Sunflower

This month we’re partnering with Europeana again to celebrate their fantastic new Art Nouveau season (21 February - 29 May). The season explores the depth and diversity of the influential art movement and features beautiful Art Nouveau jewellery, posters and much more. It is led by a major new exhibition that tells the story of Art Nouveau from its origins to its brilliant heyday, featuring fifty artworks from more than twenty museums.

In the first of these posts, we explore the beauty and significance of Eugène Grasset’s Art Nouveau lithographs, courtesy of the Schola Graphidis Art Collection in Budapest.

Many graphic artists in the Art Nouveau era were inspired by botanical illustrations and they transposed organic forms into decorative designs, often collected in design sourcebooks. Some of the finest of these books were produced by the Swiss-born artist Eugène Grasset (1845-1917) and his pupil Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869-1942).

Grasset’s 1896 book La Plante et ses applications ornementales (The Plant and its Ornamental Application) contains many intricate and colourful chromolithographs, like the Sunflower plate shown here. On each plate, a plant serves as the inspiration for decorative patterns that blend Arts and Crafts style with Art Nouveau. La Plante... also featured the work of Art Nouveau masters like Bourgeot, Gaudin and Hervegh. Its publication continued a tradition of influential design books such as Owen Jones’s 1856 opus The Grammar of Ornament.

These sourcebooks were studied not only in Europe’s fine art and architecture colleges, but also in industrial drawing schools across the continent. Their influence extended across Europe’s major cities, including Vienna and Budapest (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). This explains why the Schola Graphidis Art Collection, the modern successor of the Budapest Metropolitan Industrial Drawing School (1886–1945), has such a remarkable collection of 19th-century pattern books and ornamental prints.

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- Zuzanna