JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 867
This may well be the very first book illustrated in the
style known as Art Nouveau--Arthur Mackmurdo’s
Wren’s City Churches—coming a dozen
years before the revolutionary Gismonda poster of Alphonse Mucha. The 1895
poster by Mucha caused an enormous stir, so much so that this style, which would
be known shortly thereafter as Art
Nouveau, was initially known as Style
Mucha. But that didn’t stick; Art Nouveau and Jugendstil did.
Where does this leave the 1883 breakthrough design by multi-talented designer-architect arts-and-crafts-inspired Mackmurdo? His design for the Wren certainly has the pathology of Nouveau and stands far apart from the very sedimented regulatory aspects of the Grande Ecole schools of the day: flowing, organic, deeply stylized, intuitively suggestive. Mackmurdo’s title page is lovely, curvilinear and simple: its main base are three flowers with 21 leaves, bounded by two birds (chickens, perhaps but certainly not wrens), and fills the requirements of the new style. Except there wasn’t a new style yet, not for years to come; Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was out there well ahead of the curve, and seems to have been out there all by himself.
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