More Than Just a Pretty Vase
Gallé grappled with the question of how to combine the identities of artist and craftsman throughout his career. These tensions are evident in two portraits of the artist by Victor Prouvé, Gallé’s longtime friend and design co-collaborator. The first portrait (Figure 5), made in 1892, captures the duplexity of Gallé’s persona that was familiar to Prouvé from their time working together.[1] Gallé leans over his desk, closely scrutinizing his latest creation. A mélange of flowers and greenery is strewn about his work surface, likely used for inspiration as he adds final decorative touches to the vase in his hands. Light streams into the studio that highlights his forehead, accentuating his intellectuality, as well as his elongated fingers, alluding to his talent for the manual labor essential to his work. Prouvé depicted Gallé very differently in another, undated portrait (Figure 6) of the artist in his woodshop. In this painting, Gallé appears to be at ease, planing a block of wood while he looks out at the viewer with a bemused expression. His hair is mussed, a curly tendril hanging loose over his forehead. Gallé wears a black smock over his clothing, to protect it from the mess of wood shavings created from his work– he is surrounded by loose coils of these wood shavings. Various tools are strewn across Gallé’s workbench, and line the walls behind him. Prouvé’s choice of wall color echoes the natural tones of the wood with which Gallé works, and his loose, rough brushstrokes seem to evoke the idea of the coarse, raw wood before Gallé would refine it.
Both of these paintings show Gallé at work, closely engaged with his material, and developing his abilities in both media. However, while the first portrait reflects a quiet elegance and sense of interiority closely associated with the contemporary artist-genius, the second portrait emphasizes Gallé’s identity as a craftsman. Throughout his career, Gallé strove to develop his skills in different media, and his abilities as both an artist and a craftsman, and endeavored for them to be respected equally. However, these two identities were seen as separate and distinct during this time period, and Gallé would spend his career attempting to unite them in his works, their display, and the way in which he presented himself.
Figure 5: Victor Prouvé, Portrait of Émile Gallé, 1892. Oil on canvas, 150 x 98 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.
Figure 6: Victor Prouvé, Portrait d’Émile Gallé à l’établi, n.d. Oil on panel, 62 x 42 cm. Artnet.
Though Gallé took an unconventional approach to his career by skipping the apprenticeship-journeyman regimen that was expected of him, he became a master of multiple different media. He was born in Nancy, France, a mid-sized city in the northeastern region of Lorraine in 1846. His father owned a glassware and earthenware factory and introduced Gallé to the medium. Gallé had a deep interest in botany, a motif that would come to define his designs, and studied it in school. Gallé’s formal education was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War, when he joined the military. Following the war, Gallé took over his father’s business, incorporating his interest in botany into his designs in glassware and earthenware. In 1885, he expanded the factory to include a wooden furniture workshop.[2]
Gallé was an active arbiter of change in the discourse surrounding the decorative arts, a genre long seen as inferior to the fine arts. The Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, which Gallé helped to found in 1882, sought to reform the way in which the public, and the Académie des Beaux Arts, perceived the decorative arts. Gallé wrote extensively in defense of decorative arts, and his writings also helped shape public perception of himself as an artist, and of his work as both fine art and functional, decorative art. He frequently advocated for the abolition of hierarchies among artistic genres, and for the elevation of craft and its recognition as a fine art. For example, in an 1897 article published in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, Gallé expressed his view of the hierarchy of arts, and his hope for the future:
Let us not tire of repeating that there are no castes among all the artisans of art, that there are no villainous or peasant arts, menial arts or liberal arts, and that the 1900 Salon des Beaux-Arts will finally be the place for any artist who has produced a work of genius and humanity.[3]
In this excerpt, Gallé made clear his contempt for the way that society had villainized and derided artisans and created clear hierarchies for different artistic practices. He articulated a utopian desire to abolish these hierarchies, so that “genius” could be recognized in any artistic medium.
