Carol Belanger Grafton

For those who know me, Art Nouveau is my period. I am particularly well read in it, and have had several hundred desktop pieces glorifying my abodes. Dover has published countless little books on and with elements of Art Nouveau design, from cloth to wallpaper to glass and everything in between. They have been enormously useful to artists and designers looking for inspiration or outright theft, and anything to leverage the most pleasant ambience provided by Art Nouveau is welcome.

This new show more offering from Dover is a little different, because it takes graphic designs from other Dover books on Art Nouveau. It’s sort of a meta collection. The book is sectioned by country, so you can see how (very) different each one’s Art Nouveau was. Typically, some major artist set the tone and style, and derivations bloomed. Mackintosh in Scotland, Beardsley in England, Moser in Austria, Hoffmann in Germany, …. The whole period lasted from the mid 1890s to the early 1920s, and was subsumed by Art Deco, whose seeds are clearly evident, particularly in Austrian and German Art Nouveau (Jugendstil). show less

As with most of Dover's book this is a great source book for Art Nouveau designs. The selections are drawn from Art Nouveau periodicals, posters, textile and wallpaper designs, bookplates, jewellery and stained glass. Many of the designs are taken from previously published Dover source books, so it acts as a best of/basic introduction.

However Art Nouveau officiando's take note. It only covers examples from France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslavakia (exclusively Mucha), England, Switzerland and show more the US, with the first 3 countries offering the largest examples. It has a biographical index to the artists, but this contains very cursory biographical detail. I would also question the assertion that it contains "images by virtually every key artist of the Art Nouveau movement". There are no examples by Klimt, Mackintosh. Tiffany, Lalique or Gaudi so there are major ommissions.

As a source book, it offers some beautiful examples of the genre, but it is by no means an exhaustive survey.

I received a review copy via NetGalley in return for an honest review. show less

This is a pretty neat book with a wide variety of designs, and some of them were super weird. My only real complaint was that some of the alphabets did not contain all the letters, which just seemed weird to me. There's sets of letters with a more classical feel to them, and there's one that was obviously inspired by architectural floor plans. Overall a fun visual book.

I don't quilt but I keep thinking that you could use quilt patterns in collage. I liked this book because it shows the finished quilt, the blocks used to construct it, and the actual pieces used to construct the blocks. I'm hoping if I follow a few of the patterns, I'll be able to see the inter-relationship among the elements and go on to design my own.