What is the difference between Art Nouveau and Art Deco?
It is very common to confuse Art Deco and Art Nouveau. The error is not new and for good reason, these two movements, although outrageously different, succeeded each other within a few years. They have both marked the world’s architectural and artistic landscape in their way. Art Nouveau was born at the end of the 19th century. In response to a frenzied industrial revolution, he proclaims the need to return to a total art against academicism and rigor. To the harshness of a world where the machine is a despot queen over man and nature, he responds by exploiting the beauty of the latter, thus preferring to sublimate interiors with curves, arabesques, and animal motifs of all kinds. Passionate about natural materials such as stone and glass, timeless and soft pastels in comparison to a world won by speed.
Short for Decorative Arts, Art Deco is its exact opposite. A flashy response to the swirls and other organic forms of Art Nouveau, it took off at the start of the First World War to disappear in the mid-1930s at the dawn of the next. The Art Deco vocabulary fears neither the mention of shimmering and flashy colors nor strict geometric shapes. Rigor has its favors, geometry is its most seductive mania. More decorative than constructive, Art Deco architecture puts artifice back at the heart of interiors.
