Art Nouveau (French, New Art), European art movement popular around 1900, and named after Maison de l'Art Nouveau, a Paris shop opened in 1896 by the art dealer Siegfried Bing (1838-1905). The style found expression in a range of art forms-architecture, interior design, furniture, posters, glass, pottery, textiles, and book illustration; its main characteristic is curving and undulating lines, often referred to as whiplash lines.

Art Nouveau had its roots in the Arts and Crafts movement in England, which revived handicrafts and rejected mass-production techniques. Art Nouveau borrowed motifs from sources as varied as Japanese prints, Gothic architecture, and the symbolic paintings of the English poet and artist William Blake to create a highly decorative style with strong elements of fantasy.

The earliest examples of Art Nouveau are usually considered the work of the English architect Arthur Mackmurdo (1851-1942), particularly a chair designed in 1882 and an engraved frontispiece for a book (Wren's Early Churches) in 1883, both of which exhibit the sinuous lines that were to become Art Nouveau hallmarks. The fabric designs sold by Arthur Liberty (1843-1917) in his famous London shop (founded 1875) and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley-particularly those for the periodical The Yellow Book (1894) and for the English writer Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1894)-carried English Art Nouveau to its height. Annual shows of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, beginning in 1888, helped disseminate the style, and a new magazine, The Studio (founded 1893), helped spread it to Europe. In Belgium, the style first appeared in the works of the architects Victor Horta and Henri van de Velde; their designs for townhouses proliferated, with elegantly twining wrought-iron staircases, balconies, gates, and wall decorations. In France, the style was most evident in the work of the architect Hector Guimard (mainly the exotic Parisian subway entrances, 1898-1901), the glassmaker Émile Gallé (1846-1904), the furniture designer Louis Majorelle (1859-1926), and the poster artist Alphonse Mucha; it was also fashionable in interior decor, notably at Maxim's Restaurant in Paris. In Munich, as the Jugendstil ("youth style"), and in Vienna, as the Sezessionstil, it permeated applied art and illustration and peaked in the paintings of Gustav Klimt and the furniture and architectural designs of Josef Hoffmann. In the U.S., the leading figure was Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose shimmering Favrile-glass vases and stained-glass lampshades were fantasies of iridescence. In Spain, Art Nouveau had perhaps its most original practitioner, Antoni Gaudí; his highly idiosyncratic parks and apartment buildings in Barcelona with no straight lines give the impression of being natural organisms sprung from the earth.

Art Nouveau was in decline by 1910 and was succeeded by the sleekly elegant Art Deco . A renewed interest in Art Nouveau began in the 1960s; its role in the advent of modern art and architecture was also recognized.