Art Nouveau Floral Patterns and Stencil Designs in Full Color by Carol Belanger Grafton, M. P. Verneuil (1998, Paperback)

You won't find a better Art Nouveau collection than this ones, and you'll find yourself astonished again and again at M. Verneuil's range of vision.

Here and there you see a touch of the stylized Japanese prints and fabrics that served as part inspiration for this turn-of-the-20th-Century view. Characteristically, there are almost no straight lines, except in frames. You'll see stained glass designs of utmost simplicity -- and stencil designs of even grander abstraction. Then, turn a page, and you'll see close observation with only a touch of abstraction.

Take the sunflower, clearly one of M.P.'s favorites. There's a plate from his Etude de la Plante (pl. 59 in this book), and here the flower's petals spread in disarray on a rough stem, framed with varied leaves whose heart shape is only hinted. The flower is cooly studied, left to more or less raw nature.

In Pl. 79, the sunflower is back in a pattern meant for tiles, the flowers still a little wild in the petals, but faced to you, arranged in perfectly concentric circles of center, stamens and petals. The heart-leaves also face you, framing the flowers.

A trio of sunflowers from earth to bloom form a muted pattern in Pl. 89, where the heart-leaves pattern their way upward to the blooms, the center one directly to you, the flanking ones turned, the left one to the left, the right one -- you guessed it -- to the right. Tans (with a touch of dark green), browns and muted yellows replace the vibrant greens, yellow and orange of the previous treatments.

A final abstraction appears in Pl. 151, a pure stencil form in flat colors (olive green, muted yellow, burgundy) against a rich milk chocolate background. Here the petals are large, a perfect array of elongated pentagons around an unlikely deep red center. The leaves here are perfectly shaped. The middle leaf is in fact a kid's valentine heart, veins treated as negative space, the chocolate showing through.

There is no way to walk through a garden, or a display of Art Nouveau, without being reminded of the colors, treatments, and brilliant abstraction into pattern that you find in this book.

And we're indebted to Carol Belanger Grafton for her choice and positioning of plates. Two-page spreads again and again balance similar colors, but show wildly different approaches, as though she wanted you to see all of M. Verneuil's skills.

Everyone will find a key into understanding these presentations from something in their surroundings, something they can use as a touchstone. For me, a former potter, I learned the abstraction of the movement from Pl. 106, a decorative heading, "Ceramique," that shows tongues of flame and Japonesque smoke swirling around red-hot pots.

You don't see flames in a firing at this stage (which appears to be well above dull red-heat) and smoke is only an angry, barely-visible swirl of darker red, instantly gone. But you sense the tongues of heat that Verneuil has represented as flames, and you see the pots come alive with their own heat as the temperatures climb, again not from flame, but from the radiation of the fire transferring itself into the clay and bringing the glazes alive. It becomes clear how pattern, abstraction and analogy develop the truth of the moment... in a graphic that is, on the surface, far from reality.

If you have any interest in Art Nouveau, this book's for you.