The dream of "progress" that animated many nineteenth-century artistic and political movements gave way at the turn of the century to a dissatisfaction with the Industrial Civilization and a recurrent pessimism about a future dominated by mechanization. Art Nouveau, which was both a style and a movement, embodied this dissatisfaction, marking the turn-of-the-century period with an aesthetic that consciously set out to revolutionize literature, the arts, and society within the framework of a brutalizing, wildly burgeoning Industrial Civilization. Generally associated with northern European...
The dream of "progress" that animated many nineteenth-century artistic and political movements gave way at the turn of the century to a dissatisfac...
