Whiplash (decorative art)

[3] Noted designers who used the whiplash line included Aubrey Beardsley, Hector Guimard, Alphonse Mucha, and Victor Horta.

In the Art Nouveau period, the whiplash line appeared frequently in furniture design, railings, and other ornamental iron work, floor tiles, posters, and jewelry.

Whiplash curves have similarities with the arabesque design, used particularly in Islamic art, such as the ceramic tiles of the mosque of Samarkand in Central Asia.

They appear in the Japanese prints of Katsushika Hokusai, which became popular in France just as the Art Nouveau movement was beginning; these particularly inspired the paintings of flowers by Vincent van Gogh, such as The Irises (1890).

[4] The use of sinuous curves on the title page of the 1883 publication Wren's City Churches by architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, led Nikolaus Pevsner to identify it as "the first work of Art Nouveau which can be traced".

[6] The Belgian architect Victor Horta was among the first to introduce the whiplash curve into Art Nouveau architecture, particularly in the wrought iron stairways and complementary ceramic floors and painted walls of the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels (1892–93).

Art Nouveau was a comprehensive form of decoration, in which all the elements; furniture, lamps, ironwork, carpets, murals, and glassware, had to be in the same style, or the harmony was broken.

Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, Henry van de Velde and other Art Nouveau architects designed chairs, tables, lamps, carpets, tapestries ceramics, and other furnishings with similar curling whiplash lines.

The whiplash line was intended to show the clear break from the eclectic historical styles that had dominated furniture and decoration for most of the 19th century.

Henry Van de Velde and Horta in particular integrated the whiplash lines into their furniture, both in the shapes of desks and tables, the legs, in the brassware handles, and in railings and lamps, as well as in the chairs.

His work often crossed the frontiers between sculpture and decorative art, inspired by the lines of forms ranging from dragonflies to bats to Grecian masks.

He made not only jewelry, but also bronzes, lamps, vases, glassware, and other decorative objects, produced mostly for the Belgian glass factory of Val Saint Lambert.