Style combination · Contrasts
Art Nouveau × Nieuwe Kunst
The same years and the same plants, but Mucha's whiplash and swelling figures move while the Dutch line is constructed on triangles and repeated flat; set one against the other to choose between a line that flows and a line that is built.
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Art Nouveau Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)
- Type from Art Nouveau
- Colour from Nieuwe Kunst
- Form from Art Nouveau
- Composition from Nieuwe Kunst
- Surface from Art Nouveau
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Nieuwe Kunst
The Dutch branch of Art Nouveau, seen mostly in book covers, vignettes and posters. Where Brussels and Paris let the line whip and swell, Dutch designers, from 1895 more and more on grids of triangles, built stylised plants and animals into flat, symmetrical repeats. They took Arts and Crafts ideals from England, and from the Dutch East Indies colony they took batik, which they used for covers in cotton, velvet and parchment. Jan Toorop's poster for Delftsche Slaolie (1894) gave the style its mocking nickname, the 'salad-oil style'.
EB Garamond; Nieuwe Kunst used Hand-drawn titles lettered into the decoration of covers and posters, such as Theo Nieuwenhuis's lettering, recognisable enough that Leiden University Libraries attribute a 1908 parchment binding to him on the strength of its typography and Klaas van Leeuwen, Letterboek voor den teekenaar en ambachtsman (1907), a lettering model book, geometric in concept, from the theosophical circle of De Bazel and Lauweriks
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Nieuwe Kunst, with a counter-accent from Art Nouveau. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Art Nouveau Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)
-
#ede2c6ground · 36% -
#23365aink · 14% -
#c49a3aaccent · 18% -
#6e4426accent · 14% -
#3f7a75accent · 10% -
#6b7340accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ede2c6;
--ink: #23365a;
--accent-1: #c49a3a;
--accent-2: #6e4426;
--accent-3: #3f7a75;
--accent-4: #6b7340;
--font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
--font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}Use it with care
Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau): Nieuwe Kunst took batik and the look of wayang shadow puppets from Java under Dutch colonial rule, largely without naming Javanese makers; when you borrow its batik surfaces or puppet-like figures, credit batik as an Indonesian craft (UNESCO-listed since 2009) whose motifs can carry meaning, and do not present printed batik-look as wax-resist work.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Art Nouveau
- Fileteado Porteño Pairs well · Fileteado's acanthus scrolls share the whiplash; combine them for ornate, hand-made lettering frames.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Ornamental curves against an orthogonal grid make a strong deliberate tension; let one botanical flourish break a cold grid.
- Psychedelic Poster Pairs well · San Francisco poster artists lifted Mucha's figures and whiplash wholesale; push the curves into saturated, vibrating colour for a 1960s-flavoured revival.
- Russian Constructivism Contrasts · Organic sensuality versus machine-age diagonals: use the opposition to stage nature against industry.
- Vienna Secession Contrasts · Set French whiplash against the Viennese square to show the turn from organic to geometric ornament within one decorative idiom.
- Skønvirke (Danish Art Nouveau, Bindesbøll) Contrasts · Shares the hand-lettering and abundance but swaps the whiplash line and the female figure for blunt abstract masses; set side by side they show the heavy Danish variant.
- Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Contrasts · The parent's smooth whiplash and floral harmony is exactly what the gouge splinters; use one against the other to stage order breaking down.
- Beggarstaffs Poster (Nicholson & Pryde) Contrasts · Its curving floral line is the opposite of cut masses; set side by side to show how much a poster can drop.
With Nieuwe Kunst
- Vienna Secession Pairs well · Both pulled Art Nouveau toward geometry, symmetry and strict repetition in the same years; add Vienna's black, white and gold and its white margins to the Dutch earth-colour repeat for a more open page.
- Batik Pattern Tradition Pairs well · Its direct source: Dutch designers used wax-resist dyeing for covers in cotton, velvet and parchment; pair a constructed Nieuwe Kunst repeat with real batik colour layering, and credit the Javanese craft.
- Total Design & Dutch Functionalism Contrasts · Dutch design's later ornament-free grid against its own ornamental past: a filled, symmetrical batik cover beside a Crouwel layout in sans-serif on white makes the choice between pattern and pure information explicit.
- Wendingen & Amsterdam School Typography Pairs well · Its Amsterdam successor kept the symmetry, the closed frame and the systematic construction (Lauweriks drew Wendingen's first cover) but traded plants and batik for heavy capitals built from brass rules; combine them for a vegetal pattern inside a monumental frame.
- Javanese Wayang Kulit (Tatah Sungging) Contrasts · Toorop's long-limbed figures, whose silhouettes evoke Javanese shadow puppets, borrowed the outline under Dutch colonial rule without its code; compare them with a puppet whose every feature names a character.