Wilde and Van de Velde

Henry Van de Velde and Oscar Wilde are an interesting pairing in looking at their two views on art, philosophy, and society as a whole. Oscar Wilde was the founder of the Aesthetic movement of art, where he felt that art could simply be appreciated for its own sake and should be used to beautify any environment in which people are. His writings on Aestheticism were highly influential and influenced the entirety of England to move toward being interested in more visually pleasing things simply for the fact that they are visually pleasing. Also, he was a rather influential writer as a whole, both as a critic, social commentator, and fiction writer. He held very deep seated views about how the world was at the time and how it should be changed for the better as time progressed. On the other hand, Van de Velde was an artist in the more traditional sense of the word than Wilde was. Van de Velde was an artist known for his pieces of furniture and house decorations. He was also very well known for his architectural abilities and the incredible buildings he designed in his lifetime. He felt that the visual quality and appeal of an object was highly important. He applied this to his works in both furniture and interior pieces and to the buildings he designed. This application of visual attraction to every day, applied art eventually earned him the label as the father of the Art Nouveau ideology and movement. He felt that this movement was a necessary break away from the traditional methods and ideas of design and those methods and ideologies should progress into the future. (Chipp 56)

Overall, Wilde and Van de Velde have a lot more things in common than they have as differences from each other. Both Wilde and Van de Velde hel...

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...ces very focused on the power and beauty of lines and arranging curves in his designs. He later worked with the Bauhaus school, following these design principles. This placed him at odds with most Art Nouveau artist, who, much like Wilde with his Aestheticism, felt that inspiration for such pieces and environments to enhance peoples’ lives should be taken from nature.

Overall, these two men shared a common goal of enhancing people lives by bringing beauty into everyday life and focusing on the visual quality of a piece over anything else. Although they had different methods of going about this and held some other differences here and there, they are actually quite similar, primarily only being different from each other in that Wilde mostly wrote about his views and Van de Velde made things to help people attain the environment in which he felt they should live.