The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art – Henry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept

1 Eisentropon poster, Henry van de Velde, 1898.
reforms that swept across Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century and
the first decade of the twentieth. Yet if one turns away from the details of form to
the way that art functioned within a rapidly changing society, similarities emerge
that point to the way in which the emergence of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Germanspeaking
Europe was linked as well to the British Arts and Crafts movement and to
the increased importance of what we now know as branding.
Both van de Velde and Mackintosh were involved with healthy eating as a manifestation
of social and aesthetic reform. In 1898, van de Velde was responsible for
what the National Gallery of Art website terms “a comprehensive design program,
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