Lalique and the artistic jewel

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1998 by Joan T. Rosasco

In the concluding chapter of his history of French jewelry, Vever recalls the fervor with which the artistic jewelry inaugurated by Lalique was embraced in the 1890s and also the rapid repudiation of art nouveau when the public went back with relief to the familiar garlands, swags, and bows of "the Empire style and the eternal Louis XVI."(9) The final jewel illustrated in Vever's book is the hair ornament shown in Plate XVI, which Lalique exhibited in 1908, the year the book was published. Returning to the motif of the corsage ornament he had designed for Boucheron in diamonds twenty years earlier, Lalique carved the pin from tinted horn in the shape of two swallows with overlapping wings. One holds a stem of wheat, suggesting that these are a nesting pain. This beautiful, optimistic jewel was a valedictorian gesture.

In 1908 Lalique began his collaboration with Francois Coty, turning his attention to the design of machine-made glass perfume bottles and other objects. In 1910 he bought a glass factory in Combs-laVille and produced his own designs. With the death of his wife in 1909, the design of artistic jewelry was finished for Lalique. Presciently, he realized that the era of the aesthete and courtesan was over, even before World War I swept them to oblivion.(10) In the following years Lalique's firm continued to produce small pieces of glass jewelry, but this was no longer central to his enterprise. He focused instead on the design and industrial production of fine tableware and architectural components. He was one of the few in the decorative arts to make - even to lead - the transition from art nouveau to the other style of modernity belatedly dubbed art deco.

A traveling exhibition entitled The Jewels of Lalique, organized by Exhibitions International, and funded by Lalique North America, opens on February 3 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York City, where it will remain on view until April 12. Future showings will be listed in Calendar.

1 Trans. Roger Senhouse (1944; London, 1953), p. 36.

2 Penny Proddow brought to my attention a reference to treasures from Aucoc and Odiot in the boudoir of the courtesan Marguerite Gautier, a character in La Dame aux camelias (1848) by Alexandre Dumas fils. Although it seems clear from the context that these "treasures" were silver or vermeil toilet articles rather than jewels, it suggests that Aucoc may have numbered the demimonde among his clientele.

3 Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1945), pp. 67-68.

4 October 4, 1874, p. 746.

5 The novel is Monsieur Phocas (Paris, 1899).

6 Henri Vever, La bijouterie francaise au XIXe siecle, vol. 3 (Paris, 1908), p. 714.

7 "Modern French Design in Jewellery and Fans," Studio (Winter, 1901-1902), p. 2.

8 Rene Lalique (Paris, 1922), p. 36. The English translation is mine.

9 La bijouterie francaise, vol. 3, p. 777. The English translation is mine.

10 Roger Marx in L'art social (Fasquelle, Paris, 1913), pp. 169-187, wrote that Lalique wanted to reach beyond the small circle of wealthy patrons and find a larger public. Lalique contributed a short text to this book (pp. 288-289) in which he deplored the poor quality and design of industrially produced decorative arts. Both he and Marx were calling for the effort that led to the large and influential Exposition Internationale des arts decoratifs et industrials modernes held in Paris in 1925.