Page 40 - Studio International - January 1966

Art Nouveau

by Martin Battersby

One of the most interesting aspects of art history is the send goods to various international exhibitions.
way that the products of a particular period or style fall Japanese prints in particular had influenced painters,
out of favour after a certain time, are regarded with notably Whistler in his Peacock Room, executed in
feelings ranging from indifference to derision, and are 1876, and—mainly through his enthusiasm—Degas,
then restored to appreciation to be eagerly collected. Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Van Gogh found a
Yet in spite of this they remain the same objects and new source of ideas and inspiration. Samuel Bing, an
do not alter in any way—the alteration lies in the eye art dealer from Hamburg, opened a gallery in Paris
of the beholder, in the taste of the day and the whims which was a meeting place for the young artists and
and circumstances which mould taste. So it has been craftsmen, and when he began importing Japanese
with Art Nouveau, which, after fifty years of near objects and publishing books about them his gallery
oblivion during which the name itself has become became a focal point for Art Nouveau and later became
synonymous with vulgarity and bad taste, is now a shop called 'Le Maison de l'Art Nouveau'. Bing was
recognised as a style which had an important influence to Art Nouveau what Diaghileff was later to the Russian
on the art of the Twentieth Century by breaking the Ballet, a man of taste and personality who could bring
shackles of historicism which had imprisoned the together artists and craftsmen from different countries
decorative arts for the first three-quarters of the and successfully combine their talents—to quote only
Nineteenth Century. one example, both Frank Brangwyn and Bonnard
Art Nouveau may be summarised as a revolt against designed stained glass windows which were executed
the machine-made and mostly tasteless artefacts, all by the American Louis Comfort Tiffany. His pavilion at
depending upon past styles for their design, which were the 1900 Paris Exhibition consisted of a number of
flooding the market in the middle of the Nineteenth rooms entirely decorated in Art Nouveau style by
Century. The writings of John Ruskin and William different designers and was probably Art Nouveau at
Morris in England and of Viollet-le-Duc in France had its finest. Bing's death in 1901 and the consequent loss
a great influence on those artists and designers whose of his guiding hand was a serious loss to the style.
dissatisfaction needed a focal point, and the conviction The Japanese use of flowers as decorative motifs,
grew that the salvation of design lay in a return to the their use of carefully-balanced asymmetry and their two-
work of craftsmen and a search for a new idiom of dimensional treatment of form, were welcomed as an
decoration which had no relation to the great periods antidote to the classical symmetry and often ill-
of the past—a search which culminated in the principle digested ornament which had predominated since the
of 'Organic Form' and the use of plants, flowers and latter years of the Eighteenth Century when the Rococo
roots as sources of inspiration. style declined—a style which had also been subject to
This principle had been influenced by the influx into Japanese influence when that country had previously
Europe during the 1860's of works of art from Japan, been open to trade with the West. As we have seen,
that country having recently been opened to the West, Paris was an important centre of Art Nouveau in France,
with trade agreements signed which enabled Japan to but possibly more important was the town of Nancy
in Lorraine, where some of the finest examples of
rococo architecture and decoration could be found and
where there was a long standing tradition of crafts-
Overlay glass bottle manship. The most important of the designers and
with sweet pea design
Signed 'Daum, Nancy' craftsmen living and working there was Emile Gallé,
Height 16 1/2 in.
whose father had founded a glass and ceramic factory
in the town.
Gallo was a man of many interests and a botanist of
considerable repute who spent his spare time collecting
and sketching rare plants which he used in the decora-
tion of the vases which were soon to make him
famous. On a trip to England in 1872 he had seen in
the Victoria and Albert Museum a collection of Chinese
snuff-bottles of cut overlay glass of different colours,
and when in 1874 he took charge of his father's factory
he adapted the Chinese techniques to create some of
his finest works, the designs of which, in addition to
flowers, butterflies and insects, often included a line
from poems by Alfred de Musset, Verlaine or Baudelaire,
or by his patron, Count Robert de Montesquiou, whose
symbolist poems about flowers were interpreted into
vases called 'etudes' by Gallo.
Less imaginative and less technically skilled than
Gallé were his contemporaries, the brothers Daum,
who shared his love of horticultural motifs. The vase
illustrated is a fine example of their work. Made of
layers of coloured glass in shades of purple which are
cut away to form a design of sweet peas to show the
milky white ground, it shows very clearly a Japanese
influence in the asymmetry of the ornament and the
subtlety of colouring, especially in the slender neck
where the purple glass is faintly tinged with verdigris
green at the top.