlerhaus over Vienna

in those days, that if you were an artist,

you couldn't get your stuff into an official exhibition

without their explicit say-so.

The Kunstlerhaus curated all the major art shows in the city,

and always chose ceiling-to-floor classic historic art

by Austrian artists.

Safe. Traditional.

Boring!

There was no room for experiments and new styles were rejected.

In the coffee houses, revolting young artists fumed

at the lack of freedom, and vowed to storm the Conservative Kunstlerhaus.

This is where Art Nouveau was born in Vienna, in April, 1897.

A group of harrumphing young artists turned up here at the Kunstlerhaus.

And they said, "We've had enough of your boring,

"stultifying establishment. We're seceding from it."

And so begat the Secession.

It was a pivotal moment for Viennese art.

The Secession would change everything.

This famous photo shows some of the original Secessionists.

They include Emil Orlik,

a graphic illustrator who'd worked for the prestigious Pan magazine.

Carl Moll, who at this point was an idealistic painter,

but would end up a fervent Nazi,

and Maximilian Kurzweil,

a painter who would later succumb to the same fate as the Crown Prince,

when he shot his lover and then himself.

They may have looked confident.

The picture makes them look like some obscure, cool indie band.

But the Secession was a huge risk.

Without the Kunstlerhaus, the Secessionists had nowhere

to exhibit, no commissions,

and risked artistic ridicule.

They desperately needed a credible figurehead,

so they approached the rising star of Viennese art

and asked him to act as their president.

Gustav Klimt became the best known,

the most celebrated painter in Art Nouveau,

but he began life as just another late classic historical artist.

The young Klimt began painting in the 1880s,

initially churning out the sort of establishment art

cherished by the great and the good.

Like this ceiling panel in the Burgtheater.

And by the way, check out the figure towards the back,

in the beard and the ruff,

looking slightly off.

That's a rare self-portrait of the young Gustav Klimt.

But in 1892, Klimt was traumatised

by the death of his beloved brother and of his father.

He rejected conservative ideas and began to explore a new style.

A couple of years later, he was commissioned by Vienna University

to paint four inspiring ceiling panels.

Sadly the original paintings were destroyed by the Nazis,

and we're left with these black and white copies.

But you can still see how radically Klimt's style was changing,

infused with sex, death and the European spirit of Art Nouveau.

The University hated them, but Klimt didn't care.

He was up for the fight,

and agreed to become president of the Secessionists.

In many ways, Klimt was an odd choice.

He was notoriously taciturn,

not a man you'd turn to to voice an opinion in public.

And he was making a very comfortable living

with commissions from the Viennese establishment and the state.

But this was different. This was about art. It was about freedom.

And so taking a huge professional and personal gamble,

he simply turned his back on the establishment

and became president of the Secessionists.

One of the first things Klimt and the gang did

was to publish their very own art journal.

It gave them a platform to air their Secessionist principles,

their liberal views

and their breathtaking graphic work.

They called it Ver Sacrum.

Ver Sacrum - sacred spring. It really means fountain of youth,

with all the connotations of energy, youth,

vitality and sexuality that that expresses.

And there's something of that in the cover plate.

And what we have here is a young plant,

bursting out of the pot it's kept in.

And it's a way of saying, I suppose quite a polite way of saying,

"Sod you lot. We're doing our own thing from now,

"we won't be confined by what's gone before and by what you're used to."

This is the closest thing that the Secession,

the Viennese Art Nouveau, had to a manifesto.

And the fact that the artists and writers were donating their work

for nothing is all part of the spirit of Ver Sacrum.

Art is what counts, not bourgeois values like money.

Not putting things in the bank, but things for eternity,

things of ethereal spiritual value.

And basically they were attracting contributions

from the outstanding artists and writers of the time,

and of course from Klimt, a mainstay of Ver Sacrum.

And in the first ever edition, they declared...

"We want to bring art from abroad to Vienna,

"not for the sake of artists, intellectuals and collectors alone,

"but to educate the great mass of the people

"who are receptive to art.

