Art Nouveau Design

The majestically sinuous, curving lines of Art Nouveau form the backbone of our earliest designs at Palefire Studio, with two of our most popular U/V lights, the Parasol and the Pavilion, making direct reference to this turn-of-the-century aesthetic. The Parasol, in particular, evokes for us the way that Art Nouveau design played with proportion. The natural, floral world was explored through slender, stem-like motifs which created elegance with a hint of precarity and delicacy; as seen also in the illustrations of William Morris, who along with the Arts & Crafts movement is regarded as an originator of Art Nouveau style.

The Paris Metro 1898 arches are for many of us one of the most emblematic examples, along with Tiffany lights or Lalique glassware, of Art Nouveau style, and one of the few functioning, public-use pieces of Art Nouveau architecture. The Metro’s ubiquitous spidery green script with an almost liquid-like movement to it, and snaking modular green cast-iron components was also a key inspiration for our first hand-painted pattern, Serpent.  

The designer behind the Paris Metro, Hector Guimard, was a vocal advocate for workers’ rights and saw the metro through a socialist lens, as a place for people to come together. Art Nouveau style, with its unconventional, often asymmetrical forms inspired in part by the unruly chaos of the organic realm as opposed to the status quo, was the natural choice for expressing Guimard’s radical approach.

Art Nouveau style, in all its guises, was also radical in way that chimes with our own ethos at Palefire Studio; because it emerged from an intention to break down the rigid lines between fine art and applied arts - and while it had fallen from its dominant position by the outbreak of the first world war, it had a set a precedent for Art Deco and subsequent modernism principles.