Exactly how or where it started no one quite knows, but once it got going in the 1890s, it proved as catching as a virus. From Vienna to Chicago, new buildings shot up all curves and curlicues as though seen in a Coney Island mirror. Stairways were twisted into elaborate swirls; paintings and statues became studies in swoops. Today, the style known as Art Nouvemt seems about as "new" as Grandmother's antimacassar. But as Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art set out to prove last week, in the most comprehensive and ingeniously mounted U.S....
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