Gesamtkunstwerk
The term was developed by the German writer and philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff in his 1827 essay Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst (or 'Aesthetics, or Doctrine of Worldview and Art').
An example is the Maison Tasel de Horta in Brussels or the Villa Cavrois in Croix in the Nord department, designed by the architect Robert-Mallet Stevens.
After the lengthy domination of opera seria and the da capo aria, a movement began to advance the librettist and the composer in relation to the singers, and to return the drama to a more intense and less moralistic focus.
[8] Wagner used the exact term Gesamtkunstwerk (which he spelt 'Gesammtkunstwerk') on only two occasions, in his 1849 essays 'Art and Revolution' and 'The Artwork of the Future',[9] where he speaks of his ideal of unifying all works of art via the theatre.
[citation needed] Wagner's own opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, specifically its components Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, represent perhaps the closest he, or anyone else, came to realizing these ideals.
[citation needed] Some architectural writers have used the term Gesamtkunstwerk to signify circumstances where an architect is responsible for the design and/or overseeing of the building's totality: shell, accessories, furnishings, and landscape.
[citation needed] Historian Robert L. Delevoy has argued that Art Nouveau represented an essentially decorative trend that thus lent itself to the idea of the architectural Gesamtkunstwerk.
Robert Adam and Augustus Welby Pugin are examples of this trend to create an overall harmonising effect which in some cases might even extend to the choice or design of table silver, china, and glassware.
Belgians Victor Horta and Henry Van de Velde, Catalan Antoni Gaudí, French Hector Guimard, Scottish Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Austrian Josef Hoffmann, Russian-German Franz (Fyodor) Schechtel, Finn Eliel Saarinen, and many other architects also acted as furniture and interior designers.
Many Art Nouveau masterpieces were results of cooperation of artists of different fields: The architectural movement of Modernism also saw architects implementing this principle of Gesamtkunstwerk.
[30] They cite Richard Huelsenbeck in his German Dada Manifesto: 'Life appears as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, and is thus incorporated — with all the sensational screams and feverish excitements of its audacious everyday psyche and the entirety of its brutal reality — unwaveringly into Dadaist art'.
[33] An exhibition entitled Utopia Gesamtkunstwerk, curated by Bettina Steinbrügge and Harald Krejci, took place from January to May 2012 at the 21er Haus in Belvedere, Vienna.
It was a 'contemporary perspective of the historical idea of the total work of art' and included a display by Esther Stocker based on the idea of 'the untidy nursery',[34] it housed works by Joseph Beuys, Monica Bonvicini, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Heinz Emigholz, Valie Export, Claire Fontaine, gelatin, Isa Genzken, Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ilya Kabakov, Martin Kippenberger, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paul McCarthy, Superflex, Franz West, and numerous others.