"And for this we turn to you without distinction of status or wealth.

"We do not recognise any distinction between higher art and low art,

"between art of the rich and art for the poor.

"Art is the property of everyone."

Some of the people who contributed

were still recognisably in the historical tradition,

but there's no doubt that they were all moving towards the Art Nouveau,

as we now understand it.

Except they didn't call it that.

Instead they co-opted a German word, Jugendstil, meaning "youth style".

Jugendstil was Vienna's unique contribution

to European Art Nouveau.

There were influences from Japan, from France,

disparate elements built upon one another.

Like all European Art Nouveau, Jugendstil was sexual.

Dare I say it, even a little bit playful and camp.

There was no hierarchy.

Craft and graphic art were as important

as the painters and sculptors.

And in Vienna,

the curves owed as much to geometry as they did to botany.

But ultimately there were no rules or diktats,

as the Secession was founded on the principles of artistic freedom.

I wanted to show you this special one painting by Wilhelm Bernatzik.

He's one of the founding members.

So whilst works by artists like Wilhelm Bernatzik

might look quite traditional to the modern eye,

the dissent is in the detail.

And this painting represents

one aspect which was very important to the Secessionists.

It was a new beginning in art,

and what they wanted to express is inner feelings

which have been suppressed very much.

So it's not a naturalistic depiction

of things which we can find in the landscape,

but it's about the inner feeling which comes out

when you contemplate this scene.

What kind of things would you say the Secessionists had in common?

What united all the Secessionists was the wish to educate the public.

What they wanted is to elevate taste, elegance, so to say,

so they wanted to bring in international art.

They tried to confront Austrian art with international art,

which up to that point hadn't been seen very much.

As Art Nouveau arrived from across the continent,

artists like Koloman Moser, who'd spent years debating

the merits of the style with his fellow cafe conspirators,

finally had the chance to create a distinctive Viennese version.

This painting over here, by Kolo Moser...

And he was the multi-talent of the Secession.

As you know, he was a designer of furniture.

He was one of the greatest graphic designers of the time.

He was one of the major figures of Ver Sacrum, of the magazine.

And he was a painter. Many of his paintings

in profile or very frontal, very simple.

And this reduction is quite a typical aspect of the Secession.

Another one would be the square format,

the thin-framed... aspects of elegance

which were important to the Secessionists.

What else shall we see?

Let's go over to there. Why not?

Freed from a strict diet of Austrian historic painting,

the Secessionists eagerly embraced Art Nouveau.

They experimented with styles, surface and symbolism

and they explored sexuality, mortality and human frailty.

Jugendstil was a new art for a new era.

And when the Secessionists founded their new movement,

it was so important to them

that they could speak with different voices.

And that's why you really have a variety of expressions

in the first years of the Secession.

So, in this regard, it was really a break

with things that had gone on before.

In 1898, just a year after they'd seceded,

the artistic rebels, with the help of a few wealthy patrons,

built a home for the Secession.

And the building was as radical

as the art it was created to contain.

Significantly, the Secession building is away from

grandiose establishment buildings on Vienna's main Ringstrasse.

On the roof, there's a dome

decorated with 3,000 gold-plated laurel leaves.

But there are no windows looking onto the street.

It's as if the gallery invites you to step inside.

To look deeper. To be introspective.

And maybe that's no surprise, because the architect Joseph Olbrich

said he wanted to erect a temple of art,

which would offer the art lover a quiet, elegant place of refuge.

Inside, there was another shock for visitors.

The Secession was one of the first white cube gallery spaces,

a sparse layout that in 1898 was a dazzlingly new

and daringly modern idea.

To this day, the gallery is still devoted to contemporary art.

But you can get a flavour of the original Secession in the basement,

where Klimt's 1902 masterpiece

the Beethoven Frieze is on permanent display.

The magnificent Beethoven Frieze is meant to be read from left to right.

