glass, covered with heated fragments of coloured glass, sanded, engraved, and gilded egdes, height: 20 cm, diameter: 15 cm (mouth). Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.
As the botanist who brings back, attached to a specimen from the Alps, a plot of the mountain, the landscape gardener gives us back pieces of a happy and free land. Put on the picture rail or behind the shop window of the dealer, the work of his hands will halt the poor people passing by who go through life without looking up to the clouds. He cheerfully shows them, with the tip of his brush, the Lost Paradise:
“Just look, above the dirty streets and grotesque chimneys, just look at this little piece of sky after the rain! And this fragment of the coast below! And in this spot of the prairie under the Argentine willows! And this little country home at the edge of the woods!” The artist is recompensed when, by chance, the teary look of a passerby says, “Yes, this is where I want to go and to live.”
What a unique person among all beings, the artist who falls under the charm of a large rock that he cannot eat, a meadow that he cannot graze, who kneels down before a flower that he likes but does not love, holds out his arms to a cloud that he has no plans to caress! In his strange madness, does the artist not unconsciously try to carry man back to his natural environment, to the better life, the primitive one, to the real setting, the noble architecture of a free existence?
And that is why I am delighted to be among the painters and portraitists of our old mother Lorraine. Thanks to you, our sons will regain some of their dear old faces under the wounds that men make him: canals, roads, customs barriers, forts and barracks, factories, townships, black cities. The landscape gardener constantly engaged in watching this magnificent front, the countryside, to show it to his forgetful children, he is an educator.
The decorative artist, too, wants to devote himself to the same task. Among the flow of ugliness, he creates art shelters. He tries to hide a little the disgrace of our utensils. He seeks to replace modern existence among the natural elements that are banned from it, the tree in his pride, the wild beast in his freedom, the flower in its virginity. That is why the decorator looks at the naturalist painters like big brothers, and I just wanted to make this clear…
“L’Escargot des Vignes” cup, 1884. Clear crystal glass, height: 28 cm, width: 18.5 cm, depth: 12.5 cm. Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.
Fortune vase with lid, World Expo 1884. Clear crystal glass, height: 37 cm (with lid), diameter: 13 cm. Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.
Porcelain
It is not without regret that I see those of our contemporaries who love the manifestations of life and movement in art, the naive impression of the artist looking for man and the unrealised idea in the depth of the works, and, disdainful of the view, are dilettanti of the vision and retain towards modern porcelain, as it seems, nothing but the material and the decorative use, a restriction, which is, to my mind, going too far.
Blaming modern porcelain for aloofness, for anaemia in its assignment, cannot be, because of such and such a work, a reason for any misunderstanding about contemporary porcelain because this ostracism should then also wrap up, for the same reasons, the old ones, and with them the cold whiteness of the lily, the fragile grace of the corollas.
Coldness, eh! Is it not the core reason of the snow to be white, of the glacier to be blue? And I would say, red and sumptuous splendour of your chimney flames, Mr Lauth, the ignition of your nasturtiums, of your pelargoniums, Mr Deck, are they polar shows?
“Porcelain, they say, lacks a mysterious facet.” There is, gentlemen, a kind of marine shell called porcelain, they so resemble yours. How mysterious is the glazing, without the aid of fire, this enamel so white, so pure, so hard! In fact, the translucent shells that you retrieve from your ovens do not differ to the eye nor to the touch, from the enigmatic porcelain of the sea. In short, here is the mystery!
And the reddening that arises from a thick cover, call for a reducing atmosphere, do they not offer the beloved depths, where the mystery is sleeping? Admittedly, nobody will blame me for being a materialist, but I admit that the soft beauty of white, old, fine china and the attractiveness of a modern paste seem to stand on their own. Their caresses are also suggestive. Because, the love of work, the love of nature, the love of one’s dreams is only varied modes of the infallible spell: love.
Also, when I think about porcelain with such partialities of the decoration, I do think to myself. No, the decor of the porcelain is not a dry subject for the avid artist to add to the simple delight of the senses, nourishing the mind.
White nymphs, modern porcelains are ready today, under the skilful hands of the successors of Ebelmen and of Salvetat, to surrender to the caresses of a rejuvenated ideal. So many artists, so many of our contemporary poets, intellectual workers, are willing to move these daughters of your eves, so that they go in the world to conquer souls! […]
Dragonfly cup, 1887. Clear glass with partial black overlay and marquetry, height: 22 cm, diameter: 13.3 cm. Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.
Tall vase with grass decoration, 1884–1889. Glass, gilt, cylindrical swirled vase with a crimped rim, height: 44.5 cm. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk (Virginia).
L’École de Nancy in Paris
Preface to the catalogue of the Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Lorraine, opened in the Pavilion of Marsan from 1 March – 1 April 1903. This preface was reproduced by the Lorraine-Artiste, dated 15 March 1903.
The name École de Nancy was used to describe the group of cultural industries of France and the trends that characterise them.
More specifically, it is an association of private initiative, a provincial alliance of arts and crafts. It has its headquarters in Nancy and proposes to develop the prosperity of industries of manual arts in Lorraine. As soon as its resources permit it, the École de Nancy intends to give vocational education courses and classes for the direct application to all trades akin to drawing.
It opened study conferences, exhibitions of works of art. It is now waiting for the means to create a special museum in Nancy dedicated to its works, its education of art workers and the public, a kind of conservatory of its workmanship, of its models, of its tradition.
The École de Nancy, in fact – and this is what distinguishes it from the groups which fortunately are usually more or less cohesive art salons – claims to have, and have put into practice, some of the principles that are unique to it. It has carefully formulated them, although it leaves to its members an absolute independence for individual applications.
There still remain, however, between these artists, not to mention the Lorraine family resemblance, enough links to make their group exhibition attempt an interesting one. First of all, they rely on the higher principle of the unity of art, as painters such as Prouvé meet there with industrialists, and Prouvé himself practices both great humanitarian murals, vibrant, passionate statuary, and art trinkets. They all also relate to a more or less strong and safe aesthetic, the demonstration of which has been revealed early in Nancy, and practiced with some success for a quarter of a century.
Young people have experienced in their turn all the practical value and are readily attached to a free action, to a rational mode of design and to designer’s formulas that come from the same method of composition. This is, moreover, a national heritage in our country, above all, fond of clarity, of logic, of logical construction indeed,
