In France, Emile Galle and the Daum brothers created floor and table lamps as an extension of their work with the vases and bowls. In the USA, Louis Comfort Tiffany, the son of a leading jeweller who was heavily influenced by the French decorative arts, started producing his own lamps at the Tiffany Glass Company. In particular, he experimented with brilliant color compositions to create a stained-glass effect. Art Nouveau lamps were also wrought from metal, and surviving examples of the period in glass and metal now command high prices at auction.

But Art Nouveau was a style which assumed different forms in different countries. In Scotland, the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh created light fittings for Glasgow School of Art in 1907 which revealed a more puritanical, formal and economical expression. In Austria, the movement took an even more austere, linear approach. The Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann, one of a breakaway group known as the Vienna Secessionists, created light fittings for his best-known architectural design -- the Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905 - 11) -- which revealed in its exploitation of geometrical shapes and repeating patterns, how far the group was removed from the mainstream Art Nouveau.

ARCHITECTS AND LIGHTING

The interest shown in decorative light fittings by architects Hoffmann and Mackintosh in Europe, and by Frank Lloyd Wright in the USA, in the early years of the 20th century proved a false dawn within the architectural profession. With the exception of Alvar Aalto, who created a memorable floor lamp in 1956, the chair, not light fitting, proved to be the ultimate domestic-scale challenge for the architect until an explosion of new lighting technologies and ideas in the 1980s led to a surge of interest. However industrial designers have been more than willing to fill the void.

BEHRENS AND UTILITARIANISM

Appropriately, the Godfather of modern industrial design, Peter Behrens, established his reputation with an industrial company which had been set up to manufacture Edison's light bulb. The founder of the giant combine AEG(Allgemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft), an engineer called Emile Rathenau, saw Edison's achievement at the 1881 Exposition Internationale d'Electricite in Paris and obtained the German manufacturing rights. So began the DEG ( Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft), which became AEG in 1887 when Edison's licence lapsed.

Behrens, an architect-designer who had been a member of the avant-garde Munich Secession, joined AEG as artistic advisor in 1907. He created a coherent identity for the company, so founding the modern corporate-identity business, and went on to stamp his mark on its buildings, prospectuses, catalogues, exhibitions, kettles, electric fans and other products. In particular, his Arc lamp of 1908 expressed his philosophy of a simple, undecorated utilitarian style. It was the antithesis of the florid, self-conscious Art Nouveau aesthetic he had promoted in his youth.

At one time or another Behrens employed at AEG such leading names as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, so his influence on the future direction of modern design was immense. Behrens preached the rationalization of objects and in 1907 helped to found the Deutscher Werkbund, an association aimed at uniting art and industry. Certainly the functional turn which light-fitting design was to take owed much to his direction.