Art Nouveau, literally new art, a complex and innovative European art movement of the last two decades of the 1800s and the first decade of the 1900s. It found expression in a wide range of art forms—architecture, interior design, furniture, posters, glass, pottery, textiles, and book illustration—and was characterized by its devotion to curving and undulating lines, often referred to as whiplash lines. The term Art Nouveau is derived from Maison de l'Art Nouveau, a Paris shop opened in 1896 by the dealer Siegfried Bing.
 
   Art Nouveau had its roots in the Arts and Crafts movement in England (founded in 1861 by the designer William Morris), which vehemently rejected the shoddiness of some mass-production techniques. Art Nouveau took up and elaborated the Arts and Crafts manifesto, calling for the creation of a completely new style and a devotion to handicrafts. Art Nouveau borrowed motifs from sources as varied as Japanese prints, Gothic architecture, and the symbolic paintings of the 18th-century 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, particularly a chair designed in 1882 and an engraved frontispiece for a book (Wren's Early Churches) of 1883, both of which exhibit the sinuous flowing lines that were to become hallmarks of Art Nouveau. The fabric designs sold by Arthur Liberty in his famous London shop (founded 1875) and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley—particularly those for the periodical The Yellow Book (1894) and for Salomé (1894) by the English writer Oscar Wilde—carried English Art Nouveau to its height. Annual exhibitions 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.
 
   Art Nouveau first appeared in Belgium in the work of the architects Victor Horta and Henri van de Velde; their designs for townhouses featured elegantly twining wrought-iron staircases, balconies, and gates. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Glasgow architect, practiced a spare, austere version of Art Nouveau style in his interior design, furniture, glass, and enamel work. In France, the style was most evident in the work of the architect Hector Guimard (particularly the exotic Parisian Metro subway entrances, 1898-1901), the glassmaker Émile Gallé, the furniture designer Louis Majorelle, 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 (German for "youth style"), and in Vienna, as the Sezessionstil (German for "secession style"), it permeated applied art and magazine illustration and reached a peak in the paintings of Gustav Klimt and the furniture and architectural designs of Josef Hoffmann. In the United States, 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 Gaudi; his highly idiosyncratic Güell Park and Casa Milá Apartment House in Barcelona have no straight lines and give the impression of being natural organisms that have sprung from the earth.