So in the first panel, these lovely, leggy, ethereal ladies

represent the longing for true happiness.

And you can see how far Klimt's come from historicism.

Look at how delicate and sensuous these women are.

The mood changes a little further along.

These unclothed figures are the sufferings of weak humanity

and they're petitioning the knight in his wonderful golden chain mail,

his armour, to take on their struggle.

But that's bad news for him, in a way,

because he has to have a bout with Typhus,

that King Kong figure in the corner.

And his seconds, if you like, over there are the three gorgons...

Sickness, Madness and Death.

Typhus is also attended

by Licentiousness, Wantonness, Intemperance.

What hope is there for us mortals

in this wretched, lousy world Klimt is suggesting?

Well, here's a clue. This beautiful woman in gold,

plucking at her lyre, represents happiness through poetry.

And this is what he's building up to with his closing finale here.

Our best hope of comfort and fulfilment on this mortal coil

is in the arts.

Look at these beautiful women. The gold, the chorus of angels.

And the finest fulfilment of the arts yet known,

he's almost suggesting,

is the work of Beethoven and the celestial Ode To Joy.

On the opening night,

Mahler put on a special rendition of Ode To Joy,

and I can thoroughly recommend a blast of the old LVB

as you're taking in the frieze.

It really starts to make sense. Trust me.

MUSIC: "Ode To Joy" by Beethoven

Perhaps most tellingly,

the iconic building was emblazoned with the most cherished belief

of the whole Secessionist project.

Above the door, in big gold letters,

it reads, "Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit,"

which of course translates as...

"To the age, its art. To the art, its freedom."

So what's that all about, then?

Is it just a load of old guff?

"To the age, its art."

Well, here the young ones, the Jugendstil, are saying,

"Move over, Daddio. You've had your time.

"We refuse to be hidebound by what's gone before."

"To the art, its freedom," develops that thought.

It says, "We reserve the right to pick and choose

"from a smorgasbord of ideas, new and old.

"This is a new art for a new century."

Through the pages of Ver Sacrum

and the frequent Secessionist exhibitions,

Viennese Jugendstil grew in confidence.

Works by Klimt, Koloman Moser and Carl Moll

were widely admired and celebrated.

But not everyone was delighted.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the Secession exhibition,

he said, "Those rascals should have every bone in their body broken."

But the Jugendstil kids couldn't care less.

They were brash, confident young Viennese artists,

and if the establishment hated the YVAs,

that only proved they were onto something.

Their first show pulled in getting on for 60,000 people.

No wonder they were so bold.

The Viennese art revolution coincided with

a social revolution in the city.

The population of Vienna doubled between 1870 and 1900

and as the city expanded,

it gave the architects a chance to get in on the Jugendstil action.

The most celebrated of them in the city was Otto Wagner.

With years of experience, ol' Otto was trusted by the authorities.

But he was also a teacher, with a radical side to him.

His students included architects like Josef Hoffmann,

and the man who designed the Secessionist building,

Joseph Olbrich.

And they seemed to inspire him as much as he inspired them.

Otto Wagner was known as the Secessionists' Secessionist,

and when you look at his buildings, you can see why.

Look at the design, that floral motif, the ornament of it.

It could almost be a painting by Klimt of a woman's dress.

The new art and new city came together

when Otto Wagner designed the spectacular stations

of the Viennese underground,

including a stop built for the Emperor himself.

One admirer at the time said Wagner's stations

were the highpoint of "function and poetry,

"constructions and decoration."

Secessionist architecture,

with its modern geometric patterns, was changing the face of Vienna.

But the artists and architects

weren't content with superficial differences.

After all, they didn't want to just replace the old facade

with a shiny new facade.

They wanted deeper change.

One word, and it's very good word, you're going to love it,

sums up the entire Secession aesthetic.

Are you ready?

Gesamtkunstwerk. Bless you.

It's a Wagnerian concept, and it means "a total work of art".

Because it wasn't enough to gaze at Klimt's beautiful paintings.

