Jugendstil

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Jugendstil, the "youth style", is the German version of Art Nouveau. It flourished in Germany and the German-speaking countries from the mid-1890s to around 1910. The name comes from the magazine Jugend, founded in Munich by Georg Hirth and first published in 1896. As in France and Belgium, the aim was to stop imitating historical styles and find a style of its own time, valid for everything: from architecture to graphics, from furniture to cutlery.

Munich and the "whiplash" line

The first centre was Munich. In 1895 the Swiss sculptor Hermann Obrist exhibited an embroidery with a plant motif in a nervous, sudden curve, immediately nicknamed Peitschenhieb, "whiplash": it became the symbol of the movement. In 1897 August Endell designed the façade of the Atelier Elvira, with a huge abstract ornament resembling a dragon or a wave; the Nazis had it removed in 1937. In Berlin the magazine Pan appeared from 1895, and the graphic artist Otto Eckmann, with his swans and stylised flowers, created a typeface that bears his name.

The workshops: applied art for the home

Jugendstil did not stay on paper. In 1898 the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk were founded in Munich, with artists such as Bruno Paul, Bernhard Pankok, Richard Riemerschmid and Obrist. In the same year, in Dresden, Karl Schmidt founded the Dresdner Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst. These were workshops where artists and craftsmen designed furniture and objects together for sale. The most famous piece is the chair that Richard Riemerschmid designed for a music room at the Dresden exhibition of 1899. It has a slanting support that leaves the player's arms free, and it was so successful that it was put into production straight away; even Liberty sold it in London.

Darmstadt and Weimar

In 1899 Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse invited seven artists to the Mathildenhöhe hill, creating the Darmstadt Artists' Colony. Its leading figure was the Viennese architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, one of the founders of the Vienna Secession. In 1901 the colony presented the exhibition "A Document of German Art": homes designed down to the last detail, such as the house Peter Behrens designed for himself, his debut as an architect. Meanwhile the Belgian Henry van de Velde settled in Weimar, where he founded the school of applied arts from which the Bauhaus would emerge in 1919.

From Jugendstil to the Werkbund

Around 1905 the curving line began to look like a fashionable ornament, and many of its leading figures abandoned it for simpler, more geometric forms. Behrens, Riemerschmid, Paul and van de Velde were among the founders of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907), which shifted the focus from ornament to quality and industrial production. Yet Jugendstil remains the first step: it was there that German artists and craftsmen began to design everyday objects together.