SILVIJA GROSA JŪGENDSTILA PERIODA PLASTISKAIS UN ...

Rīga City Pawnshop, Wilhelm Roessler, 1908; the Āgenskalns water tower,
Bockslaff, 1910). Both National Romanticism and Domestic Revival were based
on similar ideas, and differences between the two styles are largely based on
sources for interpretation in one style or the other.
By 1908, there was increased criticism of buildings that were designed in
the style of National Romanticism, and it is not insignificant that this was
particularly true in the Latvian language press. The issue of ethnic specifics and
the search for a national identity in the architecture of the early 20 th century in
Rīga, thus, is a complicated one, and although there were such searches during that
period, it cannot be claimed with any certainty that it was the architecture of
National Romanticism in which they found more active voice than was the case in
other directions for architecture during the stated period in time. The fact is that
Latvian architects at the time were also thinking about the classical heritage as a
possible paradigm for national art, and that was particularly true after 1911. Those
who sought out a Latvian style tended to base their thinking on the classical
heritage of architecture and art, and this was certainly seen in practice. The
building of the Rīga Latvian Society (Ernests Pole and Eižens Laube, with an
allegorical and decorative frieze by Janis Rozentāls, 1910) is a particularly
important example of this. The building offers a synthesis of National
Romanticism, the classical arts, and Art Nouveau, and even as it was being built, it
attracted a great deal of attention in Rīga, particularly among Latvians. It is a
symptomatic fact that the architectonic shape of this, the main centre for Latvian
national ideology, was designed first in the style of National Romanticism by
Laube, but then, in the same year, was redesigned by Pole in the Neo-Classical
style. The final result was a building that is of a Neo-Classical appearance, and as
Jeremy Howard has rightly argued, it symbolises the fact that Latvians, as a
cultural nation, were part of the European tradition of classical culture.
Art Nouveau as an international phenomenon is unified with National
Romanticism in the sense that both were part of a Neo-Romanticist culture of the
turn of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. A specific look at the similarity of the two styles
in terms of architecture and the applied arts requires a consideration of analogue
utilitarian functions, as well as the principle of unity in artistic form that was true
in both cases – an aesthetic approach to that which is natural, compositional
dynamics, a partial balance through the use of asymmetry where possible, an
interest in the contrast between ornamentally saturated and empty surfaces, and the
use of different finishing materials. As far as the nature and iconography of
specific motifs of décor is concerned, any differentiation between the two styles is
made complicated by the fact that one component in the universal concept of Art
Nouveau was the use of local motifs which, inevitably, were more or less national
in nature. That means that when specific elements of Art Nouveau in architecture
are identified, this must be done on the basis of ideas about the content of the style,
whether it be pantheism or Biological Romanticism, which defined the
iconography and semantics of the motifs of décor, as well as a specific and formal
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