Not all Art Nouveau was frivolous and evanescent. Its serious adherents viewed it as the answer to a serious problem that had become apparent by the end of the 19th century: to find a style suitable for the industrial age rather than, as the academically trained architects of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts were doing, applying past styles to contemporary works. In 1861 the English designer William Morris, concerned with this problem, started the Arts and Crafts movement in an effort to improve the tastes of the Victorian public. He hoped to overcome the banality of industrially produced decorative arts by fostering a return to medieval craftsmanship. Although not a solution to mass-produced articles, the movement did revive an interest in craftsmanship that had been diminishing steadily since the French Revolution.

The Arts and Crafts Movement was the parent of Art Nouveau, but it persisted into the new period and after 1900 merged into the mainstream of the newer style. This was also true of symbolism, a Continental movement in poetry and painting that appeared in the 1870s. Much of the enigmatic form and color of Art Nouveau is related to the spirit of symbolism, as are such motifs as Medusa heads, Pans, and woodland nymphs. The atmosphere of decadent cynicism found in the drawings and paintings of Aubrey Beardsley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edvard Munch, as well as the otherworldly qualities found in the works of Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Gustav Klimt, were derived from the symbolist poets, yet the rendering in color and line related to Art Nouveau.

One other development that influenced Art Nouveau was the Aesthetic Movement, an English decorative-arts style created by followers of William Morris during the 1880s. The Aesthetic Movement took its sources from medieval art, as did its Arts and Crafts Movement counterpart, but it adapted the newly discovered arts of Japan as well. It survived for only a decade, and much of the style was absorbed into Art Nouveau. Some of the Morris-inspired fabrics and wallpapers of Walter Crane, Charles Voysey, and Arthur Macmurdo (1851-1942), designed in 1882, could easily be taken for Art Nouveau circa 1895.

In fact, the British developments attracted interest on the Continent. The Belgian architects Victor HORTA and Henri van de Velde introduced the works of the English designers in a Brussels exhibition in 1892. They were considered very advanced and were called "Style Anglais." Also, in 1892, when Horta designed a home in Brussels for a Professor Tassel, he amalgamated these recent influences in a linear design, a biomorphic whiplash, and thus created the first Art Nouveau architecture. The French architect Hector Guimard was aware of the work of Horta and Van de Velde, and in 1900, Guimard made brilliant use of Art Nouveau in his design for the entrances to the new Paris subway system, the Metro. For some time thereafter the style was called le style Métro.