It wasn't enough to pop into the Secession exhibitions.

It wasn't even enough to live in a house

decorated and designed by Otto Wagner.

No, for the true Jugendstil experience,

you had to live a life immersed,

surrounded and improved by art.

You needed to live the life Gesamtkunstwerk.

And that meant infusing your life with the spirit of the Secession,

from the Beethoven Frieze to the kitchen cupboard.

Christian, this looks to my untutored eye

to be a fairly humdrum sort of item. Why have we stopped here?

At the time it was really revolutionary for people.

We have artist, which is Josef Hoffmann, an architect,

who bothers to design a piece of furniture for a second-class room,

which is the kitchen.

For us today, the kitchen has become the most expensive room

of the apartment. But then, no visitor would see.

Also, from a formal aspect,

it was revolutionary, because it has no traditional decoration on it,

which would be carving or moulding.

So the function and the construction

produces the aesthetics of the cabinet.

It's all about very subtle details.

Why to waste them on a kitchen cupboard?

Well, why did they waste them on a kitchen cupboard?

That's the basic idea of the arts and crafts movement,

to give the people who were most affected by the negative aspects

of the industrial revolution a voice and a beautiful surrounding.

The cabinet was made by the Wiener Werkstatte,

a collection of Vienna's finest artists, artisans and craftsmen.

The Wiener Werkstatte - Vienna Workshop - was founded in 1903

by two of the original Secessionists.

The always impeccably dressed Josef Hoffmann, an architect and designer

who began with big, idealistic ideas

about kitchen cabinets improving the lives of servants,

and his friend, Koloman Moser, the great all-rounder

who painted for the Secession and was instrumental in Ver Sacrum.

They wanted to get away from curvy, botanically inspired Art Nouveau,

towards a distinctive new geometric Viennese aesthetic.

In fact, Hoffmann's obsession with grid-like patterns earned him

the perhaps uncool nickname Little Square Hoffmann.

Together, Hoffmann and Moser ran the Wiener Werkstatte,

infusing Jugendstil principles into the furnishings and objects

of everyday life.

Now, this looks very different.

Can you tell me about this?

OK. Indeed it is extremely different,

and it marks a period where all the social idealism is gone,

and it's all about the artist wanting to realise

his creative idea.

They could have carved this, you know?

Or they could have made the inlay out of flowers.

But they chose this very simple band.

And it's about honesty, simplicity.

It didn't matter if the art was old or new.

They wanted artistic expression again.

The Werkstatte was proud of its perfectionism, declaring,

"Better to work ten days on one product

"than to manufacture ten products in one day."

Despite Hoffmann's early democratic intentions, it soon became clear

that it was only the very rich and the very adventurous

who could afford the Werkstatte's stamp of perfection.

This egg cup and the pepper caster...

one of the most fantastic objects

the Wiener Werkstatte ever produced.

Really?

Today, again, we take them for granted,

this individuality of the shape,

but for people at the time, they must have looked like aliens.

It looks like a flying saucer, this egg cup,

and no ornamentation on it, just the cut-out squares.

And this was an extremely expensive luxury item.

If you bought this, you were really making a statement

about yourself, or trying to, is that right?

Yes.

You tried to tell society that you exist, and that...

It's like what's happening in New York today still,

that... You ask an interior decorator to do your apartment,

to make an impact on society, that you count.

But even for the Viennese middle class desperate to show off,

exquisite Art Nouveau furnishings were prohibitively expensive.

Fortunately for the Wiener Werkstatte,

they had caught the eye of a financier who had invested

in the Viennese railways,

a man called Adolphe Stoclet.

As a cultured, liberal European,

Stoclet was excited by Vienna's Art Nouveau.

And he was also very...

very...rich.

When his father died, Stoclet inherited a fortune.

He and his wife were already keen on the Secession.

Here was a chance for them to indulge their passion.

In 1904, they commissioned Josef Hoffmann

to build them their dream house.

