British Cities Sex and Sensibility: The Allure of Art Nouveau

It's sleek, geometrical.

A vision of aluminium and glass.

It's the last place you'd go looking for Art Nouveau, isn't it?

Isn't it?

This is the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

on the outskirts of Norwich.

Home to the art collection of the British retail dynasty,

the Sainsbury family.

It's also home to the Anderson Collection of Art Nouveau,

one of the largest and finest private collections in Europe.

Art Nouveau emerged at the turn of the 19th century

from the restless energies of the industrial city.

In the age of Darwin and Freud,

it was fixated on nature, sex,

and the newly-liberated woman.

In less than a decade it went from nowhere to everywhere.

And then disappeared completely.

This week I'm in Britain where the decadence of Oscar Wilde

and Aubrey Beardsley scandalised the nation.

Where the sensuality of exotic foreign influences met the genius

of British craftsmanship to create a wholly unique moment in design.

And as brand names such as Liberty's went global,

an extraordinary hidden gem took shape in the crook of a Surrey hill.

Imagine this, the Thames, in the 19th century.

Steam ships take our products all over the world and return

with treasure troves of art and design from the Empire and beyond.

It was a dazzling time, full of progress and change,

but there were also more ominous undercurrents.

Not for nothing is Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, published 1899,

opening on the waters of this river, foul and pestilential.

These days, the river banks are the preserve of hedge fund managers

but back then only artists could be persuaded

to find their accommodation along its shores.

They believed that our burgeoning industrial cities could be reformed

by a beauty revolution.

For Art Nouveau designers, that began with an event

that changed the story of 19th century British design.

In 1854, an American fleet of seven ships and 2,000 men

sailed into the harbour of Nagasaki.

After centuries of isolation,

Japan was forced to open her borders to trade

and Japanese goods started flooding into Britain.

Collected avidly by artists,

these goods inspired a new approach to British design.

New patterns, flowers, plants, birds adorned their work.

There was a new delicacy, a new sensuality.

Japan was seen as everything that the West was not.

Exotic, sensual, uninhibited.

In London, James Abbott McNeil Whistler painted women in kimonos

hinting at the sensuality beneath the silk.

An American who had lived in France and Russia,

Whistler was a troublemaker with a modern international agenda.

He harnessed Japanese style to a movement that insisted that

art had no social or moral agenda.

Art was for art's sake.

A new cult of beauty was born.

There was a whole new style of sensuousness

amongst the Avant Garde.

It was called the Aesthetic Movement

and I've come to find out about it, where else,

but on the sun-kissed boulevards of Shepherds Bush, West London.

Mmm, they're nice!

-Hello, Peter.

-Wow.

-Do you like my flowers?

-Lovely.

-I'm Stephen.

-Hi, how do you do?

-These are for you.

Thank you very much. They're beautiful.

'Design historian Peter Fiell has spent years

'lovingly reconstructing a room in the Aesthetic style.'

Oh, this is fun, isn't it? This is great, Peter.

I feel we should both slip into some kimonos.

Don't know how you feel about that. I only just met you.

-We've got sunflowers.

-I suppose we have. Fantastic place.

I notice there are some sunflowers here, like the ones I brought you.

Yes, well, as you probably gathered,

having gifted me those beautiful sunflowers,

one of major motifs, you know, of the Aesthetic Movement is the sunflower

and it literally represents the sun and warmth and...

-Beauty?

-Beauty.

And you see these motifs recurring time and time again.

'With their exotic sunflowers and irises,

'peacocks and cranes,

'ebonised furniture and willow patterns, the Aesthetes made a break

'with the dense briars and brambles of traditional British design.'

This is what Oscar Wilde meant

when he talked about the house beautiful, wasn't it?

It was critical to be seen as a connoisseur of beauty

and, ultimately, as someone who had refined good taste.

'Whistler and his friend, the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde,

'held court in Japanese-inspired rooms like this one,

'also sharing other foreign ideas

'that they brought back from their frequent trips to bohemian Paris.

'Their scandalous ideas about sex, death and art were beyond the pale

'of God-fearing Victorian society.'

-Thank you for these flowers again.

-It's my pleasure. They look nice.

-Tell you what, it needed something in here, didn't it?

-Yes!

I'll put them right behind you here. That's the perfect spot.

'In 1894, a new disciple joined the ranks of these Aesthetes.'

An iconoclast, brandishing a bold new art,

he captured the avant garde spirit of Paris

and the sensuality of Japanese design.

The illustrator Aubrey Beardsley

was the first exponent of Art Nouveau in Britain.

He was one of the first anywhere.

He burst on to the London scene at the tender age of 19.

His career would be meteoric, dazzling, uncontrollable,

and over far too soon.

