A volume created to accompany an exhibition considers the popular and influential style of art nouveau showcasing all mediums from Tiffany lampshades to Lalique jewelry.

Looking at Art Nouveau from an international perspective, this text examines its origins and meaning within an art-historical, literary and social context. It covers all the major designers of the period and the environment in which they worked, describing the variation in forms and ideas expressed in key schools of thought.

Art Nouveau movement overlapped with late Arts and Crafts in the 1890s and early modernism in the 1910s, combining the exquisite workmanship and natural forms of the former with the innovative materials, forms and practices associated with the latter. This book provides a fascinating introduction to the style, defining it, and placing it in design history by focusing on a number of important designers - Worth, Lucile, Paquin, Poiret - and key topics, such as clients and artists, jewelery and accessories, and advertising. Art Nouveau fashion questioned conventional gender norms with daring flamboyance, presenting women in suits, influenced by tailored menswear, for the street and overtly seductive lingerie for the boudoir. Fashionable corsets manipulated female bodies into increasingly artificial forms, while advertising seduced consumers with images of scantily clad women. The movement's radicalism and openness to diverse design influences directly influenced the counter-culture of the late 1960s, inspiring boutiques in London's fashionable Carnaby Street and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.

Creative Art: Methods and Materials educates readers about a variety of art methods and the ways different civilizations have used them in artistic expression. Each of the fourteen chapters is designed around a specific art method and material, and includes examples of art works and the artists who created them. Students learn about bronze casting, stone carving, clay sculpture, woodcuts and posters, glass work, and installation art. Each method is matched to artists both ancient and modern. Rather than adhering to a standard approach that focuses on white, male, European artists, the book broadens the student's perspective by including often overlooked female artists. Global in approach and comprehensive in coverage of arts forms, representations, and styles throughout history, Creative Art has been developed for sixteen-week courses in art appreciation, or introductory survey courses in art history.

To conclude their survey, the authors look at how elements of Art Nouveau were absorbed into Art Deco after World War I and how Art Nouveau styles of tile-making have been revived in the 1980s and 1990s. A final chapter gives useful advice to the collector of Art Nouveau tiles, suggesting ways of organizing, restoring and preserving them."--BOOK JACKET.