From now until January 11th, Art Nouveau: Age of Elegance will be on display at the Muskegon Museum of Art.
The exhibition features original Mucha posters, Amphora ceramics, furniture, and more, arranged in a bedroom, study, and dining room. Art Martin, Senior Curator and Director of Collections and Exhibitions, said, “We tried to recreate what a home would have looked like, for someone who loved Art Nouveau and could afford to collect it.”
Beginning in the 1880s, artists, architects, and craftsmen made a new commitment to beauty. The Art Nouveau movement, as it soon came to be called, looked both back and forward: back to nature, to Japanese prints, and to the work of Pre-Raphaelite painters; and forward to a world in which ceramics could be as artfully designed as sculptures, in which something as modern as the Paris metro might seem to have grown from the natural world, and in which a poster advertising chocolate could be graced with the image of an ethereally beautiful woman.
The movement sought to dissolve boundaries—between high art and humble crafts; between paintings intended for gallery walls and illustrations meant for cigarette advertisements. An exquisitely wrought necklace was as representative of the movement as the Lavirotte Building, found in Paris’ seventh arrondissement. What mattered was the quality of both vision and execution.
1900 saw Paris’s Exposition Universelle, a seven-month-long world’s fair held on 530 acres. Among the technological marvels (the escalator, the moving sidewalk, talking films, the electric car) and the grand sights (the Eiffel Tower painted yellow!) were fine examples of the new art, representing its growing popularity not just in France but the world. Art Nouveau’s momentum seemed unstoppable, until the economic realities of World War I made the lavishness of the style more difficult to justify. Soon, Art Deco would hold sway.
But affection for Art Nouveau never dried up. Its greatest figures are still known today; Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley, Louis Tiffany, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautre, and others made lasting marks. In the 1960s, rock band poster designers took inspiration from the work of Mucha and others, adding an air of psychedelic intensity. Today, if you walk into a college dorm, there’s a more than reasonable chance you’ll encounter a poster reprinting Théophile Alexandre Steinlen’s La Tournée du Chat Noir de Rodolphe Salis, its black cat looming proudly.
“It’s timelessly beautiful,” Martin said of the artwork. It presented a romanticized display of beauty and wealth, and it made money; those who could afford it were entranced by its natural curves and opulence and by the way it captured the sensuous allure of the female form—the latter, especially, never a particularly hard sell.
The Muskegon Museum of Art’s exhibition allows viewers to feel that they’re wandering through a home, down not only to the furniture but even the glassware. Posters hang everywhere; a cabinet is filled with sculptures. A table of dark wood might have emerged from J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing. Lamps, some by Tiffany, are wonderfully ornate. Even knobs look fantastic. Rare ceramics bearing images of women, spider webs, and jewels tempt the eye, as does a gorgeous, giant display case. A video, available on the museum’s site, shows only glimpses of some of the features to be found, just as posters for the Parisian cabarets—which came of age along with the art movement—offered hints of what could be found within.
A large display case, with its curving lines, glass doors, and dazzling inlays, speaks to something central to the artwork’s appeal: its willingness to sacrifice efficiency to create enchantment. It’s easier to make furniture efficiently, focusing on simplicity, clean lines, and right angles—the Scandinavian approach. IKEA operates under the assumption that less is more. Art Nouveau’s approach maintains that more is more; at least, it is when done elegantly.
It’s simpler to have no art on your walls. It’s cheaper. Walls don’t need art to perform their function. They’re there to hold up ceilings, and to divide buildings into rooms. What Art Nouveau recognizes is that there’s nevertheless something about walls that cries out for art, just as a blank notebook cries out for ink.
Along with the exhibition, the museum has held a number of events, including short, curator-led flash tours, and a lecture by Erin Walling titled Glasgow Girls of Art Nouveau. In it, she focused not on the idealized women seen in the work of Klimt or Mucha but the women artists and designers who helped shape the movement.
Asked what he hopes viewers take away from the exhibition, Martin said he hopes, simply, that they enjoy it. “Art Nouveau is familiar,” he said. “People will recognize the style. There’s an educational element, in that people can learn where this all came from, but what we want is for people to walk away having enjoyed the art.”
Art Nouveau: Age of Elegance
Muskegon Museum of Art
Oct 02, 2025 - Jan 11, 2026
muskegonartmuseum.org