The teenage Beardsley heard that Wilde was writing a play

about the biblical temptress Salome.

He produced an illustration on spec

in the hope that he might impress Oscar and his publisher.

In it, Beardsley transforms the sinful Salome

with whiplash curves into a femme fatale.

Here she is clasping the severed head of saintly John the Baptist.

The blatant sensuality and amorality of this image

rivalled anything from bohemian Paris.

Wilde was duly impressed and Beardsley was commissioned

to illustrate the first English edition of Salome in 1894.

His drawings were startlingly new.

They were sensuous. They were international.

They were Art Nouveau.

Beardsley is, I suppose, the most distinctive,

most extraordinary young illustrator that we've ever had in England.

This is called the Peacock Skirt

and it's probably the most celebrated from Beardsley's set of designs.

People would have thought this was very shocking at the time.

It absolutely exemplifies the way in which he'd found

a new way of representing a literary subject.

There's no suggestion of the background.

He cuts to the chase, as it were. It's just about the figures.

That's the sort of thing he learnt from looking at Japanese prints.

It's also, in a way, stylistically what we now call Art Nouveau,

except that Beardsley was not trying to do exactly the same sort of thing.

He knew what was going on on the continent but he was, actually,

to a great degree, ploughing his own furrow here in England.

'Beardsley's whiplash curves came to define his unique

'Japanesque version of Art Nouveau.'

And this famous whiplash line here, apart from anything else,

that's extraordinarily difficult to do, isn't it, I would imagine?

Just to have the elan and the confidence just to dash that off.

This is something he excels at,

which is this kind of extraordinary calligraphic energy.

He is the great master of drawing with a pen.

And for people who haven't done that themselves,

that's no mean feat, is it?

You don't just produce one of these swirls.

It is actually very difficult to create a drawing

of this kind of faultless technique.

Beardsley's penmanship, if you like, the actual craftsmanship

of working with, remember, a spluttering pen dipped in ink...

'In the finely-drawn decorative details of his work,

'Beardsley's mischief and subversion plays out.

'The devil is certainly in his details.'

Look closely at those candlesticks.

Yes, they are what you think they are.

The publishers actually jokingly said

you had to look at everything through a microscope and upside down

in order to make sure he hadn't smuggled in some kind of indecencies.

Is it the art of a young man? As you get older, do you get more cautious?

I think he moved in a circle of youngish, quite revolutionary

artists and writers who enjoyed teasing the public.

Cocking a snook, if that's the phrase I'm looking for.

Absolutely. It is exactly the word.

'To the London arts establishment

'he was the amoral, alien enfant terrible of his day.'

The Studio Magazine,

the international bible for avant garde design founded in 1893,

featured Beardsley's work and reproduced his Salome illustrations.

His Japanesque figures and decorative curves,

distributed all over the world in the magazine,

were absorbed into Art Nouveau as it emerged on the continent.

Beardsley had arrived.

This was the age of the dandy.

It was the time when what you said, the cut of your jib,

the colour of your button hole, the name of your tailor,

all these things counted for at least as much

as what you actually DID in life.

'Matthew Sturgiss is Beardsley's biographer.'

Hello, you must be Matthew. I'm Stephen. How are you?

-Very well, thanks.

-Fancy a haircut?

-Well, why not?

Matthew, how important was image to Aubrey?

Was image crucial to him?

Hugely important.

Really both as a reflection and a projection of his art.

He delighted in witty bon mots.

He dressed beautifully.

He was conscious too, of his extraordinary physique

and that became part of his public persona.

'Beardsley's strange haircut and dandified garb

'were cultivated for effect but it wasn't all artifice.

'His gauntness was the result of incurable tuberculosis,

'though not even the gravity of that condition

'stopped his searing humour.'

He once said that, you know, I'm so affected,

even my lungs are affected.

But he knew he didn't have long, so he had to make an impact?

Yes, I mean, from childhood

he'd suffered with tuberculosis

and he realised that time was likely to be short.

I think that did lend an intensity to his work

and the way he worked.

'Beardsley's intense ambition, mischief and hunger for attention

'were a lethal combination.'

Matthew and I have come to the Cadogan in West London,

a hotel that would play a crucial part in the unravelling

of Beardsley's brilliant career.

Would Wilde and Beardsley have taken tea together?

Were they friendly?

What was the nature of their relationship, would you say?

Wilde was the older figure.

He was some 20 years Beardsley's senior.

He was the great artistic personality of the age,

and Beardsley was ever an iconoclast

and although he admired Wilde enormously,

he also enjoyed poking fun at him,

undermining him, pricking his pretensions.

It's extraordinary. You know, at first sight what you have here

is a fantastic draughtsmanship,

and, at the same time, the sensibility of Viz magazine.