It would be themed and designed right down to the egg cups.

That's right, it was going to be a Gesamtkunstwerk.

For the Stoclets, it was the opportunity

to show off their taste and their modernity.

Viennese artists couldn't believe their luck.

Here was a chance to indulge their wildest excesses, money no object.

It was to be the finest Art Nouveau building in all of...

TRAIN HORN BLARES

..Brussels.

Because Mr and Mrs Stoclet's dream location, location, location

was in fact 570 miles from Vienna.

Believe it or not, Brussels was one of the most exciting

artistic cities of the fin de siecle.

They were creating the first Art Nouveau buildings here in 1893,

four years before the Viennese even plucked up the courage

to start their own Secession.

And just sauntering through the city,

you see architectural gems on every corner.

Brussels' Art Nouveau star

was Victor Horta, whose innovate architecture

pioneered the use of organic curls and swirls.

Horta designed houses for nouveau riche Belgians,

with seaweed-like wrought iron.

And he was one of the first architects to integrate

all-new electric light into his interior stylings.

This is Victor Horta's house. It's now a museum to the old boy.

Built in 1898, it's resplendent, as you see, with light, nature,

organic shapes.

If the Viennese architects were going to come up with

anything as good as this, right here in Brussels,

it would be like the toughest away game imaginable.

The Stoclet Palais would have to be a masterpiece.

Work began on the Stoclet Palais in 1905.

Every detail had to be honed, perfected.

This exhibition shows the extensive preparatory work,

showcasing the early plans and sketches.

Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann designed the building,

and the artists of the Wiener Werkstatte

furnished the interiors.

For an opulent finishing touch,

the great star of Vienna's art scene, Klimt himself,

created a huge centrepiece frieze.

It took five long years to complete.

There was to be a unity of style to every aspect of the building.

It would be a Viennese masterpiece in the heart of Brussels.

So what's the old pile like on the inside?

Does that interior sing like a symphony?

Is that Klimt frieze all it's cracked up to be?

Sadly, for the public, for historians,

and yes, even for arts documentaries,

the house and its contents are out of bounds,

tied up in a long-running legal dispute

involving Stoclet's descendants.

So there's nothing else for it, is there?

But to peek over the fence.

It's the great Miss Havisham of European architecture,

still dressed up in its finery, but withdrawn from the world.

The house, garden, interiors and furnishings

were all conceived as an architectural whole.

Every detail. The carpet, wallpaper, glass, silverware, lighting,

furniture and fittings, was designed and created in Vienna.

The dining room had Hoffmann silver cutlery, crockery

and 24 matching chairs covered in reindeer skin.

Even the children's playroom

had a Wiener Werkstatte-designed frieze on the wall.

Vienna's finest architect, finest craftsman and finest artist

had finally created the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk.

But to this day, the secrets of the Stoclet Palais

remain locked away.

The most famous painting in Austria,

the jewel in Vienna's Art Nouveau crown,

the work which is synonymous with Gustav Klimt,

was painted in 1908.

It's one of those rare iconic works of art that needs no introduction.

First of all, I have to say it's not The Kiss.

When you look at the painting, you will see it's not The Kiss.

They're lovers.

So, also Klimt named the painting Lovers.

This is something special.

It's not The Kiss, it's definitely the moment before.

So this is very important to know.

Whatever you call Klimt's masterpiece,

standing in front of the original is an overwhelming experience.

No wonder it's held up as the pinnacle of Viennese Art Nouveau.

Decorative and fine arts are intertwined here,

with layers of geometric patterns,

ornamentation and the use of Klimt's favourite material...

gold.

So the father was a goldsmith,

and Klimt was used to working with gold.

You can have the polished gold, you can work with leaf gold,

whatever it is, you know, and with a shiny one, with not so shiny.

Because he had the knowledge about the material, so he used it, yeah?

So he was the only one who did it, more than also the pre-Raphaelites,

because the pre-Raphaelites, they used the gold as well.

