The art nouveau

Describing the period in A Political and Cultural History of Madern Europe, C. ]. H. Hayes sums it up: "Fundamentally,. . . . a
significant change occurs. Novel modes of thought and action came
to prevail and what continues of the old is modified and adapted
to a new situation and a new environment. There is a wider spread
and a faster speeding-up of machine industry, attended by intensive
competition of individual industrialists, which in the previous era
had nourished liberalism. There is consequently a weakening of liber--
alism and an intensification of nationalism, a decline of international free trade and a revival of mercantilism, a special stimulus
to overseas imperialism and to an unprecedented Europeanization
of the whole world, and a confusing of the dream of universal peace
with a nightmare of mounting national armament, military and
naval.
"There is also an absorption of intellectuals, and a great interest of
the masses in the pursuit of natural sciences, especially in practical
and applied aspects. There is an accompanying shift of emphasis in
philosophy from the spiritual and the free to the material and fatalistic,
in the social sciences from the historical to the statistical, and in popular
movements from the individualistic or cooperative to the socialistic
and combative. There is a growing faith that, as machines multiply,
creature-comforts must inevitably increase and automatically make the
world a fit and fine habitation for human beings. And in this era of
machinery and materialism, traditional religion is extraordinarily
troubled, while art and culture testify to the outmoding of romanticism
and the rise of a new fashion, which is concerned with factual data,
and which, as over against 'romanticism', is called 'realism"' 1 .
Art forms which served an earlier age could no longer cope with the
problems of daily living in such a world. They had to change, either
retreat into disenchantment and "art for art's sake," or adapt themselves to the new environment and attempt to serve the new master