Around 1900, artists in Paris, Vienna, Brussels, London and Chicago put serious work on paper meant to be pasted on a wall and covered over within weeks. Some of these sheets were stolen off the hoardings at night. This list follows one curving line from the street, the shop and the printed page to the walls of an exhibition.
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How These Were Chosen
Art Nouveau, French for "new art," is the decorative style that spread across Europe and the United States between about 1890 and 1910. Its sign is the line: stems, hair and ribbons that curve, double back on themselves and end in a sharp flick called the whiplash.
That line changed the job of ornament. It no longer framed the subject, it could carry it, with the lettering drawn inside the image. Cheap color lithography then took these designs onto city walls and magazine covers.
So any image printed for the street, a shop or a publisher could qualify. A one of a kind painting got in only if its pattern does the work of the subject. Furniture, glass and buildings stayed out.
12. Will Bradley, The Chap Book, Thanksgiving Number (1895)
Two women in red orange capes stand one above the other on a night blue sheet, each carrying a heaped tray at the height of her head. The lower woman is a smaller copy of the upper one. Thick black curls of Art Nouveau line wrap around their cloth, and THE CHAP BOOK runs across the top in large capitals, with THANKSGIVING NO. underneath.
The sheet advertised a magazine. In 1895, The Chap Book came out twice a month in Chicago, and it existed mainly to sell the books of its own publisher, Stone & Kimball, a firm that Herbert Stuart Stone and Hannibal Ingalls Kimball Jr. had founded while they were still Harvard students. For the Thanksgiving issue, dated 15 November, the publishers turned to Will Bradley, who had already designed the posters for the first six issues.
Bradley had no formal art training. He had learned his trade inside print shops, starting at about twelve as a printer's devil, the errand boy of the shop, and the poster is built the way a printer would build it, from a few flat colors.
Night blue covers the ground, red orange the capes, and black and a pale tone take care of the rest. On their own, the capes would read as two flat red shapes. What makes the cloth seem to move is its black lining, which turns outward in thick scrolls. The title letters share the same blue ground as the figures, so the name of the magazine belongs to the picture instead of sitting under it.
The second woman deserves a last look. Catalogues describe the poster as a single "repeated figure." In that reading there is only one woman, drawn a second time at a smaller size, and the sheet works less like a scene than like a border pattern, one motif stamped twice down the page.
At a Glance
Artist: Will H. Bradley (1868 to 1962)
Made: 1895
Medium: Color lithograph
Size: 50 × 33.6 cm (19.6 × 13.25 in), image
Where to see it: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
11. Carlos Schwabe, Salon de la Rose+Croix (1892)
Lilies lie scattered on a staircase where a woman in a dark dress climbs toward a pale figure in white, inside a frame of decorated columns that turns the tall sheet into an Art Nouveau window. SALON ROSE+CROIX sits at the top. The salon it announced came with a written list of what painters were forbidden to send.