Is that fair?

There is certainly an element of that.

I mean, Wilde complained that some of the details were like

the naughty doodles that schoolboys introduced

into the margins of their copybooks.

Wilde had good cause to be suspicious.

In his play, Salome,

Wilde had compared the moon to a fat, pleasure-seeking old woman.

But in one of Beardsley's illustrations,

he gives the moon Wilde's features.

Beardsley, as being someone in the inner cultural circle of the time,

would have known rumours circulating about Wilde's double life,

his attraction to the homosexual milieu,

and so the notion of him being a bad drunken woman

searching everywhere for lovers

would have carried a certain sort of resonance.

And in a way, that was dangerous information to be being leaked out.

In 1894, Beardsley co-founded an arts journal called The Yellow Book

to celebrate new writing and art.

As art editor, he had the freedom to develop his unique style.

Tragically, this startling talent was about to be eclipsed

by a scandal that traumatised 19th-century Britain and Europe.

For nearly four years,

Wilde had been having an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas

who was 16 years his junior.

In 1895, Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensbury,

left a card at Wilde's club calling him a sodomite.

Wilde sued Queensbury for libel, but it backfired.

Queensbury's allegation was upheld

and Wilde was charged with gross indecency.

Now, Oscar Wilde's room is down here, 118.

This is where he had his exquisite collar felt

the day the rozzers came to pick him up on charges of indecency.

Beardsley's Yellow Book comes back into the story here,

with tragic consequences.

Everybody wanted to be in it and most of them were,

with the notable exception of Oscar Wilde.

The Yellow Book was consciously modelled

on the most provocative French fiction of the day -

cheeky novels coming in from the continent in yellow wrappers.

On 5 April 1895, two arresting officers led Wilde out of the hotel.

Under his arm was a yellow book.

It was actually a copy of one of the aforesaid French novels

but nobody noticed or cared.

Journalists reported that Wilde had left the hotel

with a copy of Beardsley's Yellow Book.

The loathing for Wilde was so intense

that a crowd took it upon themselves

to go round to Beardsley's publishers and put the windows out.

His boss, in a panic, fired him.

Not one but two great careers and lives were blighted.

Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour.

The fallout from the scandal across Britain was devastating.

And how important was the Wilde trial?

We hear in the news that such-and-such a case

is the trial of the year, the trial of the century,

but that really was a huge case, wasn't it?

I would say that it's probably not possible to exaggerate

the importance of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895.

It traumatised British and specifically English culture,

transformed the atmosphere in London and really did jump out at the time.

It upset the entire nation. And I would say, in effect,

made practicing as an advanced or an Avant Garde

and Art Nouveau designer or artist

extremely difficult in England after that time,

because Wilde was loosely and broadly associated with that world.

How influential was Beardsley?

How deep did it go? How pervasive was it?

Well, we would say that Beardsley was probably absolutely key

for the style, paramount in fact.

There are lots of English movements around

in the last quarter of the 19th century

and Beardsley pulls everything together to create

what is going to become Art Nouveau. He is the first one to do that.

And the key - the signature, I suppose - is the whiplash line.

That strange tensile shape

that everybody picks up on incredibly quickly

and becomes the dominant image of the late 19th century

in architecture and design.

Despite his wit and bravura style,

Beardsley had crossed a line that he couldn't come back from.

After the Wilde scandal, he was vilified

and his art forced under the counter.

He worked for Leonard Smithers,

an infamous publisher of literary erotica.

Smithers commissioned Beardsley to illustrate Aristophanes' play,

Lysistrata, about a community of women

who deny their husbands their conjugal rights.

Beardsley had nothing to lose.

But then, just three years after the Wilde scandal,

tuberculosis finally claimed him.

Beardsley was just 25 years old.

His shocking version of Art Nouveau had become

the style that dare not speak its name.

But that didn't mean it had gone altogether. On the contrary.

The whiplash curve had got under the skin of British designers.

So they took those curves...

and then added something of their own.

A spray of Celtic mist, just a hint of medieval mystery

to create a version of Art Nouveau that was uniquely British.

While Beardsley had looked to Japan and France for his ideas,

this more polite version of Art Nouveau

drew on British craft traditions

and on the influence of one man in particular.

William Morris - craftsman, poet, publisher, designer,

socialist, all-round Victorian visionary.

He was the driving force behind Arts and Crafts,

one of the most influential movements in all European design.

In his quest for beauty,

Morris invoked the power of nature and our medieval past.

Arts and Crafts may have been inspired by British history,

but Morris was fighting for a brave new future,

one in which beauty triumphed over industry.

It's hard to believe now, but back in Morris's day,

even here, in Hammersmith, the Thames was polluted and ugly.

