The industrialisation that spread throughout Europe and America in the 19th Century caused enormous changes also to the social state.
The mass-production not only created new classes of workers but also a wide variety of products never so widely available before.
The progress in technology produced, simultaneously, means easing the communications (trains, steamships, telegraph .etc...) and this fact created, with the time, a sort of common taste and consequently a more participated trends.
Always in this period the use of iron in the building industry joint with the availability of glass-laminates in big dimensions made possible some unexpected developments of the Architecture.
The Artists, mainly working on commission basis for the upper classes were called to improve and develop the sense of aesthetics for the mass products of the Industry.
This call was widely participated and moved various Art Schools in this direction. (Paris, Nancy Glasgow, Darmstadt etc.).
A new decorative and artistic style was born: Art Nouveau.
 

Various groups of Artists gave different names to this new-coming style: in Germany, round the revue Jungend, the Jungendstil, In Austria a group of avant-garde anti-conformist Artists created “Sezession” (between them Gustav Klimt).
This style had a remarkable follow in France (Lalique, Grasset, Guimard etc.), United Kingdom (Mackintosh, Mackmurdo), Germany e Austria, Belgium (Horta, van de Velde), in Holland, Spain (Gaudi), United States (Sullivan, Tiffany) and in Italy where its name “Stile Liberty “is a tribute to a fashionable London department store with the same name and specialised in the sale of progressive craftsmen designs and exotic goods.
There was not a common starting source for this style due also to the increasing nationalism. Every Nation searched its own source like Rococo in France and Germany, Celtic Art in the U.K., geometry in Austria etc.
With different names and origins, Art Nouveau found perhaps a coherence at its decline-period (early ‘900) given by the common use of curved lines of the Nature and to the inspiring Japanese Arts.