Find many varieties of an authentic adolf loos on sale available at 1stDibs. Frequently made of
wood,
metal and
glass, every adolf loos on sale was constructed with great care. There are 3 variations of the antique or vintage adolf loos on sale you’re looking for, while we also have 108 modern editions of this piece to choose from as well. You’ve searched high and low for the perfect adolf loos on sale — we have versions that date back to the 20th Century alongside those produced as recently as the 21st Century are available. A adolf loos on sale made by
Modern designers — as well as those associated with
Art Nouveau — is very popular.
Essentially dubbed the Frank Llyoyd Wright of Europe by Wright himself, Adolf Loos possessed a talent for architecture and interior design as potent as his outspoken criticism of Art Nouveau and excessive ornamentation. A forerunner of the International Style, Loos exercised immense restraint in his building projects as well as his designs for chairs, tables, storage pieces and other furniture, and wrote prolifically on his disdain for taking a decorative approach to architecture.
The son of a stonemason and sculptor, Loos was born in 1870 in what is now Brno in the Czech Republic. He studied architecture in Dresden in 1889, completed a year of military service and moved to the United States by 1893. He visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and came to appreciate the American approach to design over his three-year stay before returning to Vienna.
An avid proponent of simplicity, Loos hated fluff above all else. In his best known essay, “Ornament and Crime,” he states “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use” — a principle evident in both his architectural work and furniture. His writing was profoundly influential for practitioners of the International Style that would emerge later as well as the likes of prolific Swiss-born French architect and modernist prophet Le Corbusier.
Loos challenged the prevailing architecture and decorating styles of his time, and disliked the ornate work associated with the Vienna Secession and Gesamtkunstwerk — the concept of a house as total work of art — an ideal pursued by a collective born from the Secession called the Wiener Werkstätte. To Loos, design should prioritize function, and any ornamentation devoid of a structural purpose was childish and unnecessary.
Loos’s furniture — alongside the work of fellow Austrian architect Josef Hoffman — was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in 2014. His architecture projects, including the Viennese Goldman and Salatsch building, the Austrian Steiner House and the Villa Müller in Prague, are celebrated by design enthusiasts all over the world.
Find vintage Adolf Loos seating, lighting and other furniture on 1stDibs.
In its sinuous lines and flamboyant curves inspired by the natural world, antique Art Nouveau furniture reflects a desire for freedom from the stuffy social and artistic strictures of the Victorian era. The Art Nouveau movement developed in the decorative arts in France and Britain in the early 1880s and quickly became a dominant aesthetic style in Western Europe and the United States.
ORIGINS OF ART NOUVEAU FURNITURE DESIGN
CHARACTERISTICS OF ART NOUVEAU FURNITURE DESIGN
- Sinuous, organic and flowing lines
- Forms that mimic flowers and plant life
- Decorative inlays and ornate carvings of natural-world motifs such as insects and animals
- Use of hardwoods such as oak, mahogany and rosewood
ART NOUVEAU FURNITURE DESIGNERS TO KNOW
ANTIQUE ART NOUVEAU FURNITURE ON 1STDIBS
Art Nouveau — which spanned furniture, architecture, jewelry and graphic design — can be easily identified by its lush, flowing forms suggested by flowers and plants, as well as the lissome tendrils of sea life. Although Art Deco and Art Nouveau were both in the forefront of turn-of-the-20th-century design, they are very different styles — Art Deco is marked by bold, geometric shapes while Art Nouveau incorporates dreamlike, floral motifs. The latter’s signature motif is the "whiplash" curve — a deep, narrow, dynamic parabola that appears as an element in everything from chair arms to cabinetry and mirror frames.
The visual vocabulary of Art Nouveau was particularly influenced by the soft colors and abstract images of nature seen in Japanese art prints, which arrived in large numbers in the West after open trade was forced upon Japan in the 1860s. Impressionist artists were moved by the artistic tradition of Japanese woodblock printmaking, and Japonisme — a term used to describe the appetite for Japanese art and culture in Europe at the time — greatly informed Art Nouveau.
The Art Nouveau style quickly reached a wide audience in Europe via advertising posters, book covers, illustrations and other work by such artists as Aubrey Beardsley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha. While all Art Nouveau designs share common formal elements, different countries and regions produced their own variants.
In Scotland, the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh developed a singular, restrained look based on scale rather than ornament; a style best known from his narrow chairs with exceedingly tall backs, designed for Glasgow tea rooms. Meanwhile in France, Hector Guimard — whose iconic 1896 entry arches for the Paris Metro are still in use — and Louis Majorelle produced chairs, desks, bed frames and cabinets with sweeping lines and rich veneers.
The Art Nouveau movement was known as Jugendstil ("Youth Style") in Germany, and in Austria the designers of the Vienna Secession group — notably Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich — produced a relatively austere iteration of the Art Nouveau style, which mixed curving and geometric elements.
Art Nouveau revitalized all of the applied arts. Ceramists such as Ernest Chaplet and Edmond Lachenal created new forms covered in novel and rediscovered glazes that produced thick, foam-like finishes. Bold vases, bowls and lighting designs in acid-etched and marquetry cameo glass by Émile Gallé and the Daum Freres appeared in France, while in New York the glass workshop-cum-laboratory of Louis Comfort Tiffany — the core of what eventually became a multimedia decorative-arts manufactory called Tiffany Studios — brought out buoyant pieces in opalescent favrile glass.
Jewelry design was revolutionized, as settings, for the first time, were emphasized as much as, or more than, gemstones. A favorite Art Nouveau jewelry motif was insects (think of Tiffany, in his famed Dragonflies glass lampshade).
Like a mayfly, Art Nouveau was short-lived. The sensuous, languorous style fell out of favor early in the 20th century, deemed perhaps too light and insubstantial for European tastes in the aftermath of World War I. But as the designs on 1stDibs demonstrate, Art Nouveau retains its power to fascinate and seduce.
There are ways to tastefully integrate a touch of Art Nouveau into even the most modern interior — browse an extraordinary collection of original antique Art Nouveau furniture on 1stDibs, which includes decorative objects, seating, tables, garden elements and more.
