L' Aventurine - Art Nouveau Ornament - 2000

Massive Compendium of Art Nouveau

Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2010

This is a big book with thousands of b&w art Nouveau Images. 381 pp, 3 pounds.



I suppose that 15 years ago, it might have been titled something like The Big Book of Art Nouveau Clip Art because, yes, it does accumulate a massive number of apparently royalty-free images. William Morris, Karel Hvlacek, Guimard, Mucha, Galle, Julius Dietz, Beardsley, Tyra Kleen, Josef Hoffmann, and, oh, I don't know, maybe 40 more artists. Not simply the British and French are here -- this book is happy to journey onto the Continent.



A wide range of types of images are to be found here, organized into 7 chapters.



There's a lot to look at: simple ornaments, borders, signs, naked figures, clothed figures, logos, advertising art, bits of filigree, pedimentary shapes, rules, corners, foliage foliage and more foliage, little illustrative bits, complete and closely-worked prints, numbers, typography, landscapes, pre-Raphaelite medieval-y scenes, densely-illustrated scenes that probably came out of the Grimm's Household Tales traditions, blocky woodcuts, fairies, buildings, title pages, book covers, and more.



And the beauty of this is the simplicity of the presentation. Looking at some incredibly beautiful lamp from 1890 or a building from 1895, one's eye and one's brain go a thousand places at once. Here one simply gets the shapes, the lines, and forms in magnificently simple 2-D black and white. The essences of the styles that comprised Art Nouveau are here for you to experience.