Poster by Vienna Secession artist Bertold Loeffler – 1908

Survey 6: Dreams and designers 
(1895 – 1905)

“Art Nouveau grew out of the dark restless energies of the industrial city. In the age of Darwin and Freud, it was fixated with nature, sensuality and sex. What began as a revolution in the name of truth, beauty and nature, ended in derision, decadence and decay.”

The Allure of Art Nouveau (BBC documentary)

Optional resources:

Listen to: Taking Back Time

(A 30 minute listen on Audible that’s well worth the time.)
We’ve been burning the candle at both ends ever since the invention of the light bulb. So how do we break the cycle and take back time to rest?
(This requires signing up for a 30-day trial of Audible using a credit card. If this is not possible for you, please let me know ASAP.)

“Milton Glaser was promisicuous in his inspirations, borrowing ideas from art nouveau, from Renaissance painting,
from Islamic ornament, from pop art,
from commercial culture.”

Rowan Moore, theguardian.com

BBC Documentary: The Allure of Art Nouveau (60 mins)
La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon – Lumière Brothers, 1895  
A Trip to the Moon – Georges Méliès, 1902  
The Wright Brothers’ early flights
Art nouveau packaging
1900s Beauty and hygiene ads: Sunlight, the world’s first packaged, branded laundry soap, was a brand of household soap originally produced by the British company Lever Brothers in 1884. The success of the product led to the name for the company’s purpose-built workers village, Port Sunlight, near Liverpool

“Never has youth been exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and day. Increasing urban life with its temptations, prematurities, sedentary occupations, and passive stimuli just when an active life is most needed, early emancipation and a lessening sense for both duty and discipline, the haste to know and do all befitting man’s estate before its time, the mad rush for sudden wealth and the reckless fashions set by its gilded youth–all these lack some of the regulatives they still have in older lands with more conservative conditions.”

 Psychologist Granville Stanley Hall,
The Psychology of Adolescence, 1904

Why Dreams and Designers?

In 1899 Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams was published. While early filmmakers were fantasizing about the future, Sigmund Freud was studying peoples’ dreams. The Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis introduced his theory of the unconscious in his book. 
This was one of the slides I had to cut :(.