Art Books: A sumptuous tour

In 1930 Evelyn Waugh, already at 27 a famous novelist, spent two days in Barcelona. He came upon one of the art nouveau houses designed by Antonio Gaudí, who had died four years earlier. Waugh was captivated by the swooshing ‘whiplash’ lines of the building. He hired a taxi and asked the driver to take him to any other buildings in the same style. So he saw a number of Gaudí’s fantastical creations, including his church (often mistakenly called a cathedral), La Sagrada Familia. It took an extra-ordinary leap of taste for Waugh to admire this flamboyant architecture at the height of the Modern Movement, with its insistence on ‘clean lines’ and ‘form follows function’.

More than 20 years after Waugh was in Barcelona, I had a similar epiphany, aged 12, on a visit to Paris with a school party. I suddenly encountered one of the strange, tendril-like Métro entrances (c.1900) by Hector Guimard. I had never heard of him or the art nouveau style, but I was mesmerised by the exotic ironwork: it seemed incredible that a municipality had officially sanctioned such work.

Ten years after my Paris visit, the great art nouveau revival burst upon London, with exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Aubrey Beardsley and the Moravian-born poster artist Alphonse Mucha and pioneering books by Robert Schmutzler, Maurice Rheims and Mario Amaya, the art critic later shot by a madwoman with Andy Warhol. (Schmutzler’s book was translated into English by Edouard Roditi, who in his Oxford days had been described by Sandy Lindsay, the left-wing Master of Balliol, as ‘the second Harold Acton and the third Oscar Wilde’.)

Nouveau was the dominant revival style of the 1960s. It influenced the mind-expanding ‘psychedelic’ art of the drug culture and was one of the main ingredients of Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba ventures.