Quotes & Sayings About Art Nouveau

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. — Salvador Dali

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails. — Janet Fitch

Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority - an apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. Poor little rich man: he is 'precluded from all fuure living and striving, developing and desiring' in the neo-Art Nouveau world of total design and Internet plenitude. — Hal Foster

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say. — Peter Sloterdijk

The "Art Nouveau" appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. "I'm alive." "I'm decorative. — Susan Sontag

Japonisme was a vertical phenomenon running through a number of successive styles; Art Nouveau was a horizontal, chronologically limited phenomenon that embodied the aim of giving expression to a new experience of life. — Klaus Berger

I like elegance. I like art nouveau; a stretched line or curve. These things are very much in the foreground of my work. — H.R. Giger

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering. — P. J. O'Rourke