But only in connection with saints, yeah?

But Klimt changed it completely.

Klimt worked with the idea of the icon. When you're entering

a church, let's say in Russia or in Greece, with a lot of icons,

you see those metallic pieces there.

But painted is only the face and the hands.

And this is what Gustav Klimt wanted to show, you know.

He's focusing everything on the faces and on the hands.

And that's it. And the rest is gold, and this makes it so famous,

and when the tourists... The moment when they're entering the door here,

it's still. It's quiet, and they're overwhelmed.

It's definitely a kind of Klimt Church, which we have here.

What's it like seeing this painting every day,

as you do, in your professional capacity?

Can you still see it?

Has it become like the furniture for you?

Sometimes I really hate the painting... Do you?

..because you can see it everywhere, on the umbrella, everywhere,

and I always feel as though

there's something in the painting which I don't know,

there is another secret which I didn't realise, and I have to work.

It's always a confrontation between me and the painting.

Every day I have these confrontations.

Klimt almost never explained his paintings.

He lived with his mother and his sister.

He rarely courted the limelight, and never married.

But although you might not take ol' Klimt for a lothario,

oh, bless him, the sensuality and brazen sexuality of his work

set tongues a-wagging.

Klimt hardly ever painted men.

And when he did, their faces were averted.

He had countless lovers, and in the coffee shops of Vienna,

they whispered about the young girls flitting through his studio.

Of course Art Nouveau had a thing about bare girls and nymphs,

but Klimt was obsessed with the female form.

Some of his paintings and etchings were pure Viennese Viagra

for a certain class of gentleman collector.

In fact, in 1901, the Public Prosecutor of Vienna

ordered the latest edition of Ver Sacrum to be seized

and all copies found, destroyed.

Fortunately, the court rejected the call

to destroy Klimt's erotic sketches,

and I've come to the storerooms of the Leopold museum

to look under their mattress.

I mean, to access some of Klimt's rarely displayed material.

Tell me about this one, Maria.

I'm sure this is one of those drawings which were created

after Klimt has made love to her,

because her expression is after orgasm.

And this was unusual

in that he's celebrating the female sexuality here?

Yes, and that's what was perhaps shocking for his contemporaries.

Female sexuality was a taboo

and to show a face of a woman

in this...very happy...

circumstances. Orgasmic.

Orgasmic, of course, you say it, was not usual to see in a picture.

The spontaneous expression here in the drawing,

you never find in the same way in the paintings.

One of the few pronouncements that Klimt did make

was that "all art is erotic".

He's articulating one of the core beliefs of Art Nouveau,

a movement that celebrated sensuality.

And it's clear that Klimt idolised women,

both sexually and aesthetically.

But despite the flattering treatment,

it sometimes seems that the women in his work are there

as part of the artist's own decorative scheme,

rather than as portraits of living, breathing individuals.

And of course, from a feminist point of view,

this is terrible, because he had a very male view on these girls,

and he didn't respect their individuality.

So, for the feminists, he is a terrible guy.

But on the other hand, he is a great artist,

and I think you cannot blame him personally for this attitude,

because it was so typical for the time and for the atmosphere

in which he lived, and in which he created his art.

But with all this wanton sexuality,

all these richly decorated portraits of smouldering society women,

these opulent ornamental buildings

stuffed with luxurious chairs and pepper pots,

the sheer decadence of Art Nouveau made it ripe for criticism.

And it was no longer just idiotic aristocrats

whinging on about traditionalism.

The era of mass production was well under way

and urban life grew ever more anxious.

Art Nouveau sceptics were emerging.

And none more so than this man, the eccentric Adolf Loos.

Loos was a vehement opponent of the Secession.

He spent three years in the United States,

and came back here to Vienna

enthralled by their much more practical approach to design.

He was a deep thinker and a man with a clever turn of phrase.

Herr Loos wrote essays on every aspect of life.

But his most influential writing was on architecture.

