Art Nouveau was a vibrant but short-lived phenomenon that flourished but from 1890 to 1910 and touched on all the visual arts. Fashion and furniture, pots and paintings, books and buildings, no object was too small or too large, too precious or too ordinary, to be shaped by the designer working according to the ideals—moral and social as well as Entries A–F 129 aesthetic—associated with the Art Nouveau, even though these ideals were never codified in a coherent manifesto and were inflected according to the place wherein they were practiced. Although historians may question the extent, chronologically and geographically, as well as the very validity of an Art Nouveau style, several characteristics that bind its representatives together may be credibly summarized: first, a desire to avoid the historicism so dominant during the 19th century, using as inspiration Nature in all its fertility and heterogeneity; second, an emphasis on the expressive power of form and color and an aspiration t...