Uncommon Culture

ca. 1905, unknown architect. The conception of Art Nouveau in Belgium as a kind of bourgeois art should be seen in a bro-ader social context, because most of the early Art Nouveau artists were heavily influenced by the socialist and anarchist ideas of their time, notwithstanding the fact that almost all of them were indeed of bourgeois origins. Especially in the case of Henry van de Velde, these influences would shape his life and career. Henry van de Velde was born in 1863 into a fairly wealthy pharmacist family in Antwerp. At the Athenaeum he befriended Max Elskamp, who later would become a well-known writer. This friendship would last a lifetime and exemplifies the important connection van de Velde had with the literary world. Despite his father's hope for him to study for some high ranking position and in the midst of a family tragedy- his sister-in-law died in childbirth- less attention was given to the plans of the young Henry, so he enrolled secretly in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1881. He studied drawing and painting in the atelier of the director Charles Verlat, who was influenced by the realist painting of Gustave Courbet. Not only was he a friend of the French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but Courbet (1986) shared also some of his anarchist ideas. It was on the request by Courbet for a pamphlet that Proudhon (1865) wrote the very lengthy Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale, posthumously published, only months after the death of the writer [Ill. 1]. Courbet himself was also very active during the Paris Commune, but after the wystaj