In Ornament And Crime,

he dismissed the Secessionists' idea of the craftsman as an artist,

and he declared ornamentation "degenerate".

In 1909, he finally got the chance

to put these theories into practise, when he won a commission

in the historic heart of Vienna.

Get a load of this place. This is the Emperor's Hofburg Palace.

And that's only the back door.

One day a couple of tailors approached Adolf Loos and said,

"Can you build us a new shop front? It's got to be opposite the palace."

What would he come up with?

How would he satisfy the curiosity of the Viennese

for architecture with attitude?

What would the man deliver?

Da-na!

Please yourselves.

At first glance,

you could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about.

But believe me, when it was first revealed in 1910,

the Looshaus shocked Vienna.

There was no traditional ornaments,

no nude muscular heroes, no cherubs,

but nor were there florid Art Nouveau patterns,

gold, curling metal.

To Viennese eyes, the building was naked.

One wag dubbed it the house without eyebrows!

That's probably funnier in German.

Inside, the public areas of the shop combined mahogany,

oak, brass and mirrors to stunning effect,

while the work areas were more Spartan.

Loos dismissed the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Real people didn't need a life surrounded by art, he said.

What they needed were buildings

that were primarily functional and simple,

and any superfluous decoration was an old fashioned idea.

Loos thought it was as savage as getting a tattoo.

His definition of modern architecture

was influential and compelling.

Even the Secessionists' star architect seemed to concur.

Otto Wagner, who originally designed buildings like this,

ended up producing buildings like this one.

The era of decoration was well and truly over.

In the fine arts too, Art Nouveau was beginning to age.

Nothing illustrates this better than the emergence in 1909

of the enfant terrible of Viennese art, Egon Schiele.

At first, Schiele seemed destined

to be the next big thing in Art Nouveau.

So, Frank, what are we going to see first?

What have you got up your sleeve?

Well, it's quite an interesting picture, really,

cos although I would be the last to say it's a GOOD painting,

it's a very young Schiele. He was 18 when he did it.

It's called Stylised Flowers.

I don't see that you can describe this picture at all

without mentioning Art Nouveau or Jugendstil.

He has turned everything into a decorative device.

It's ornamental.

But what's really interesting about it, it seems to me,

is the evidence that it provides

of his interest in what Klimt was doing.

First of all, you've got a square format,

of which Klimt himself was so fond.

Secondly, we've got that central position in the painting.

But then there's the final clincher, if you like,

which is the use of gold and silver,

actually IN the surface of the paint,

which of course is taken directly from those paintings by Klimt.

What was their relationship like, Frank?

Well, Schiele would very much have liked it to be

a kind of father/son relationship, but it was never that.

Klimt obviously liked Schiele.

He admired to an extent what Schiele was doing.

He helped Schiele early in his career.

Schiele, on the other hand, absolutely ADORED Klimt.

So, Frank, is it the case with Schiele then,

that he's got all these influences from Klimt,

there's an Art Nouveau period,

but then he's taking art onwards in some way?

Very much so.

And I suggest we look at a painting now,

which will demonstrate that in maybe even a shocking way.

Really, Frank? Well, we're both consenting adults.

Let's have a look.

Lovemaking. Wow, that is quite full on, isn't it? It is.

You wouldn't know that was the same bloke.

No.

And that, of course, is a self-portrait. Really?

The whole point about this really is

that he makes himself look like a corpse

and she looks like one of these rubber dolls that you...

..well, not exactly rubber. But you know what I'm trying to say.

I have heard of them. Yes. Yes.

He's dealing now with death, with melancholy,

with extremes of all sorts.

And he's also, of course, consciously dealing

with what might be regarded as an impossible subject.

He's using his work to express something

which is beyond what you can see.

What you can see is merely, as it were, the veil

which is cast in front of the true message of the picture.

Schiele is now, particularly in a painting like this,

concerned with almost everything BUT the surface.

Frank, where did Schiele's new direction

and everything else that was happening associated with him,

where did that leave Art Nouveau?