In fact, it's one of the things that Morris and his cohorts

wanted to change, because their art, their design

wasn't just about prettifying houses.

It was also about revolution.

It was changing the world one wallpaper at a time.

In the 1890s, the middle-aged Morris

used to take his daily constitutional here along the Thames

to visit his close friend and fellow socialist,

the publisher Emery Walker.

-Hello, are you Helen?

-I am, yes.

-I'm Stephen, very nice to meet you.

-Do come through.

-Thank you, I'd love to.

'Helen Elletson is the curator of Walker's house.

'Full of Morris's designs, it's still a testament

'to the Arts and Crafts vision.'

-And this is just as it was, is it?

-It is, yes, just as it was

in the Walkers' day.

There's a real sense of peace in here, isn't there?

It's incredible.

What's really striking as a visitor, and what I really like,

is I expected a lot of it

to be behind glass and velvet rope and "do not touch".

It's not like that at all.

It has more the feel of a private home, a time capsule, actually.

It is a family home, it was lived in until 1999,

unchanged since the Walker family lived here.

They were great friends and William Morris in fact said his day

wasn't complete without a sight of Emery Walker.

-That's a lovely tribute from one man to another, isn't it?

-Definitely.

Yes, they used to meet each other regularly

to talk about printing, their shared interest in politics,

literature, so they were very close together.

Morris's hand-printed designs, with their roses,

briars and brambles, celebrate an historic England,

a far cry from Beardsley's exotic whiplash curves.

Morris was very much inspired by the English countryside.

He wanted to go back to the way things were done properly,

the traditional craft methods.

Because, going back to his social beliefs,

he really felt that if you had something beautiful

in your home it would influence your quality of life.

Was he a bit of a champagne socialist, as we might say today?

Or maybe it's a mead socialist, harking back to medieval times?

In the sense that, he was all about giving

beautiful quality products to everybody,

but in practise it was only the middle classes who could afford it?

There is that contradiction with Morris

and he had the best people working for him

and the best materials that went into making the items.

The only way of bringing down the price was to bring in

some form of mass production and factories and machines,

and that was what Morris was against.

He disliked the Industrial Revolution

and what it was doing to people's lives.

Morris's vision was a potent force in British design

at the turn of the century, especially in the south of England.

When the work ethic and historicism of Arts and Crafts met

the sensual curves of Art Nouveau, something magical happened.

You won't find this extraordinary chapel in art history tomes,

but it's a hidden gem created by Mary Watts,

one of the unsung heroines of British Art Nouveau design.

It's screened by these beech trees

and tucked in the crook of a Surrey hill,

but you can just hear the motorway, you'd never know it was here.

It's like a Victorian mausoleum

to the legendary, immemorial figures of Albion.

You half-expect that bell to start tolling at any minute,

and for these incredible, half-true figures

to rise up and answer the call of their nation.

You get a sense here in this churchyard of the sleep of England,

the spirit of England.

Mary designed this extraordinary chapel in 1895

when she moved here from London with her husband,

the celebrated Victorian painter George Frederick Watts,

who was 32 years her senior.

Mary had been his student.

She idolised him, calling him "signor"

as a mark of respect and deference.

For the first years of their marriage

she lived in his shadow in the society of London's great and good,

but when the couple built a house just down the road from here

in Compton, Surrey, she really came into her own.

Look at this lovely sun-dappled, enchanted and enchanting frieze

on the front of the chapel.

Look at these very English-looking maidens got up as angels

and it's a light slumber as they preside over classic

Christian and British virtues of courage and patience.

But everywhere the scene is enfolded

by this riot of Art Nouveau motifs.

They're enclosed in this thicket of curvy, sinuous lines.

The peacock is displaying his feathers,

a great chain mail behind him, and there are these knotted vines

which veer off in all directions, their arrow-headed points.

Mary was a member of something

called the Home Arts and Industries Association

that was founded on the Arts and Crafts principle

that anybody could learn our ancient craft skills.

She held Thursday evening terracotta classes

for the local villagers to make the exterior decorations of the chapel,

finally completing them in 1898.

This is an early form of socialism, if you like, set in clay,

because Mary Watts, although she was the guiding artistic brain

behind this and did a lot of the work herself,

was leading the common people, the everyday folk of Compton in Surrey,

guiding their hands through the process.

So what you see here is an Arts and Crafts sensibility

but the languishing sensuality of Art Nouveau.

And if you think the outside's impressive, prepare yourself...

This is dumb-striking. It's not what I expected at all.

It's a kind of fairy grotto or secret cave,

as if some strange druid Celtic sect had been walled in here

and these were their folk memories

that they were implanting on the walls.

