Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Hill House

Art advances as much by word as by image: without The Stones of Venice the Gothic Revival would have been a very different affair, as would twentieth-century modernism without Vers une architecture. But some movements are wordless. A new visual sensibility arises, is found urgent or appealing, and is widely imitated—the entire process occurring by means of image alone. Fashions in couture occur always in this way (the miniskirt required no manifesto), and, occasionally, they do in art as well. Such was the case with the Art Nouveau, perhaps the least literary of all artistic movements.

In the year 1893, there came about a sudden longing for expressively elongated curves, flicked into “whiplash lines,” and for figures of wan somnambulant women suggestive of flowers, their sinuous stalks crowned with great writhing tendrils of hair. Because the sensibility was visual rather than verbal, it did not need to wait for translation, and it ricocheted across Europe, carried by magazines, posters, and commercial advertising. Then, like most fashion crazes, it ended abruptly with a sudden withdrawal of energy, leaving no lasting monument beyond a smattering of buildings with peculiarly liquid façades.

Because the Art Nouveau left no great trove of words for scholars to chew over, it has received short shrift in the history of art, where words always beget more words and where non-literary movements languish. If historians speak of the Art