Anton Seder’s *The Animal in Decorative Art* (1896) — The Public Domain Review

Given his career’s anticlimactic end, it is, perhaps, a small justice that Seder’s work remains so striking today. In 1894, Anton Seder (1850–1916) was appointed the director of the Strasbourg School of Applied Arts. Already a leading representative of the growing German Art Nouveau movement, he chose to steer the school toward Jugendstil, training his students to draw on history and from nature, with the help of an on-site greenhouse. By the end of his tenure, in 1915, Seder’s project had largely collapsed, along with his reputation. Beside more banal factors (it turned out that the Alsatian market could not support the number of craftworkers the school graduated), Seder’s experiment fell under the weight of a different thread of theoretical critique. Local artists condemned the modernity of the Art Nouveau program as a sinister source of foreign influence, and Seder found himself the target of pro-Germanization censorship. His bet on the near future of German decorative art, in other words, didn’t pan out. It was around the same time, as the first World War picked up, that the international Art Nouveau moment too began to unravel. Yet Seder’s own artwork embodies the best of Jugendstil’s romantic imagination and organic lines, an indulgence in the joy of kitsch that still resonates.