At the same time it's like a crazy prog-rock version of heaven.

If you had all the early Genesis LPs

and your time was up, this is your Nirvana, to mix bands.

Just this splendid explosion

of vines and drapes and fronds.

It's also got this great sensuality, these writhing plants.

What could be more earthy?

It's a Christian mortuary chapel, but there's something almost pagan

and pre-Christian about it.

I don't know whether to light a candle

or cover myself in woad and dance naked.

Hello, Rebecca, how are you? I'm Stephen.

-Do come in and join me. It's chilly, isn't it?

-It is, yes.

Very nice to meet you. Now, what have you got there?

-I've got a photograph of my great-grandmother.

-May I handle it?

You may, yes. This is my great-grandmother, Alice Jacobs.

So that must be Mary?

That's Mary, the designer of the chapel.

So this place has a special family connection for you, doesn't it?

It does, yes. I've been coming up here all my life.

And because it's so extraordinary and a little bit secluded,

it could almost be as if your great-grandmother

had just stepped away from here. Do you have that sense?

Absolutely, yes. Definitely. It just hasn't changed over the years.

You can come in here and definitely feel

like you were here 100 years ago.

I love it.

And I actually think it's quite life-affirming.

Which is odd, considering it's a chapel of rest, isn't it?

Yes, but I don't think the Watts saw death as a bad thing.

Watts painted pictures of death as a young woman,

not as a scary old crone.

After years of hard work,

the chapel interior was finally completed in 1904,

the year Signor GF Watts died.

Mary survived him by another 34 years

and went on to establish the Compton Pottery

with her local craftsmen.

The chapel was little known in her time,

but with these terracotta pots,

Mary's unique version of Art Nouveau reached a much wider audience.

They were admired and sold to the masses

by an influential family friend, Arthur Lasenby Liberty.

Liberty, who'd built a global empire of department stores

at the end of the 19th Century,

was the key figure in the mass production and spread

of this British version of Art Nouveau.

By the beginning of the 20th Century,

the very name Liberty had become a byword for the style.

This is Liberty's department store in the West End of London.

With its half-timbered Tudor-bethan facade,

it's managed to persuade tourists and shoppers alike

that it's quintessentially English and that it's been here forever.

That's wrong on both counts.

Liberty was a humble warehouse manager

when he opened his own shop in 1875 using a loan from his father.

With his canny knack for spotting a cultural trend,

he became the art lover's retailer.

First an importer of exotic decorative arts,

he soon began retailing the work of British designers

under his own name.

The famous Liberty peacock print is still popular today.

Selling silks, clothes, rugs, jewellery and furniture,

Liberty's empire quickly expanded.

Anna, it feels as though we're in an Eastern bazaar here.

We're not, though. Where are we?

We're in the Liberty carpet department,

but, actually, that's one of the departments

that very much reflects

Liberty's origins as an oriental importer

when he first started in 1875. Liberty was an entrepreneur.

He knew that he couldn't stay in the same style.

He needed to grow his business, and he was one of the early people

to sell products that we would now describe as Art Nouveau.

So what do we have here in your book of swatches?

Well, let's have a look and see.

Here we've got a very typical Art Nouveau Liberty style.

Why is that Art Nouveau?

The stylised flowers.

There is that sort of... You can't quite see it on here,

but I know that the repeat has that sort of movement.

-The famous wavy lines?

-Yes, which is very Art Nouveau.

And it has that sort of feel of hand block printing,

to look as if it's been done by hand.

We have another one, which is quite weird, I think.

That's quite different, at first sight, to the last one,

but this is still Art Nouveau you'd say?

I think that's still Art Nouveau,

and it's still doing that sort of shape.

These Art Nouveau fabrics with their Arts and Crafts handmade look

became the pinnacle of bohemian taste.

With Liberty, you could have the Art Nouveau dress, the rug,

the chairs, even the garden pots.

Liberty actually got all the top designers to design for him.

That, I think, shows what a charming person he was

because he didn't credit them.

He paid them, but he wouldn't have credited them,

because he sold his designs as Liberty designs.

He was an entrepreneur.

That's a mixed blessing for them.

They're getting the pay, but not the credit.

History has forgotten them, rather.

Well, I have no idea who's designed this,

because, yes, that's gone, that history.

Which is frustrating for you?

Very frustrating for me. It must have been rather frustrating

for the person who designed it!

One of Liberty's most important anonymous designers

was the painter and teacher Archibald Knox.

'Patch Rogers, a guardian of the Liberty legacy,

'has some Knox treasures to show me.'

And you've brought somebody to look after it? That's very serious.

Hello, I'm Stephen. Very nice to meet you. Hello, sir.

-How are you?

-Good.

