January 24, 2002
Lecture to focus on nouveau book bindings
The Art Nouveau Bindings of the Works of Louis Couperus is the title of a talk to be given by H.T.M. van Vliet at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 30 at the Faculty Club. Van Vliet is the director of the Constanijn Huygens Institute for Text Editions at The Hague and visiting professor of textual studies at the Free University of Amsterdam.
The “Art Nouveau” movement at the end of the 19th century, van Vliet explains, changed the style of architecture, interior decoration and furniture design as well as the design of a large range of commodities such as rugs, curtains, domestic utensil and bindings. But its effect in the Netherlands was a bit different.
“In the Dutch field of decorations, designs using natural shapes were replaced by symbolic decorations illustrating the contents of the books,” he says. “Towards the end of the 1890s, the designs drew attention to the physical nature of the binding itself, and sometimes there was a use of mathematical abstractions.”
Van Vliet will focus on the bindings for the works of novelist Louis Couperis, for whom “publishers spared no pain or expense to create beautiful volumes.” Well-known painters and architects were commissioned to design the bindings for Couperis’ books, including painter Jan Toorup and architect H.P. Berlage.
“The bindings of Couperus’ works not only reflect a number of decades in the history of the art of book decoration,” van Vliet says. “They also bear witness to a particular practice at the end of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century.”
Van Vliet’s talk is sponsored by the Textual Studies Program, the Department of English and the Center for the Humanities. It is free and open to the public.
