A lot of people are old enough to have lived when Bauhaus was ”the modern look.” Hence, it now looks just plain ”old” whereas Art Deco and Noveau look ”classic.”

They say "art deco is for dwarves while art nouveau is for elves." Forgot where it came from.

Hah, that is a good way to remember it. Wood elves would be even better.

Art Deco at the office. Art Nouveau at home.

I don’t mean to sound pretentious but i have a hard time understanding how anyone can have a difficult time differentiating between art nouveau and art deco. The only similarity between the two lies in word “art”.

In that post I explore a few ideas as to why I think this happens. I think it’s more that Art Nouveau gets labeled as Deco.

In general though, both are art movements from roughly the same time period with roughly the same basic principles. For someone unfamiliar with art history, it can be confusing in a way that doesn’t happen with day, Medieval vs. Neoclassical architecture.

Not the same time period. Art Nouveau started in the 1890s and was exhausted by the time of the start of the First World War (1914). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau

Art Déco first appeared in 1910, and became much more popular in the 1920s, after the end of WWI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco

Read my comment again. I said “roughly” the same time period. And yes, they overlapped for about a decade and from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with art history and living a century later, that is very close.

WW-I was a huge event in the history of this world, and it is a pretty clear divider between those two styles of art and architecture.

I wouldn't call pre-WWI and post-WWI "roughly the same time period". Not by a long stretch.

The length of time between them is not relevant in this case. What is relevant is the events that occurred between them.

Like the pre-atomic age and the post-atomic age. The events themselves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively short-lived. But their impact on this world greatly exceeded the time immediately before those two events and the time immediately after those events.

No, it's not a "clear divider" between the two. It was more of a slow transition between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, which as I already stated, overlapped for nearly a decade.

This is all pretty clearly laid out in the historical literature that you yourself linked to. You don't seem to understand how art movements work; there is not a firm dividing line when one ends and the next begins.

Beyond that, the question was about why people mix the two. Your nit-picking about how we should divide history is irrelevant to the discussion.

Art Deco got its start in 1910, but it didn't take off until after WWI. I did read those pages, even though I've been a big fan of Art Nouveau since I met my wife in the mid-90s and she introduced me to the style, and I was a fan of Art Deco since I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.

And I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years, in a house that was built in 1910 (according to the numbers formed into the bricks), and I lived about two blocks away from Hotel Horta. We have several coffee table books on Art Nouveau and Art Deco, some of which you can no longer find.

So, I am very well acquainted with both styles and when they were common. I also make a point of reading articles at any links that I include for reference.

Well, then it's a little unclear to me what you are arguing against. That they aren't from "roughly the same time period" from the perspective of someone that isn't familiar with art history? Why would someone unfamiliar with art history make a distinction between early 20th century art movements? They both occurred in the early 20th century, unlike (as I used in my example) neoclassical and medieval styles, which occurred centuries apart.

This is the subject of the grandparent post that I was replying to. Yes, in actuality, they overlapped a bit, and Art Nouveau waned as Art Deco rose – although again, this is not so clear cut in other art fields as it is in architecture; e.g., jewelry or furniture.

WWI was a watershed event. A world-changing event. It wasn't as short as the time period between when the first atomic bomb was dropped and when the second one was dropped, but in the scale of world events, it was still relatively short.

And while Art Deco got started before WWI, it didn't really take off until after WWI.

Just like Art Nouveau that got started in the 1890s, but didn't really take off until after the International Paris Exhibition in 1900.

Both styles took several years to get started and really take off. And Art Deco didn't really take off until after WWI.

I think it's because people show examples of Nouveau and label them as Deco.

Was art nouveau a response to the art deco movement?

The other way around. Nouveau was more 1890s-1900s, while deco was more 1920s-1930s.

However, both were heavily inspired by Arts & Crafts (1860s-1920s). They just focused on and innovated on differents aspects of it.

I think the source of the issue is that Art Nouveau and Art Deco also both commonly get mixed up with Arts & Crafts (as well as Craftsman and Mission), which is ancestral to them both and shares elements with both -- sinuous organic shapes and hard geometric shapes.

> Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse

Could it be that the most acclaimed expressions of art nouveau were the product of a gilded age, while the bauhaus legacy was mostly enacted during the postwar period where speed of rebuilding was more important that quality of buildings?

There was actually a lot more money put into art deco (which happened post WW1) than art nouveau, but yeah bauhaus and modernism certainly flourished in a resource-scarce post-war environment.

The other big influence is that a lot of the members of the Bauhaus went to the US to teach, and so they influenced many of the midcentury designers that designed and built the post-war world.

To me Art Deco seems to range from Kinda Like Art Nouveau all the way to "I can't Believe it's not Bauhaus".

Deco and Bauhaus both seem to sometimes share an excitement towards mass production and materials themselves.

Art Deco shows off luxury and wealth, which is not very far from truth to materials.

With art Nouveau I notice designs more than materials, unless they're simple natural things like wood, not really giving any sense of technical achievement or extravagance in the actual materials.

Bauhaus seems to deliberately design things that would not work without the specific high end materials used, and look out of place if they are scratched, everything is pointing to the raw substance, the craftsmanship, the function, and the level of maintenance, and the design is just a frame.

Art Deco doesn't do the minimalism thing the same way,

I greatly prefer Art Nouveau, but it seems like both the aesthetic and philosophy of Bauhaus is everywhere.

Maybe there's something missing in my personality since I don't quite feel the appeal of simplicity and valuable materials as strongly as some, while the more philosophical types all seem to love it.

I think part of the mass appeal of Bauhaus might be because it got popular when tech was worse. You couldn't make a cheap CrapBoard thing and veneer it, unless you wanted it to peel in a week. That still happens, but it's possible to reliability do form, function, and material more separately.

Maybe people were tired of crappy goods that broke in a year, and Bauhaus was a way of advertising that you weren't doing that.

Now of course, durability seems random, and sometimes people take superficial Bauhaus elements and use them without the deep quality that it was supposed to be about, and it looks bad from the start and then breaks.

And we've got cheap synthetic materials that can be incredibly strong if you know how to design with them, although unfortunately they do not survive the trash compactor, when people toss them even though they're perfectly good, because people tend to see things without valuable substance as disposable.