'Knox grew up on the Isle of Man,

'a tiny island in the Irish sea.'

Inspired by its ancient Celtic crosses,

he designed Art Nouveau silver and pewterware for Liberty

that was characterised by a Celtic twist.

So what about this clock, Patch?

It's got a playful quality, hasn't it?

It has. It's got that slightly kind of animated look,

I think, and I think Knox was drawing inspiration very much

from his Celtic origin.

Being on the Isle of Man, he would have studied the Celtic crosses

in the cemeteries and churchyards

and was drawing inspiration from that. I mean, it looks like a cross.

With his marketing nouse,

Liberty gave these designs faux historical names -

Cymric silver and Tudric pewter.

Other designers worked on the ranges,

but Liberty spotted Knox's outstanding talent

and worked closely with him.

This is the earliest piece, this is about 1899.

You have the sort of cleanness of the silver

and then you have these applied handles, in a very organic,

sinuous line, giving you that very much Art Nouveau feel.

You also had the rivets, which was a way of showing craftsmanship.

The silver pieces were handmade, but not by Knox himself.

The pewter, designed by Knox to mimic the handmade look,

were actually machine-made, a crime against Arts and Crafts principles.

But with his lower production costs and a big retail market,

Liberty was laughing all the way to the bank.

-How did he market them?

-Through mail order, catalogues.

Obviously through the store,

but at the time, you had stores in Paris

and other places as well. I think there was one in Buenos Aires.

-Right, so the mail order was the internet of its day?

-Absolutely.

As the catalogue says,

"Designed and worked exclusively by Liberty & Co."

Smart.

The ranges were so successful that in Italy

Art Nouveau became known as Stile Liberte.

Knox's career, not surprisingly, took a different course.

He stayed friends with the Liberty family, but he was a retiring man.

Never publicly credited for his designs in his lifetime,

he ended his days unknown, back on the Isle of Man,

painting watercolours.

His tombstone reads "Archibald Knox, artist,

"humble servant of God in the ministry of the beautiful."

I'll raise a pewter tankard to that.

Other retailers wanted to cash in on Liberty's Art Nouveau success.

When Harrods was redesigned in 1902,

the owners hired a fashionable young ceramicist

to give their meat hall the new look.

Born in Barnsley and trained as an architect,

William Neatby worked with Doulton's tiles

and borrowed from the medieval churches of his Northern childhood

to create this extraordinary frieze.

This is a kind of idyllic scene of an Arcadian Albion

that never quite was,

a 19th-Century view back to medieval England.

It's almost like the storyboard for a panto

because they have this 19th-century view

of how the medieval Briton dressed,

its doublet and hose, nice dinky little pixie boots,

lovely hats, but they're all spotless and pristine.

You have to love the whimsy and nonsense of this.

In Neatby's panto of rural life, the happy hunter always bags his duck.

Neatby's brilliance lay in the graphic quality of his work

which complimented its surroundings rather than competed with them.

Neatby spares us the horror of Bambi's death scene

so we don't have that distasteful thought in our heads as we stand

at the counter and pay for the weekend joint.

Morris and Beardsley must be chuckling in their graves.

Chicken anyone?

Many shopping arcades were thrown up at the end of the 19th century

and Neatby's colourful ceramic schemes became a popular

cutting-edge adornment to the new retail experience,

as here in Norwich.

If you were part of Norfolk's fashionable society then this arcade

was the place to see and be seen and maybe splash the cash.

You wanted something to attest to your taste, to your sense of

what was hip and happening so why not pick up Art Nouveau fabrics,

perhaps a nice piece of silverware from Liberty's

or maybe even get the fireplace tiled

with Doulton's finest ceramics, that was the thing to do.

Neatby was head of architectural tiles at Doulton's ceramics

when its Art Nouveau ranges were selling like hotcakes.

Most of them have been torn down from fireplaces and doorways now,

but this arcade preserves some of that legacy.

Today, Art Nouveau remains highly collectable

and can secure huge prices at auction.

I've come to central London to visit auctioneers Christie's

who are putting on a sale.

There are more fancy goods in these parts

than you can shake a silver-topped cane at.

Small wonder the antiques trade, as practised around here,

is at its most luxuriant, its most subtle, its most refined.

Hello, Colin.

Good afternoon, Mr Smith.

Here's a fine range of Knox pieces

with their Celtic Art Nouveau swirls.

And glass by the great French designer Emile Galle.

But the Art Nouveau story also played out in Scotland.

Silver Apples of the Moon by the Glasgow-based artist

Margaret MacDonald was created around 1912.

It's a example of what's been called "Scotto-continental" Art Nouveau.

Catchy.

It's a lot that I personally am passionately in love with.

If I could take it home I would, I absolutely love it.