Was it a bit old hat by now?

It was just losing relevance

and losing importance.

And this sort of thing was becoming...

..I won't say fashionable

because it never became fashionable in the same way,

but it was doing all the interesting new things

which Art Nouveau had long since ceased to do.

It was the end for beauty,

for ornament, for decadence.

Art Nouveau suddenly felt archaic,

as egotistic Egon was happy to point out.

It's called The Hermits, it's dated 1912.

It shows Schiele,

finally out of the Art Nouveau Jugendstil mould.

There's no going back from this point? Oh, no. No going back.

It looks as though Schiele is supporting

the weight of Klimt on his shoulders.

Klimt looks almost dead.

And I think he's trying to tell us something.

And what's he trying to tell us?

He's in charge now? Yeah, yeah.

There's poor old Klimt, on whom he used to rely,

who's now relying on him.

It's quite a bold, even arrogant, thing to be saying or painting?

It certainly is, but Schiele was, in terms of modernism,

that much further ahead than Klimt was.

I do see Klimt as being, as it were,

the end of something rather than the beginning of something.

He belongs as much to the 19th century as to the 20th century.

There's nowhere else really for him to go.

The work of Schiele and Loos

heralded the end for Viennese Art Nouveau.

By 1918, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser were all dead,

and the Austro-Hungarian empire had ceased to exist.

There's an argument that the Art Nouveau

that flourished on the banks of the Danube here

wasn't a new wave, so much as the last eddies of the old.

True, they banged on about being young.

They were the Jugendstil, remember.

And they dealt with trendy things like sex and psychology.

But the whole design movement here

remained essentially the plaything of the rich and the well-to-do,

and they self-consciously turned their backs

on the new means of production - industrial methods.

After the stinging criticisms of Loos,

the idea of paying a craftsman to spend ten days

making you an egg cup or a stool seemed frankly laughable.

With its decadence, decoration and luxurious prices,

Art Nouveau is as much

the last artistic flourish of the 19th century

as it is the first of the 20th century.

Perhaps it's no surprise that a stylistic movement

founded around the idea of the new never fully matured.

The style had bloomed in cities

like Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Glasgow, Prague, Barcelona,

and was built around a myriad of modern ideas about what art was for.

But just a decade or so after its spectacular rise,

it died out throughout the continent.

With the advent of the First World War,

Art Nouveau's international style was deemed unpatriotic, foreign,

and disowned by both sides of the conflict.

And by the 1920s, Adolf Loos's radical ideas

inspired modernist movements like the Bauhaus

to reject all decoration and embrace functionalism.

Fine art was enthralled to Picasso, Cubism, Abstraction.

For decades, Art Nouveau was dismissed

by both modernists and traditionalists.

Its buildings neglected, its art ignored.

In fact, it wasn't until the 1960s that a new generation

began to rediscover and celebrate European art's fin de siecle moment.

And after so much darkness in 20th century Austria,

celebrating the golden era of Klimt, Wagner, and the Wiener Werkstatte

has become vitally important to the image of the city.

Young couples snuggle up in front of The Kiss.

Tourists learn the story of the Secession.

And every day, thousands of Viennese commuters

pass through Otto Wagner's sumptuous stations.

A multi-million pound tourist industry

is now built around the story of the Secessionists.

Klimt, Hoffman, Wagner, Moser, and Schiele, take a bow.

It strikes me that Viennese Art Nouveau

was as much about artistic freedom

as it was fancy buildings and naked ladies.

"To every age its art, and to the art its freedom."

A century on, that still sounds like a radical manifesto.

And if we ever lose sight of that,

well, then it really is Goodnight, Vienna.

# Goodnight, Vienna

# You city of a million melodies

# Our hearts are thrilling to the strains that you play

# From dawn till the daylight dies

# Goodnight, Vienna

# Where moonlight fills the air with mystery

# And eyes are shining to the gypsy guitars

# That sing to the starry sky. #