Émile Gallé. Émile Gallé
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are missing – Jules Lejeune and Pastor Othon Cuvier are no longer with us. I mention these two noble persons, not out of vanity, but I appreciate that by welcoming a craftsman too superficial in his various experiments, you paid credit to the good judgement of these two valued men, both of them being paragons through the light of their charity, their tolerance of any sincere belief, and their honourable zeal to unite men in appreciation, study, and peace.
They only had to alleviate a little my anxieties and doubts, not about your kindness, but about myself. My commitment to our Academy dates far back to my youth, to the days of annual sessions, these ancient and good Thursdays in May when my classmates from high school in Nancy, Hubert Zæpfell and the angelic Paul Seigneret, two pure victims, picked us up from the joys of the noisy Institution Leopold to come and listen, in this royal decor, to the Lacroix, the Margeries, the Burnoufs, the Benoîts, the Godrons, the Lombards, the Vollands, and the Duchênes.
Our young humanities savoured the indulgence of a generous science, of an Atticism, pretty as the golden Jean Lamour guipure. Who would have thought that the mediocre student of the best masters ever would one day dare to present, here, in front of many, a belated French essay?
This task will find favour, I hope, more easily thanks to the choice of a familiar theme in my usual work. It might be more sincere and more significant. Hence it is from a composing decorator, an image assembler, who requires voice this time, who wants to talk to you about the symbolism in the decor.
Imagining themes that are specific to coating lines, shapes, shades, thoughts, the decoration of our homes and the objects of utility or pure pleasure, adapting its purpose in a material-specific way to metal or wood, marble or fabric; it is, without any doubt, an absorbing occupation. But it is actually more serious, the consequences grave, which the creator of the adornments usually does not suspect.
Daisy vase (front and reverse), 1874–1878. Faience, white tin glaze, yellow-reddish flakes, height: 17.4 cm, width: 17 cm, depth: 7.5 cm. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich.
Smoking service: tray, tobacco tin, ash tray, cigarette holder, and match case, date unknown. Faience. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Each implementation of human effort, however minute the overall result may be, is summed up in the gesture of the sower, sometimes an awe-inspiring gesture. However, per chance or intentionally, the designer, too, acts as the sower. He plants a field, the decor, devoted to a special culture, the decor, to tools, to some workmen, to germs, to special crops.
Because among the ornaments that arise from his conventional issues, the most humble as the most exalted ones can one day become elements in this compelling documentary ensemble: the decorative style of an era. Indeed, any creation of art is conceived and born under influences, amidst the atmosphere of reverie and the most customary volition of the artist. It is there, in any case, that his work arises from. Regardless of his consent, his concerns are like a newborn for godmothers, good fairies, or witches, who cast evil spells or confer magical gifts.
The work will bear the indelible mark of cogitation, a passionate habit of mind. It synthesises a symbol in the unconscious, in the depth. Some Asian rugs contain, amongst the frame and the wools, a silky female hair, that is the personal branding of the task performed, such as a faded ribbon in a closed book reveals the page meditated upon, preferred, the page sometimes interrupted forever.
Thus, the designer intermingles into his book something of himself. Later on, we unravel the skein; we will find the blanched hair, the dried tears – making the autographs of Marceline Valmore often unreadable – and exhale something inaudible or the sigh of weariness and disgust for the involuntary and repulsive task, or the manly satisfecit of the poet:
Oh night, friendly night, desired by the one
Whose arms, truthfully, can say today
We have worked!
We ignore the name of this fine artist thinker, Egyptian statuary, royal goldsmith, mage, or temple decorator, who, having stopped to contemplate the agitation of a muddy insect, the dung beetle, the dung-making skua kneading a ball of manure, in order to lay its eggs into the heat of the Libyan sand, was moved by religious respect.
He was the first one to know, beyond the appearances, to discover a noble image and invent this mystical gem, the sacred scarab. Its forelegs – and later in the Phoenician imitations its outstretched wings – support the solar sphere, source of the light, of the heat; in his hind legs he maternally rolls another celestial body, a globe, the earth where it puts down the seeds of life. What a testimony given by the inventing artist, to the existence of a creative God, the providential development of the satellite with the source of heat! Strange and very ancient prescience, it seems, the global terrestrial planetary form itself: here you have an artistic, cosmographic, religious, and divinatory symbol. But what is especially corroborated with the artist is that such an invention is a testament of the spiritual quality and the habitual thinking of surprising and prophetic beauty.
Hen terrine, after 1880. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 16 cm, width: 27 cm, depth: 18 cm. Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels.
Lion-shaped candlestick, 1874. Faience, reddish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 43 cm, diameter: 23 cm. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich.
Cockatoo pitcher, designed in 1874, executed in 1889. Faience, yellow flakes, blue tin glaze, height: 38 cm, diameter: 19 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.
Duck jardinière, 1884–1889. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 18 cm, width: 21 cm, depth: 14.5 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen.
This characteristic example allows me to set aside the more or less boring definitions that have been given for symbol, symbolism, and symbolic art. We mean it, don’t we? That the symbol in the various fields of art, poetry, religion, is the representation of a thing, usually an abstract, conventional representation, agreed amidst insiders, which is in the decor, in the vase as well as in the coin, the statue, the painting, the bas-relief, the temple, or in the poem, the sung or mimed work. It is always the translation, the awakening of an idea for a picture.
In the unpolished symbol surges the epitome, said Maurice Bouchor. And the symbolic decoration humbly adapts to this definition: up to it to render just any figure ornamental, any synthesis of drawing, plastic, shades, designed to turn them into the most subtle abstractions provided he is something of a poet, he has carte blanche, for the poet is a symbolist par excellence. How will the decorator do it? A bit like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: “I will bring a rose bud with thorns as a symbol of my hopes, mingled with many fears.”
But it is desirable that the symbol is not too enigmatic for the spirit of France likes clarity. As Hugo says:
The idea that to which everything yields is always clear.
And the French audience, in front of the modern British anthologies, sometimes real blooming charades, takes pride in the end, as Victor Hugo, deciphering the riddle:
A Rose said: Guess!
And I replied: Love!
Does this mean that the rose is more romantic than the peony? “The weeping willow,” said the aesthetician Lévéque in The Science of Beauty, “does not weep more than other willows, the violet is not more modest than the poppy.” The moral expression of plants is purely symbolic.
Fellow citizens of one of the most charming symbolists, Grandville, we have learned to read in Animated Flowers and Stars, and we know that this eloquence of the flower, through the mysteries of its body and its destiny, through the synthesis of the plant symbol seen through the eyes of the artist, sometimes exceeds in intensely suggestive power the authority of the human figure. We know that