What can you tell me about the Art Nouveau quality of this work?

Very much, we have a fascination with nature

and the human relationship with nature.

The woman metamorphoses from a berry to a trout, to a woman,

then dissipates into nature again.

Also, there's a deep underlying mystery about the work.

But also we have this sense of the bejewelled maiden,

but actually, very much, she's the femme fatale at the same time,

which you can pick up in the slightly spooky hands.

Very spooky actually.

They're very skeletal and elongated

-and just the positioning of them is quite...

-Quite haunting.

Yes.

And there's a good reason why this lot is raising pulses at Christie's.

MacDonald's work is actually rather rare and the last time a piece

of hers came to sale, it changed auction history.

The White Rose and the Red Rose was estimated

at between £200-300,000.

But actually on the day the bidding war was fierce and very exciting.

The sale room held its breath and The White Rose And The Red Rose

finally realised 1.7 million,

-which was very, very exciting...

-That's extraordinary!

..and a world record.

During her lifetime, Margaret MacDonald

was derided in Britain far more than she was appreciated.

She worked in the shadow of her more famous husband,

the Art Nouveau architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

They met when they were both studying

at the old Glasgow School of Art in the 1890s.

Along with her sister, Frances, and her husband, Herbert MacNair,

they were known as "The Four".

This is the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow -

during a period of intense collaboration in the 1890s,

The Four designed these posters.

The long, stylised figures

were inspired by Aubrey Beardsley illustrations,

which they'd seen in The Studio Magazine.

But the press went in with their hatchets,

dubbing their strange new style "the Spook School", and it was

the two women, Margaret and Frances, who got most of the stick.

One pundit even wrote a witty verse about them.

"Would you witness a conception of the woman "really" new

"without the least deception from the artist's point of view.

"See the Art School exhibition in the Rue de Sauchiehall,

"They don't charge you for admission for they haven't got the gall."

Margaret and Frances struggled to get work but Charles and Herbert

had day jobs with a local firm of architects.

Charles started work on the design that would immortalise him -

the Glasgow School of Art, as we know it today.

Mackintosh's masterpiece,

and the pinnacle of what we now know as the Glasgow Style.

Mackintosh, quite rightly, takes the sole credit for

this astonishing building, but the groundwork for the style had

been laid during his collaboration with The Four.

Here are those long Japanese forms again -

and Art Nouveau decorative flourishes,

but Mackintosh elevates them to the towering scale of a Scottish castle.

This is such a theatrical space,

with the gallery and the lighting effects.

Rennie Mackintosh was a real architectural impresario.

He cast such a shadow

it would be difficult for anyone to emerge from it.

And Margaret never did quite manage to.

After their marriage in 1900,

her collaboration with Charles intensified.

They moved to a smart new town house

which they redesigned in the Glasgow Style.

Today you can find it at the Hunterian Art Gallery,

just as if the couple had got up and left it

to go out and buy some oatcakes.

Now, remember the art school, and look at this...

Walking through this intimate space

I feel like Goldilocks when the three bears were out.

I keep expecting the Mackintoshes to come back with their groceries.

The couple created this as a home in 1906,

but also as a showcase for their style.

Here's that long Japonesque shape again in the chairs

and the writing desk, but now there's a new motif -

the Celtic rose that's become

an emblem of the Glasgow Style and of the city itself.

It's tremendously pristine, isn't it? And calm and minimalist

and rather soothing, as if perhaps a fresh drift of snow

was banked up against the windows.

But this was Glasgow,

one of the great industrial centres of the world.

Within earshot, factory hooters were going off, steam locomotives

hammering to and fro, and on the Clyde, the noise of the rivets

being punched into the steel hulls

of the ships that dominated the world.

But you'd never guess any of that was going on

from the sanatorium hush of this space.

For them, it was a refuge, a spotless, germ-free environment

in which they could be together and celebrate their love

and, as lovers have done through all eternity,

shut out the rest of the world,

almost hermetically in this case.

Margaret worked in metals and fabrics

but I've come to talk to Pamela Robertson,

curator of the gallery, about the panel above the fireplace.

Isn't this the panel

that went for nearly two million quid not so long ago?

Well, actually it's not.

-It's not? Oh.

-It looks very like it,

but the one that was at auction is a duplicate version of this one.

This one came to the university through Margaret MacDonald's family.

And then the other version,

which was owned by a great Viennese collector, Fritz Waerndorfer,

and went through his family and then out into the open market,

and that was sold at auction for that world record price.

What about this panel?

I mean, first of all is this how Margaret intended us to see it?

Largely, yes.

I mean it's astonishing, given that it's made of gesso,

a sort of plaster-based medium and is very fragile,

that we see it pretty much intact.

