The Art Nouveau European Route brings together local governments and other institutions in the common quest for the protection, promotion and diffusion of Art Nouveau heritage. While this heritage is mostly tangible – physical elements of outstanding artistic and architectural interest and beauty – it is also intangible, inasmuch as it embodies and helps to explain and understand the recent history and idiosyncrasy of our communities.

To fully explore and bring to light the value of Art Nouveau heritage, therefore, a Congress organised by the Art Nouveau European Route could not limit its scope to the analyses and interpretation of the tangible heritage; it should go deeper into the reality of the communities that created it. In particular, studying aspects of the creation of Art Nouveau heritage that were not publicly acknowledged or were even hidden by the communication systems of the period can provide a valuable contribution to the full comprehension of the Art Nouveau phenomenon.

In this second edition of the coupDefouet International Congress, we proposed to shed new light on an aspect that has been studied very little, if at all: the important contribution of women artists to the development of Art Nouveau. In a nutshell: women as artists, women as creators, women as promoters and protagonists of Art Nouveau.

Coupled with this ambition, we also wished to revisit the widely studied and interpreted representation of the female aesthetic and ideal in Art Nouveau, with new contributions on the matter.

A further strand focused on little-known Art Nouveau cities, in which we discovered creative centres of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have not until now been widely publicised. A similar section on research in progress to the first congress, one in which we welcomed presentations from both seasoned and young researchers, completed the thematic strands of the programme.