One can’t quite call Anton Seder’s prints naturalistic in Das Thier in der Dekorativen Kunst. For one thing, there are the dragons, coiled and bug-eyed. Their scales and mottled patterns are familiar, but transformed into something more stylized and romantic: they are living, thrashing fleurs-de-lis. Then there are the sea creatures, gaping with almost human expressions. Fish fins flow with more grace and energy on his page than they do even underwater. The whiskers on prawns curl with calligraphic flourishes; a lobster and a crab lock claws, frozen in a dramatic stone tableau. Seder exploits vines and seaweed for their dynamic geometry, winding them into grand fibonacci spirals. Here is the “frisson de la vie — the quiver of life”, which is Jugendstil’s signature. Seder takes from nature, he evokes its colors and its writhing lines, but he doesn’t accept its limits. In the spirit of Art Nouveau, nature is just the starting point for hypernatural imagined worlds.

Intended as reference books for decorators and craftsmen, volumes like this one cropped up around Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the same era when periodicals such as Dekorative Vorbilder (decorative designs) featured full-color illustrations meant to inspire the ornamental artist and craftsperson working in any number of mediums, “giving themes for the decoration of panels, borders, designs for fresco painting, wood carving, wall-paper designing, tile decoration, china painting, tapestry painting”, as an 1895 literary notice announced. These potential applications are visible in Seder’s work too. His dragons are twisted into caducei and medieval-style medallions, his prawns march along in ready-made borders. A vibrant page of sea creatures, whose colors and symmetry suggest a looser and more fantastical interpretation of Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, offer themselves up as bookplates or frontispieces. It’s not hard to imagine today how Seder’s images might be used to decorate; only, perhaps, surprising that so much care and skill were lavished onto a reference work.

Within its own time, however, such a sumptuous treatment would have been typical. Art Nouveau elevated the status of the decorative arts, magnifying attention on illustration and ornamentation, and blurring the lines between craft and fine arts. But by the turn of the twentieth century, ornamentation had become the center of a firestorm of aesthetic controversy. The dramatic demotion of the decorative arts since then is due, in large part, to outspoken advocates for another, competing vision of modernism. The Austrian modernist architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933) published his famous critique of the decorative arts, “Ornament and Crime”, in 1908, denouncing modern ornamentation as an orphan visual culture, condemned to tastelessly and inauthentically repeat the styles of the past. “Modern ornament has no parents and no progeny, no past and no future”, he wrote. “I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.”

The worst offenses of the Art Nouveau ornamentalists, in Loos’ view, were their frivolity and fast and loose ahistoricism: the symbols of Persian and Slovak art, for example, are relics of the past, and ought to be left there too. Artists like Seder, on the other hand, saw bygone visual languages as a catalog to be pulled from creatively and at will. It is through the “appropriation and re-formation” of “ancient, Gothic, Baroque, and even Asian styles” that the modern artistic spirit emerges, Seder wrote in the preface to an earlier book. Fictitious histories emerge across the pages of Das Thier in der Dekorativen Kunst: Celtic knot borders and scripts accompany winged dragons, chiseled hieroglyphs complement Nile crocodiles and South Asian gharials, a massive faux-classical coin frames a proud Arctic snowy owl. If Loos looked forward to a time when streets “glisten like white walls”, a blank surface would be hard to find in Seder’s city of the future.

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.

It is impossible to declare a winner in the fin-de-siècle arguments over what modernity should look like. The jury is still out. But we might admit, at least privately, that Seder’s drawings — though they date to the same year as the Quadricycle, Henry Ford’s first vehicle — shock us with their modernity. They seem to anticipate mid-century science fiction paperbacks and Tolkien fantasy epics. The very ahistoricism that motivated some of the Jugendstil’s harshest critics — the decadent jumble of genres and eras that constituted “Viennese kitsch” and the uninhibited artistic appropriation of Art Nouveau — is part of what makes Seder’s art travel so well across the interceding century.