Jugendstil (also known as Art Nouveau) was a revolutionary art movement. It asserted a form of modern art that was attuned to its own era, and drew its themes both from nature and from the visual language of the human being and their passions. As such, Jugendstil used art to explored and discovered possibilities for a utopian and aesthetical­ly determined form of society. Emerging from the dynamism of nature and the vitality of youth, fin­de­siècle art also embodied the darker side of life, most notably through Symbolism and its bleak aesthetics of decay, myth and mystery. The aim was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk that would erase the divisions between life and art.

Museum Wiesbaden is presenting the collection of Ferdinand Wolfgang Neess as a permanent display in the southern wing of the museum. More than 500 objects provide a cross­section of all the genres of Jugendstil, providing prime examples of the quality and stylistic virtuosity boasted by the art of the late nineteenth century. With the first public presentation of the Neess Collection on 29 June 2019, Museum Wiesbaden will be showing this outstanding collection to a broader audience for the very first time in its entirety, and in the process, putting Wiesbaden on the map of Ju­gendstil cities in Europe.

The origins of Jugendstil go back to the mid­nineteenth­century Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, for which the versa­tile artist William Morris and art critic John Ruskin provided decisive impulses. The key concern of this movement was to do something about the qualitative decline of craftsmanship in the wake of industrialisation. On the European conti­nent, it was above all in cities such as Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Munich and Darmstadt where experiments in this new, nature­-oriented artistic style took place.

In the early 1890s, the Belgian architect Victor Horta developed an architectural style that was characterised by biomor­phic forms, with the young architect Hector Guimard introducing this style to Parisian society, where it received its name at the Salon de l’Art Noveau in 1895. Around the same time, a group of craftsmen centred around Émile Gallé and Louis Majorelle retreated to the countryside of Lorraine, where they soon founded the École de Nancy, which sought to harmonise regional craftsman­ship with scientific advances.

In 1897, the so­called Vienna Secession was formed — an association of artists whose Jugendstil works found no recog­nition in official exhibitions and salons. The Secessionists included artists such as Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich, all of whom also had a strong influence on Jugendstil in Germany. In 1895, Georg Hirth founded the Munich­-based illustrat­ed magazine Jugend. It was in reference to this magazine that people began to speak of Jugendstil for the first time in 1897, at the industrial and trade fair of Saxony­Thuringia in Leipzig.

The Paris World’s Fair of 1900 was of central importance for the new style’s profile throughout Europe. This event brought together a range of Jugendstil approaches from different countries and regions for the first time, allowing the movement to gain international visibility. At the same time though, art critics of the time viewed the fair not just as symbolising the arrival of Jugendstil on the international stage, but also its apo­gee and the beginning of its decline.

The collection contains more than 90 paintings, pastels and watercolours produced by artists from all over Europe. Works by Gustave Moreau and his stu­dent Edgar Maxence as well as by Alphonse Osbert represent French Symbol­ism, while works by Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville are prime examples of its Belgian variant. Numerous paintings by Franz von Stuck, Heinrich Vogeler, Ludwig von Hofmann, and Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach document important German practices and perspectives in Symbolism and Jugendstil alike. The collection is complemented by works from Great Britain by renowned Pre­Raphaelites such as Evelyn De Mor­gan and John Melhuish Strudwick. In terms of sculpture, the works by Alphonse Mucha and George Minne stand out.

The collection also comprises a spectac­ular range of objects from the applied arts, such as furniture, glass objects, porcelain and ceramics. It features entire furniture ensembles by Emile Gallé, Hector Guimard and Louis Majorelle, as well as by Bernhard Pankok and Richard Riemerschmid. The wealth of high­calibre glass objects also merits a mention, with numerous vases, bowls, lamps and chandeliers produced by Emile Gallé, Les Frères Muller, Les Frères Daum, Lötz­ Wit­we and the Tiffany Studios enriching the collection, stressing that the importance of works in glass for Jugendstil can hardly be overestimated. No less worthy of mention are the porcelain objects and ceramics produced by figures such as by Ernst Wahliss, Michael Powolny and Albin Müller. The presentation at Museum Wiesbaden provides a representative overview, both in qualitative and quantita­tive terms, of the field of fin­de­siècle artistic production unfolding between Jugendstil and Symbolism.