NEW ART NOUVEAU

NO art style seemed more surely dead and buried than Art Nouveau, the turn-of-the-century vogue for flowing, whirling motifs and gingerbread gewgaws. Thrown out by cubist artists who viewed such effulgent detail as a bad case of artistic warts, and banned by the stripped-down school of Bauhaus modern architects, the movement that once spread across Europe and to the U.S. had been dormant for decades. Now there is new interest in Art Nouveau--particularly among the strongest proponents of modern art and architecture.

What has happened? The fact is that the world of the cube, the cage and the austere glass fac,ade has begun to look pretty stark to the men who have been perpetuating it. The trouble is lack of richness, variety and delight, and the result is monotony. Architects and designers who recognize the problem are checking on themselves, re-examining the very style against which they once rebelled. They are searching for clues to the missing elements in much of mid-20th century architecture and design.

Architecture Is Sculpture. Most dramatic example is the revival of interest in the buildings of Barcelona Architect Antoni Gaudi (TIME, Jan. 28, 1952), whose work in the early decades of the century would have rated him a place on the couch in midcentury. Precisely because Gaudi's work stands opposed to the main line of development taken by contemporary architecture, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art this winter staged a two-month-long exhibit of his work (see color page), discovered that it had a popular, stimulating and controversial show. Said the museum's director of architecture and design, Arthur Drexler: "Gaudi's preoccupation with organic forms, his enthusiasm for texture, and the alarming Hansel-and-Gretel atmosphere his buildings occasionally produce, are today inevitably seen against the background of psychoanalysis as well as the history of architecture . . . Gaudi is not an architect to be imitated. But once lured into his world, no one is likely to remain indifferent to his innovations in expressive form."

Even in his native Catalonia, Antoni Gaudi, who died at 73 in 1926, was considered unique and eccentric. His weird and wonderful gatehouses, animal or vegetable apartment-house fac,ades and phantasmal parks that out-Disney Disneyland delighted Barcelonians, even when they were surfaced for economy's sake in broken tiles, old pots and broken glass. Gaudi's greatest problem was that his designs demanded a craftsman's skill to execute and his on-the-spot presence to construct.

Manhattan architects, who swarmed to the museum's exhibit, came away impressed but perplexed. What lesson did Gaudi's flowering masonry buildings teach in the age of steel beams and plate glass? Guggenheim Museum Director James Johnson Sweeney thought he knew part of the answer. Said he at the museum's standing-room-only symposium: "Gaudi points the way not through a restatement of Gaudi, but by restatement of his method of approach. He has brought home the value of architecture as sculpture." Critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who with Architect Philip Johnson kicked off in 1932 the boom for the International Style of wrap-around ribbon windows, flat roofs and stripped fac,ades, came close to disowning his own offspring: "Not the least value of studying Gaudi's work is the exhilaration that comes from realizing how vast, how unplumbed, are the possibilities of architecture in our time. The dead hand of academicism in the 1950s seems to be closing in on our way of building."

Simplicity Plus Richness. Renewed interest in Art Nouveau has also caught up the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany, well-to-do son of the founder of Manhattan's Tiffany & Co., who started out as an artist, switched, along with Artist John La Farge, to experiments with hand-blown glass, and became the most fashionable decorator of his day. Tiffany held that "simplicity is the foundation of all really effective decoration" and he proved that simplicity need not rule out richness and beauty.

Swept out of fashion by streamlined functional modern, Tiffany's work is now having its first major Manhattan exhibition since his death, at 84, in 1933. Behind the current Tiffany exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts is the same unease that has sent architects back to Gaudi for inspiration. In an age when man's vision seems increasingly hemmed in by a machine-made environment, there is an urge to draw new strength from adventuresome craftsmen who knew how to combine richness with beauty.

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