Polish Art Nouveau and Młoda Polska

Garrett Van Reed - 14th January 2010

In the late 18th century Poland was suffering a little bit of a crisis: it didn’t exist. At least not on the map, anyway. The backwards-glancing oeuvre of the nation’s art establishment, in its effort to build and bolster the national identity during partition had succeeded merely in lodging a national complaint, and its influence in European art circles was approximate to a bouquet of dead roses.

However, when Polish artists caught a hold of the Art Nouveau wave that was sweeping across the continent in the last years of the century, a much-needed dose of modernity and style were injected into Polish culture during perhaps the country’s most brilliant modern artistic epoch. Wider in s ...