Jugendstil and Art Nouveau – nature's lines in art

If there's one common denominator for everything called Jugendstil or Art Nouveau, it's the line that never runs straight when it can curve instead. Art historians have called it the whiplash line – a movement that mimics how a plant rises, how smoke drifts, or how hair falls. In Paris it appears in Hector Guimard's wrought-iron métro entrances, in Nancy in Émile Gallé's glasswork, in Vienna in Otto Wagner's facade ornamentation.

What made the style radical wasn't just its look but the ambition behind it: art was no longer meant to hang separately from everyday life. Furniture, book bindings, jewellery, posters and buildings were all meant to speak the same visual language. That idea – that decoration and function belong together – is one reason Art Nouveau's expression still feels familiar today. We're used to thinking of graphic design as a whole, not as decoration added afterwards. If you want to place Art Nouveau in relation to other movements, our guide to art periods is a good place to start.

In 1897, a group of artists in Vienna broke away from the conservative art academy and formed what became known as the Vienna Secession. Gustav Klimt became its first president, and his painting became the style's most recognisable face outside Austria. Klimt's so-called Golden Phase, with works like The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, drew its shimmer from Byzantine mosaics he had studied in Ravenna – gold leaf, geometric patterns and ornamentation that lies over the bodies like a second skin.

What makes Klimt worth returning to is precisely that tension between the organic and the strictly patterned. Faces and hands are painted with almost photographic precision, while the rest of the picture plane dissolves into spirals, eyes, flowers and grid patterns borrowed as much from textiles as from botany. In works like Fulfillment and Danaë, the ornament becomes almost physical – a way of painting intimacy without needing to paint a face at all.

If Klimt's Vienna stood for gold and dense ornament, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Paris stood for something faster and starker. Lautrec drew Montmartre's cabarets, dancers and emcees with a line borrowed from Japanese woodblock printing – ukiyo-e prints that were circulating in Paris at the time, teaching an entire generation of artists to work with flat fields of colour and negative space rather than shading.

Posters like Jane Avril, Divan Japonais and La Revue Blanche were made to be pasted on streets and building walls, often in large print runs and intended to be worn out within a few weeks. That gave them an energy quite different from salon painting: silhouettes, cropped compositions, as if the viewer had just walked past. Lautrec's portrait of Aristide Bruant, with his red scarf and wide-brimmed hat, became one of the earliest examples of how a poster could build a personal brand – a trick advertising has never let go of since.

The curious thing about Art Nouveau is how often it resurfaces without always being called by its proper name. The curved line, the decorative typography and the flat colour field turn up in album covers, festival posters and editorial illustration in cycles, especially when a graphic style wants to feel handcrafted rather than digitally cold. Where minimalism strives to strip away, Art Nouveau strives to weave together – and the two impulses seem to take turns dominating our taste.

Perhaps that's why posters from this period still work so well in contemporary spaces. They carry historical weight – the Vienna Secession, the Paris cabaret scene, the break with academic tradition that was also unfolding in parallel within Impressionism and would later be radicalised further by Expressionism – yet the expression itself, the ornament, the gold, the confident contour, still reads as modern.