Art Nouveau Style Sterling Silver Topped Cane. Floral patterns across silver. Marked "STERLING." 

Length: 35 1/2 in. 

#4291 #11 . 

Art Nouveau (French for “New Art”), known as Jugendstil in German, Stile Liberty in Italian, Modernisme in Spanish, and multiple other variations throughout the Western world, is a style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts, often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. Other characteristics of Art Nouveau were a sense of dynamism and movement, often given by asymmetry or whiplash lines, and the use of modern materials (particularly iron, glass, ceramics, and later concrete) to create unusual forms and larger open spaces. It was also one of the first styles to wholeheartedly embrace modern technology and industry, making it one of the most influential movements of the past two centuries. It was most popular between 1890 and 1910 during the Belle Époque period, and was an indirect reaction against the academicism, eclecticism and historicism of 19th Century architecture and decorative art. One major objective of Art Nouveau was to break down the traditional distinction between fine arts (especially painting and sculpture) and applied arts, and it was most widely used in interior design, graphic arts, furniture, glass art, textiles, ceramics, jewellery, and metal work. This is due to its origins in Victorian Britain, as it was influenced primarily by the works and philosophy of artist and activist William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Japonisme was a significant contributor to the style as well, influencing designers and artists alike from Vincent Van Gogh to Victor Horta. German architects and designers embraced the movement sooner than others, and sought a spiritually uplifting Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) that would unify the architecture, furnishings, and art in the interior in a common style, to uplift and inspire their citizens who lived amongst these works. The first Art Nouveau houses and interior decoration appeared in Brussels in the 1890s, and the style spread quickly to France where it reached its peak at the 1900 Paris International Exposition. This introduced Art Nouveau to the rest of the world, including artisans in America, Australia, and Eurasia. Its impact on graphic arts was unparalleled, and influenced the birth of modern advertisement through poster design. It appeared primarily in capital cities, where artisans and the upper merchant class most rapidly embraced it, but spread to individual cities who wanted to establish their own artistic identities, such as Palermo in Italy, Glasgow in Scotland, and Catalonia in Spain. It also became a force for independence movements to rally behind, both through visual and written propaganda as well as the fundamental rejection of the old way of things, as seen primarily in Finland and the Russian Empire. By the beginning of World War I, however, the movement had exhausted itself as the realities of global conflict made arts and crafts focused more on utilitarian purposes than nature, and many critics deemed it too decadent and opulent. In the 1920s and 30s it was supplanted as the dominant architectural and decorative art style by Art Deco, and in the 1940s onward Modernism reigned supreme. But the Art Nouveau style, which was the underpinning of both of these movements, began to receive more positive attention and reevaluation from critics in the late 1960s, with multiple revivals since then.