'During her lifetime, Mary's innovative decorative panels

'made a huge impact on continental Art Nouveau.'

The May Queen, exhibited in Vienna in 1900, impressed

the golden boy of Viennese Art Nouveau, Gustav Klimt himself.

He struck up a friendship with the Mackintoshes,

and particularly with Margaret.

And the unlettered eye might say this reminds me

a lot of Klimt, but actually the artistic boot's on

the other foot there really, isn't it?

I mean she influenced him, is that right?

There was a bit of a dialogue but I think you can certainly say

it started with her and Mackintosh's work

when they both exhibited large-scale decorative gesso friezes

in Vienna at the Eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition.

And that notion of large friezes facing each other across a room,

decorative, as this panel is,

certainly had a profound influence on Klimt

and his later decorative work.

Two years after The May Queen, Klimt created the Beethoven Frieze,

the first of his own decorative panels.

Despite her connection to Klimt,

one of the giants of 20th century Art Nouveau,

Margaret MacDonald is still not widely appreciated

in Britain outside the gilded world of art galleries and auctions.

Speaking of which, it's the day of the Christie's sale.

Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, Silver Apples Of The Moon.

I point out that this is on vellum, and not paper.

Lot 68 will open at £30,000...

The couple never received

the recognition in Glasgow that they won on the continent.

Charles' last commission in his home town was in 1906.

They moved to London in 1914 and then to France

but their fortunes never looked up.

Margaret didn't work after 1921

and when she died her entire estate was worth only £88.

Any more? At 85, still with you.

90,000.

95,000.

And selling at £95,000.

No more? 95,000.

It's yours.

How times have changed.

After Margaret MacDonald's death in 1933, it seemed like the last

of British Art Nouveau had gone with her,

but our story doesn't end there.

It was 1966, Beatles, Carnaby Street, Flower Power.

So who do you suppose the V&A dedicated

a prestigious exhibition to?

None other than the pioneer of Art Nouveau in this country,

Aubrey Beardsley himself.

That's right. He was reinstated as an icon of trendy, happening London.

Victorian Britain associated Beardsley's sensuous curves

with degeneracy, but in the sexually liberated '60s, they chimed

with the swirling psychedelia and with the hippie movement.

Gerald Scarfe, himself a child of those days, is today

the celebrated political caricaturist of The Sunday Times.

He acknowledges his own debt to Beardsley,

the once defamed pioneer of Art Nouveau.

This one I did for The Sunday Times of Stalin here.

I picked up really on Beardsley's ability to have these very,

very fine lines and these dramatic blocks of colour which, you know,

picks that drawing up.

But this, I hope, does have some sort of impact because he was

part of my consciousness at that time and people compared me

to Beardsley, so I was extra interested and wondered why.

So that whack of black I sort of learned from him.

That was, you know, a good way to do it.

'When Beardsley was the talk of the town again in 1967,

'Scarfe was commissioned by the New Statesman to create

'a caricature of the iconoclastic illustrator, and this is where

'viewers of a sensitive disposition should please avert their eyes.'

Well, I mean, in true caricaturist style,

I have exaggerated everything.

I have exaggerated Beardsley's exaggeration.

And I think, you know, that may have to be censored for the BBC.

But, I am pretty certain that will have to be, that bit there.

There we are, darling Aubrey.

When Scarfe was in his Beardsley phase in the 1960s,

a wealthy and influential couple,

on the crest of this new wave of Art Nouveau,

started a collection of their own.

At the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich,

the team is preparing to put it on show.

It was collected by Sir Colin Anderson and Lady Anderson

over a period of years, starting in the '60s,

which classically is when a lot of the contemporary,

the great Art Nouveau collections started coming together.

There was a big revival then, of interest?

Huge revival. I always think it's based on the Beatles' lyrics.

A lot of the Beatles' album covers used Art Nouveau.

It was big revival alongside pop art.

And at the beginning of the 21st century,

the significance of the style is being reassessed again.

The main point, I think, in a way,

is to rescue Art Nouveau from the 19th century and show it

as being the first modern style, the first attempt self-consciously by

designers in England and in Europe to make something modern -

the modern age really begins with these designers

and what they were up to.

It's hard to exaggerate now

just how bold and ambitious Art Nouveau was in its heyday

just over a century ago,

when a more insular society was wary of anything

too cosmopolitan, too foreign.

Art Nouveau was the first truly international style,

bridging the old century and the new.

These days, we understand that for a design movement to be successful

it has to be global, it has to be international,

and we recognise that "foreign" and "new" aren't dirty words.

Next time,

I'm in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt and a gang of rebellious artists

won their artistic freedom and transformed the city in

an art revolution that was sealed with a kiss.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd