Art Nouveau in the United States

During the late 1800s, a new art spread throughout Europe and major American cities. This movement, known as Art Nouveau, was an art movement and style of decoration and architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Artists and designers who created Art Nouveau aimed to transform their world by challenging convention, abandoning academic styles, and embracing a modern aesthetic based on sources such as plant forms, Celtic patterns, and Japanese art.
Primarily a movement of the applied arts - interior and furniture design, architecture, book production and illustration - Art Nouveau, characterized with its graceful, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms, and exotic, rich imagery, is among the most immediately recognizable and widely appreciated of all artistic styles. In a broader sense it includes the geometrical and more abstract patterns and rhythms that were evolved as part of the general reaction to 19th-century historicism (Johnson 12) The exponents of th...