white tin glaze, height: 21.5 cm, diameter: 13.5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Cup, 1872–1874. Faience, yellow-reddish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 10 cm, diameter: 7 cm (mouth); 6 cm (base). Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Clock, c. 1880. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 41.6 cm, width: 35 cm, depth: 11.8 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.
Because it is the ancient pottery of Gaul which in ‘rustic earthenware’ by Bernard Palissy, reappears, moulds closely to nature like a fossil footprint, is dressed in true colours, wetting objects with a liquid enamel, it is clear that, in prevailing reproductions, the specific characteristics of our various fern fronds, and at the brink of still freshwater or flowing water, the nature of our marsh or river shells, our crustaceans and our fish.
Yes, we know it was once fashionable for some individual professors to belittle from the top of some oxymora pulpits, in some sectarian sanctuaries, applied art and works from our traditional crafts. Let me seize this opportunity to proclaim the principle of the unity of art, paying homage to the proud ancestor, to one of the leaders of the French arts of fire, to the Symbolist of terracotta art. And just to do it justice, let us recall the excellence of the concerns about the origin of the clays, and the French invention, Gallic, of the fritted glazing. Let Palissy speak for himself about his purpose, his goal:
A few days after the emotions and civil wars were allayed, and it had pleased God to send us His peace, I walked one day along a meadow of the town of Saintes, close to the river Charente. And while I was contemplating the horrors of which God had spared me at the time of past turmoil, I heard the voices of some girls sitting under willow trees and singing a hymn of Psalm CIV.
And because their voices were silky and well-toned, it made me forget my first thoughts, and being stopped to listen to the hymns, I left the pleasure of the voice and entered into contemplation on the meaning. And I said to myself: Admirable goodness of God! My goal is to have for the works of your hands as much reverence as David in the Psalm. And I therefore thought of building a garden in accordance with the drawing, the ornament and the excellent beauty that the Prophet described in this psalm, a dome of refuge that would be a holy delight and honest occupation of body and mind.
So, here is the mystery of Bouvard and Pécuchet – A Tragi-Comic Novel of Bourgeois Life responsible for this pedantic quip of one of our modern French critics (Brunetière) with respect to the works by Palissy: “There is no art in a pot, because there is no aim,” that is to say premeditation. Yet there was precisely a holy purpose for the potter, a genuine desire to initiate men, through reproductions of nature, to see God through the similarities and the beauty of the most humble works.
In turn, will the modern decorator have enough sincerity, faith, to make shoot out of his work a symbolic, rejuvenated, free art, creating through and by means of constant observation of the nature, the progress and the highest and best ideal, entitled to be amongst the usual concerns of an artist?
First of all, the nature of today contributes with new forms; science offers novel symbols, features, unknown to our ancestors and nature and proper to draw the attention of those who have ‘unlearned’ the familiar things. In the flow of ideas and the exchange between our current decorative workplaces we can already see today the potato, this good old tuberous crop, the alpine Paradise lily or Saint-Bruno lily, the Cretan dittany, the mallows, the dicentra, introduced since the beginning of the century, and which, by its twisted shape, so elegant and suggestive, with its tender colours, by the winged fold of its two outer petals, now stands as a symbol of love and cordiality; the flower that features the typical corolla, turbined; periwinkle, the Golden Saxifrage of a dubious good faith, and bittersweet; of the illustrious family of good poisoners, the sister of poisons, or rather of intense remedies: henbane, belladonna, the bittersweet mandrake, what a touching emblem!
This is the flavour of the fertile pain, the salutary ordeal; it is the emblem of the anxious ethics. We confess our preference for the good old plants, dear to our foremothers. But the fast, modern trend is deeper, more powerful than the quiet stream of our penchants. It carries everything away. It throws, like a last bouquet of Ophelia, an orchid, with a wealth of an unimaginable strangeness of forms, species, perfumes, colours, voluptuousness, pleasures, and disturbing mysteries.
Finally, science, on all sides, opens new horizons to the designer. Oceanography, which finds in Nancy one of its most passionate fans, is like the king of the sea in the tales of the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, who carries in his arms his terrestrial beloveds to give them a tour of the blue palace
Free man, you will always cherish the sea!
The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul
In the infinite unrolling of its billows;
Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter
O Sea, no one knows your most hidden riches,
So zealously do you keep your secrets!
These secrets of the ocean were delivered by brave researchers. They clear their fishing nets, which like laboratories, create decorative art workshops, museum models. They draw, they issue for the artist such unexpected materials, enamels and cameos of the ocean. Soon the crystal jellyfish will inject touches and innovative curves to the chalices of glass.
“La France” large plate, 1884. Earthenware, red flakes, glaze mottled in light brown, brown, and grey, height: 11.7 cm, diameter: 43.5 cm. Musée des Arts et Métiers, C. N. A.M., Paris.
“Cri-Cri” vase, 1889. Faience, yellow-grey flakes, white tin glaze, coated with blue-yellow glaze, height: 19.5 cm, diameter: 15 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen.
Thus to find, next to the new forms and decorations, the symbols of a new art, all we have to do is to look around, to inquire, to study and to love; symbol springing spontaneously from the decorator out of these allied forces: the study of nature, the love of his art and the need to express the feelings that belong to our heart.
This is what the artist of the 19th century has too often forgotten. This epoch, surprisingly, admirable in so many ways, claimed to produce a decor, in flooding the world industrially and commercially, and that under very special conditions, although unfortunate, the current performers of these settings have hardly been able, in a similar way as their ancestors, to enjoy the pure joy of the worker’s love for his opus, the composer himself is dragged into slavish imitation of the past, copies of which thinking were absent, whose symbol, created by other times, is misunderstood by ours, and responds to other needs, to a different conception of life.
This was one of the errors, one of the bitter concerns of the age of industrialisation, the exaggerated division of labour, of its organisation far away from home, from family and of its natural environment, in a hostile, artificial atmosphere. The century that will end had no folk art, that is to say, art applied to utility objects and executed spontaneously and joyfully by the artisans themselves for their trade; only the better-informed of our contemporaries, the most generous minds, the most laborious and the noblest artists had noticed it.
Vase, 1884–1889. Faience, yellowish flakes, brown lustre glaze, height: 21.4 cm, diameter: 13.3 cm. Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.
But let us welcome the return to a better design of work. William Morris, the great artist, this humanitarian philosopher, the prophet of joy at work, said that work is human, that it is good, that art is salutary; that
