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In a sense, art nouveau invented female chic in the popular arts. Not since the 16th century mannerists had there been such a plethora of delicately icy women as now appeared on that new form, the advertising poster. Mucha, a Czech émigré who became Sarah Bernhardt's court artist, and followers like Privat Livemont helped change the sexual prototypes of the 19th century before they launched a million psychedelic posters in the late 20th.
But Alphonse Mucha was a sculptor too, and nothing in this show epitomizes the art nouveau vision (or fantasy) of woman better than a bust he designed around 1899 for a Parisian jeweler. This astonishing object, whose form shifts like water in the twining reflections of silver flesh and gold hair, is perversely liturgical—a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame sans Merci—enigmatic as a sphinx, cruelly indifferent as a Byzantine empress, wearing the features of the Divine Sarah and the aggressive glitter of a vintage Cadillac fender.
It reminds one how fused by the current of high artificiality the aesthetic and sexual fancies of the time were apt to be. Every Parisian male wanted to possess Cléo de Mérode, Liane de Pougy and their thespian sisters—the "great horizontals." But they were also votive objets de culte, focuses of sexual snobbery. In a like way, the most rarefied work of the art nouveau craftsmen was not accessible to a wide public. As the style spread through the decorative arts—furniture making, inlay, bookbinding, jewelry, glass—too much labor and fine material were devoured by it. It was, in very essence, elitist: the stylish style. But as Brunhammer rightly exclaims in the catalogue, "Thanks be for the snobisme that broke through the barriers between the arts and gave us such a profusion of fine works!" As it is in Proust, snobbery is often the essential subject of art nouveau. There is plenty of costly jewelry made today; but what modern design by Bulgari or Tiffany does not look gross or commonplace beside a piece like Lalique's swan pendant of 1898? In those cool, exquisite loops and featherings of enamel one sees a vanished sensibility: distanced, calm, perfectly judged, and soon to be destroyed by the tensions of a new century.