Curvilinear Forms
Art, design and architecture shaped by curves: arcs, circles, spirals and flowing S-shaped lines.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Curvilinear Forms are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Curves slow the eye and carry it along. Celtic metalwork in the La Tène style, from the 5th century BC, twists into spirals and trumpet shapes, and 14th-century English Gothic tracery swells into flowing, flame-like loops. Rococo designers of the 1730s and 40s avoided straight lines almost entirely, and William Hogarth argued in The Analysis of Beauty (1753) that a gently waving line gives the eye most pleasure.
Art Nouveau made the whiplash curve its signature around 1900, in Victor Horta's Brussels interiors and Alphonse Mucha's posters. Modern architects used reinforced concrete to build curves at scale, and Oscar Niemeyer's buildings at Pampulha and Brasília sweep and undulate. In abstract art, Robert Delaunay's circular colour paintings of 1912–13 and the steel arcs of Bernar Venet show the curve working without any subject. Look for whether a curve is geometric and compass-true, or free and visibly hand-made.