Jugend (Youth) (1896-1940) was a German art magazine. It was initially meant to showcase German Arts and Crafts but became known to show off the German version of Art Nouveau. It was started in Munich by Georg Hirth, who edited it until he died in 1916. The magazine sparked the Jugendstil (“Youth Style”) movement in Munich, Weimar, and Germany’s Darmstadt Artists’ Colony for its “astonishingly brilliant covers” and “radical editorial tone,” and influenced German arts and culture for decades.
The magazine, along with several others that launched more or less concurrently, including Pan, Simplicissimus, Dekorative Kunst (“Decorative Art”) and Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (“German Art and Decoration”), collectively roused interest among wealthy industrialists and the aristocracy, which further spread interest in Jugendstil from 2D art (graphic design) to 3D art (architecture), as well as more applied art.
Germany’s gesamtkunstwerk (“synthesized artwork”) tradition eventually merged and evolved those interests into the Bauhaus movement.