Gallé was not alone in his efforts to champion the value of decorative arts to a broader public. His friend Roger Marx (1859-1913, Figure 7) was a vocal supporter of the decorative arts, the development of Art Nouveau, and a prominent figure in the decorative arts reform. Over the span of his career, Marx was a contributor and editor for the Gazette des Beaux Arts (1900-05), and he held several governmental positions related to the arts, including serving as the Secrétaire des Beaux-Arts (appointed in 1882), the Directeur de l’Administration des Beaux-Arts (appointed in 1887), and the Inspecteur des Musées de Province (appointed in 1889). He helped to organized the 1889 Exposition Universelle, and was in charge of the paintings section of the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Accordingly, his ideas on decorative arts were convincing, and reached a wide audience. In an essay discussing Marx’s role in the unity of art, Rosella Froissant Pezone and Catherine Méneux described him as “slayer in the name of the ‘unity of arts’ of academic hierarchies that confine decorative arts to the despised category of useful.” Marx believed that decorative arts should be treated with equal seriousness and respect as fine arts.[4] In an 1894 article for Le Salon, Marx wrote that “both manage to create in us the same pleasure, the same emotion.”[5] Perhaps Marx’s greatest legacy was his institution of a new section for the decorative arts at the annual Paris Salon beginning in 1891. In an 1889 article for Le Salon, he wrote:
We claim for them the same honors, the same glory, and the same enthusiasm… no more protest against the intimate union of useful and beautiful; a piece of furniture… in which the temperament of a master has given free reign, outweighs the interest a thousand times over the statue or the painting, executed without instinct or vocation…[6]
Marx wanted for decorative artworks to be displayed alongside paintings and sculptures, so that they could be viewed and evaluated alongside one another, and in 1889, with Marx in charge of organizing the 1889 Exposition Universelle, he did just that.
Marx viewed Gallé as the embodiment of the artist-craftsman, and saw him as the exemplar of elevating the decorative arts. For example, in an 1892 article published in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, Marx praised Gallé’s ability to combine technical skill with artistic vision. He emphasized the importance of Gallé’s work elevating everyday objects of use to the level of fine art. Marx also noted that Gallé’s work was distinctive for its use of natural motifs and organic forms, which he classified as a rejection of the artificiality and ornamentation of earlier decorative styles.[7] This attempt to merge fine art and decorative art was clear in Gallé’s wooden furniture and marquetry.
Gallé’s quest to reconcile the beautiful with the functional extended to his works in glass and ceramic, and is exemplified in Les Courges (The Squash, c. 1902, Figure 8). Wrought iron vines seem to sprout from the wall, stretching and winding their way across the wall. Tendrils extend in all directions, their ends spiraling as they seem to seek something to grasp onto for support. Leaves spring from the vine, as if to collect sunlight to photosynthesize energy for the plant. A glass squash flower in full bloom hangs alongside blown glass squash in various stages of ripeness, representing the lifecycle of the plant, a common theme in Gallé’s work. The transparent, striped glass squash are illuminated from within, as if to convey that the plant’s efforts in energy production have been successful. In this work, Gallé included several details that were characteristic of his bois des îles: the cultivation of nature as both a reference point, and as a standard upon which to improve; the showcasing of skill in transforming materials to mimic and refine the natural world; and the dualities between function and ornamentation, the natural and the cultivated.
[1]. Gallé and Prouvé collaborated on several designs, including the Rhin table, for which Prouvé designed the composition for its top. Along with Louis Majorelle and others, they founded the École de Nancy in 1901. For further reading, see Dandona, Nature and the Nation, 11.
[2]. Dandona, Nature and the Nation, 5; Duncan and Debartha, Gallé Furniture, 24.
[3]. Émile Gallé, “Les Salons de 1897: Objets d’Art,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 18, no. 3 (July 1, 1897): 233.
[4]. Rosella Froissant Pezone and Catherine Méneux, “L’unité de l’art” in Roger Marx: Un Critique aux Côtés de Gallé, Monet, Rodin, Gauguin…. (Nancy: Ville de Nancy, 2006), 91.
[5]. Roger Marx, “Le Progress Artistique.” Le Salon (May 2, 1884), n.p.
[6]. Roger Marx, “Le Voltaire.” Le Salon (May 1, 1889), n.p.
[7]. Roger Marx, “Les verriers et les céramistes contemporains,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 7, (1892), 257-81.