Towards the end of last year I was preparing a paper for a conference in Adelaide called "New Narratives for the New Millennium".  I decided to look at all the available art magazines of the last year to see what people had been saying about art for the new millennium.  What I discovered was that most of the major world class exhibitions in Europe, Britain and America were actually focussing on the late eighteen nineties, rather than the later nineteen nineties.

Now in the Special Exhibitions Gallery of the Art Gallery of W.A. we are being treated to much the same subject matter.  London's Victoria & Albert Museum is simultaneously showing a very major exhibition of art nouveau.  At the Royal Academy in London there is an exhibition called 'Art at the Cross-roads: 1900' which looks at the cross currents of symbolism, social realism, Post Impressionism and early Expressionism; the Tate meanwhile is focussing on Ruskin's influence, meanwhile the Parisians are being treated to a major exhibition called 'The Year 1900'.

In Perth, although we are spared much of the languid decadence of full on Art Nouveau, we are getting a remarkable snapshot of late nineteenth century urban art through the 'Dance Hall Days' show.  The exhibition is also accompanied by a separate show drawn from the Gallery's own collection and some private collections of Nordic Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau posters define the fin-de-siecle period to perfection.  They present a sense of cohesion that I am sure would be lacking if we were looking at an exhibition of 1990 posters.  Art Nouveau itself has recently been described as ugly, ostentatious and afunctional and it's very tacky over-the-topness is one of the reasons that most people like it.  As a metaphor for the century, many people saw it as perfectly portraying a seedy world going rapidly to the bad.  Behind the technical bravura there are often social messages defining a world of rapid change.  It may well be that a decade in history is best defined by examining the period's attitude to change.  Certainly these posters record with great clarity a period of terrifying social and political change.

The style or movement in it's own day was labelled by up to a dozen different names, each different in various countries.  In Germany it was known as Jugendstil; in Austria Sezessionstil; in England the English art magazine The Studio caused it to be called Studio Style;  London's famous store Liberty & Co. was the source of the Italian title Stileliberty and the writer de Concourt christened the movement Yachting Style because of it's sweeping curves, which looked like waves and wind filled sails.  The name that stuck however was based on a shop named Art Nouveau opened in 1895 by the German entrepreneur Bing.

Bing's shop sold decorative goods and it is as a decoration style that the movement is best known.  The fact that it was known in different countries by different names establishes it's international character. It's flame like forms spread like a bushier to consume the whole of Europe and eventually the United States and even Australia. Contemporary writers saw it as a pronounced disease but it drew into it's tenuous hothouse forms, some of the most talented artists of the day.

The exhibition of posters provides us with examples of work by Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Mucha and Jules Cheret, but it also includes less well known artists such as Theophile Steinlen, who is represented by a masterpiece of poster making which puts it's finger on the pulse of Paris's multilayered society.  Steinlen was closely associated with the writings of Emile Zola and we can very easily see behind the sensual, exuberant dance hall imagery to the sordid, seedy heartbeat below.

The colour poster was in effect a new artform.  During the 1890's manufacturers used the technique of colour lithography to advertise their goods for a  rapidly growing consumer oriented society.  Art Nouveau posters also illustrated, in a celebratory fashion, the new attitudes to sexuality and  leisure.  Jane Avril's shapely legs waving at the audience in Toulouse-Lautrec's posters provided a level of energetic artistic 'come on'  imagery that had not been seen before.  The gaiety of the chorus girls portrayed with such artistic flourish hides the sheer agony of their hard won can can skills.

Fortunately the public recognized the value of these posters with the result that many original works were preserved in the way that no works of the later Twentieth Century are likely to be preserved.

I would urge all printmakers to look closely at this show and say to themselves - does the technical allure of premiere and photoshop allow us to express our ideas of our contemporary society with such vivacious enthusiasm?  Indeed I would urge all artists to look closely at this remarkable display of artistic ingenuity and technical dexterity.  It is remarkable to recognize so many famous images and see what an incredible scale some of the artists managed to work at. The thought of the labour
necessary to grind down these lumps of Bavarian limestone with the finest grain sands, to a perfect finish to receive these slender lines in lithochalk and ink and then wind them through the grandiose Albion presses makes my back ache.  This was the first true mass media and it is still appreciated by countless numbers of reproduction poster buyers around the world.  As someone in London reviewing the V & A exhibition said of an Alphonse Mucha's poster for cigarettes, "It had become the adornment of a million bedsits".

This populist style which arrived quickly like a computer virus and disappeared as quickly, burst onto the world and helped make the period become known as the Belle Époque.  It's hard to imagine that our era will ever be thought of as the Belle Époque and it is very clear that we have no equivalent global artistic style, which is probably just as well.