Art Nouveau, in Turin, spread in the early twentieth century.
This new stylistic current involved various artistic disciplines including the applied arts and, predominantly, architecture. In the specific panorama of Turin, Art Nouveau was influenced, in its major works, by the important Parisian and Belgian schools, becoming one of the greatest Italian examples of this current, so much so as to establish Turin as one of the Italian capitals of the Art Nouveau style, not without also undergoing inevitable eclectic and Art Deco incursions.
Due to the success of this stylistic current and the type of buildings that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, Turin became one of the landmarks of Italian Art Nouveau, often renamed "floral style," so much so that conspicuous architectural evidence of that period can still be perceived today.
History and historical-artistic context
The transition from the 19th to the 20th century in Europe was marked by a fervent renewal of artistic expressions, strongly influenced by technical progress and the enthusiastic positivist exaltation of the important achievements of science. The evolutions of the artistic avant-garde at the end of the nineteenth century first involved the applied arts, taking on different names in different geographical areas: in the French-speaking area it took the name art nouveau, in Germany jugendstil, in Austria sezessionstil, modern style in Britain and modernismo in Spain.
In Italy, and particularly in Turin, the new current initially established itself as "new art," translating the term directly from French. In the overall and varied national panorama, this new current, which later also took on the name "floral style," never consolidated into a true Italian school of reference but established itself, albeit with a slight delay compared to the major European countries, experiencing its heyday in the very first years of the twentieth century. In its first decade, in fact, one can speak of Art Nouveau, a term that eventually became more widely established in Italy and derived from the famous London warehouses of Arthur Lasenby Liberty, among the first to display and disseminate objects and prints of exotic taste that flaunted the sinuous forms typical of this new style. Art Nouveau, therefore, found its greatest success in architecture, leaving posterity one of its most enduring testimonies. At the beginning of the 20th century, the upper middle class, by then definitively established as the hegemonic class of Italian society, found in Art Nouveau its own specific distinguishing element, that is, an opportunity to show its superiority and at the same time emphasize its detachment from the old aristocratic class and its neoclassical and baroque mansions, still strongly tied to the more conservative eclectic style that had characterized the entire 19th century. However, its innovative aspect was not only the opposition to neo-Gothic and eclecticism but also a greater consideration of the applied arts as an implicit strength, since Art Nouveau trusted, thanks in part to the growing development of technology, in a large-scale production of an art that in its emblematic beauty was accessible to the majority of the social fabric of the time; despite these premises, even in Turin this initial populist vocation of Art Nouveau waned; the ideal of a "socialism of beauty" evolved into a rich triumph of floral motifs, threadlike ribbing, bold metal decorations of clear phytomorphic inspiration but soon became only a privilege of the wealthier social classes. This new stylistic trend was facilitated by the presence of many Italian and especially English or Swiss industrialists such as: Abegg, Bich, Caffarel, Caratsch, Kind, Krupp, Leumann, Miller, Menier, Metzger, Remmert, and Scott, who contributed to that "international breath" and to the future industrial vocation of the Piedmontese capital, and who set up new and numerous works in the Piedmontese capital precisely in the years between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
As a result of this stylistic season, often considered "frivolous" and perhaps naively optimistic, the added value of technique and industry prevailed, just as "function" prevailed over "form," but modernity soon erupted into the horrors of the Great War, which, not only symbolically, decreed the end of the Art Nouveau season.
Turin between the 19th and 20th centuries: Art Nouveau
Turin, while boasting an architectural landscape predominantly characterized by the Juvarra-esque connotation of the numerous noble palaces and Savoy residences, in the two decades between the 19th and 20th centuries allowed itself to be permeated by this new stylistic current.