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Almost any photograph of a Northern European city street scene taken around 1900 shows how decisively art nouveau (or its German version, Jugendstil) permeated the Mauve Decade. As the first art style since the Industrial Revolution to integrate every phase of design, its florid, free-flowing lines ornamented buildings and posters, park benches and Metro stations, Tiffany glass and Liberty silks. Yet few styles have had a shorter life. It achieved its purplest popularity between 1895 and 1900, was fading fast by 1914. With the advent of the machined precision of the 1920s Bauhaus modernism, handcrafted art nouveau became an object of ridicule.

Only in the past decade have European connoisseurs begun to reappraise the movement's significance and restore its masterworks. In many cases, furniture and stained-glass are long gone; World War II and the postwar building boom have leveled many buildings. Yet those art-nouveau monuments that remain are now recognized as well worth the trouble and expense of renovation (see color pages).

In West Germany, a group of Munich Jugendstil fanciers, led by Retailer Hans Joachim Ziersch, 53, bought, for $380,000, the 20-room villa built by Franz von Stuck, and restored its public rooms and part of its atelier with another $250,000. At the turn of the century, Von Stuck was Germany's most fashionable painter, earning the equivalent of $250,000 a year. His slickly lecherous nymphs and centaurs were snapped up by wealthy industrialists, his portraits commissioned by royalty, and his banquets were compared to Roman Bacchanalia. Von Stuck's million-mark palazzo, begun in 1896, fell into decay after his death in 1927, but an aging daughter lived amid the ruins until 1961. Opened last month as a Jugendstil museum, the Stuck-Villa pays its way by housing four art galleries in its annex, a modern-art museum upstairs, a restaurant in the wine cellar.

Belgium, when art nouveau was in flower, boasted one of its veritable orchids, Architect Victor Horta. Although four of Horta's buildings have been redesigned, destroyed by fire or demolished, the 66-room manse that he did for Baron van Eetvelde, Belgium's first Governor of the Congo, is preserved much as Horta left it. Moreover, in the annex of the hotel lives Architect Jean Delhaye, a kind of one-man Belgian fin de siecle society who is directing the reconstruction of the home Horta built for himself in Brussels, so that it can open next fall as a museum.

Cache in the Shaft. Most original ol the art-nouveau architects was Spain's Antoni Gaudi, but recognition was slow in coming. Two decades ago, Art Historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his Pioneers of Modern Design, relegated Gaudi to two footnotes in the appendix. Eight years later, Pevsner recanted, saying, "He is the only genius produced by art-nouveau." Gaudi, who urged that "we must not imitate or reproduce Gothic but continue it," based his studies on Catalan architecture and plant forms in nature. The results, scholars now recognize, intuitively anticipated many of today's shell structures, including the asymmetric churches by Mexico's Felix Candela.

Gaudi's acknowledged chef-d'oeuvre is the Church of the Sagrada Familia, still abuilding at snail's pace in Barcelona. But many of the revolutionary structural concepts he employed there, including columns shaped like so many free-form caryatids, received their baptism in the crypt of smaller Guell colony chapel, built on the city's outskirts. Says the American architect, Peter Harnden, who has been hired by Barcelona's Society of the Friends of Gaudi to help restore the building to Gaudi's original design: "It is a continuing surprise and delight to me, so rich in detail that I find something new each time I visit it." The recent discovery of a long-lost cache of Gaudi drawings in a factory shaft may enable Harnden and his associates to enrich the crypt with still more Gaudi delights.

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