Judit Pataki

When Art Nouveau Turned to Glass

...

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) went to Paris to study painting and metalwork design, jewellery and objets d'art, and even occupied himself with photography. Returning home in 1879, he set up his own firm under the name Louis C. Tiffany & Associated Artists, which specialised primarily in interior decoration. His interest was initially directed at ceramics, with glass only a sideline, but when he first exhibited his glass pieces these were received with such acclaim that he was prompted to expand this area of production. In 1885 he founded his first glassmaking manufactory, the Tiffany Glass Co., which in time was to be followed by others. He did not concern himself with the production processes, shrewdly handpicking experts to realise his designs. Siegfried Bing, the great Paris dealer, made Tiffany's acquaintance during a visit to America. He became such an enthusiastic admirer of his work that, on returning to Paris, he transformed his shop from an Oriental Emporium into 'La Maison de L'Art Nouveau' in the rue de Provence, and through this set up a two-way commercial collaboration with Tiffany. He was successful in making a name for his friend in France, to the point that at the 1900 Exposition Universelle the American won a gold medal (and was awarded the Légion d'Honneur). His works soon became sought after right across Europe.
As already noted, from the time of its foundation, the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts took a keen interest in contemporary art; this was expressed through its acquisition policy and also through its exhibitions. Thus, it is no surprise that in the spring of 1898, under the title 'Modern Art', it should have displayed fifty of Tiffany's ornamental glass pieces, 29 of which he had created specifically for that exhibition. In the words of József Mihalik, an artist and art critic of the time:

... these display wonderful colours that combine the lustre of mother-of-pearl with the brilliance of a rainbow and the colour play of iridescent glass, and are worthy objects of general admiration.

Presumably some of the 11 early Tiffany items that are owned by the museum were acquired following this show, and the collection was substantially amplified by a further 45 items that came as a bequest from Dr Ottó Fettick, a collector, in 1952-53.
The shapes that Tiffany adopted were derived from historical sources, from nature, or were their abstract versions. Among the historicising pieces there are some -a Persian rosewater sprinkler, for example-that draw on ancient Oriental forms and decorations, while others show the influence of the archaeological finds from the Tell el-Amarna site in Egypt that Tiffany visited. The 'Flower-form' vases are not taken from any specific flower but, with their compositions of opening buds or the fully unfolded corolla on a slender item, are metaphors for birth and the fullness of life. A key motif of the early works is the continuous wavy pulled decoration around the bowl, which symbolises the regularity with which life is propagated.
The 'Lava' series, one of which is on display in this exhibition, has a special place in Tiffany's repertoire. He produced objects that evoked petrified, goldenglowing streams of lava, or elemental forces, employing a wide range of methods. The peacock is likewise a subject that excited and inspired countless variants. The coloration and iridescence of peacock feathers appear in a range of objects; by using a soft lustre developed specifically for this purpose, and sometimes by employing gold-threaded (aventurine) glass, the artist strove to achieve ever greater fidelity to life and even simulates the 'eye' of the feathers. The 'Peacock' series embodies many symbolic meanings associated with the bird; important items of this early series are also in the show.

The other defining personality of Art Nouveau glass and, in fact, the initiator of the whole movement, was Émile Gallé (1846-1904). He studied mineralogy, botany and art history in Weimar before moving to the Meisenthal Glass Works to study glass techniques. He set up a glass studio of his own in Nancy in 1873. His work received recognition at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and by the time of the 1889 Paris Exhibition he had made an international name for himself. His fame increased throughout the 1890s. In 1901 Gallé established the School of Nancy, other members of which included Auguste and Antonin Daum, Victor Prouvé and Louis Majorelle, to organize courses in the various arts and crafts, and to nurture and foster the new style.
In the early phase of his activity, Gallé, like most of his contemporaries, was heavily under historicist influences. He employed the forms of Venetian Renaissance glass from Murano, Silesian dessert dishes of the Baroque era, glass tableware, and faience ware, even adopting stylised versions of their ornamental motifs, very often mixing all these with Islamic, Egyptian, Persian and Far Eastern elements. In 1884, the first items that can be regarded as belonging to the 'Verreries parlantes' series began to appear, vessels inscribed with quotations from medieval poems and legends, heraldic devices, and 'Neo-Gothic' forms decorated with scenes in coloured enamelling.
Gallé's early multi-layered glass pieces also show the special path down which his historicising bent took him, revealing the influences of motifs from Chinese scent bottles as well as from Japanese woodcuts and wood carvings. The glass for the pieces in the Japanese manner, with their floral décor or depictions of insects, was carved or acid-etched stepwise so that each layer depicted a different motif. This allowed him to achieve a perfect spatial effect, which could be further enhanced by varying the coloration of the various layers and by introducing flecks of gold or silver foil sandwiched between them. The sober elegance of these compositions, the use of sharp lines to demarcate the highly stylised shapes and an intentionally striking asymmetry all bear the imprint of Japanese woodcuts. In Gallé's work, light always plays a special, highly planned role, with one and the same object being transformed almost to the point of unrecognisability, and gaining a new significance by incidental or transmitted light. Glass for Gallé was an intellectual medium:

My own work consists above all in the execution of personal dreams: to dress crystal in tender and terrible roles alike so as to compose for it the thoughtful faces of pleasure or tragedy. For its success this aim is served by the assembly and careful preparation of all the elements needed for accomplishing future plans in production, with technique being subordinate to the predetermined artistic work, and balancing up the potentialities of the gamut of 'master craftsmanship', of technical execution.¹

In the Museum's Gallé Collection, pieces decorated with floral motifs predominate, as they did in his broader oeuvre (he originally trained as a botanist). He thus made good use of the rich collection of plants that he had amassed in his younger years, but in Gallé's art the flowers that were so favoured by Art Nouveau gained a symbolic content. The poppy stands for opium, the dream world and death, the sunflower for the soul turning towards God, orchids for refinement, the iris for the rainbow and the compact between God and man. His disciples of the School of Nancy, the Daum brothers in particular, took his meticulousness of depiction and his striving for technical perfection as the aspects to be emulated. They did not share Gallé's fondness for symbolism, and the extraordinary precision of their floral and scenic decoration owe more to Impressionist painting.
René Lalique (1860-1945), the third major figure in French glass design around the turn of the century, began his career as a designer of jewellery. He gained huge success at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, when he presented his exquisite jewels, in which the plain gold setting was conceived as objet d'art, the jewel taking the form of a dragonfly or mermaid, with insects, plants and female figures as their subjects. The wit and imaginative power these pieces attested swept Paris off its feet. Lalique was already using glass at this stage as a facet of the jewellery, but by 1909, when he purchased the Verrerie de Combs-la-Ville, he was devoting himself fully to glassmaking. By the time he held the first big show of this work, in Paris in 1912, he was already master of a huge variety of techniques. This Budapest exhibition features his opalescent glass objects, of which the tree-legged 'Siren' dish is a splendid example. Produced in the stamping press, a technique that Lalique himself pioneered, this vessel displays at its centre the supple figure of a mermaid, palely lustrous in a gentle play of the full spectrum of opal colours (from pale blue to a warm brown). So fond was the artist of these opalescent frosted or transparent glass forms that he experimented with them throughout his work as a designer; indeed, it is interesting to note that he always produced a transparent version even of the coloured pieces that he brought out in limited editions.

One of the main aims of the show is to draw parallels between two prominent oeuvres in Art Nouveau glass, those of Tiffany and Gallé and those of their contemporaries, and also to show the influence they exercised on those who came after them. Consequently, only a modest selection of the comprehensive Hungarian Collection is presented, with no more than seven items from the Museum's uniquely rich collection of pieces by Valentin Leó Pantocsek (1812-93). By the middle of the nineteenth century, he had developed a technique that decades later became widespread among English, American and Austrian firms and craftsmen; from the outset it also displayed conspicuous parallels with the techniques that Tiffany adopted in his work. Pantocsek's undecorated iridescent glass objects are exact replicas of Roman, Persian or Egyptian glass, or have free forms. What he called "iris glass" glitters in a rainbow of colours, which was completely novel at the time, in the 1860s, when he produced them in the Zlatnó glassworks in Upper Hungary. That is why they came to the notice of Professor Vince Wartha, who, as the head of the new Department of Chemical Engineering at what was then the Polytechnic School of Buda (later the Technical University), accumulated a major collection of glass and ceramic work for teaching purposes. The pieces were made accessible to the wider public by their transfer to the Museum of Applied Arts in 1949. It is thanks to Wartha that we are able to trace the early history of Hungarian decorative arts.
By the mid-nineteenth century Hungarian glassmaking reached a point for the first time in its several hundred years of history where it could stand comparison with the best international work. In the person of Pantocsek it could even produce a pioneer. On the matter of ornamentation, however, there were two opposing schools of thought: to one belonged the advocates of the international, 'cosmopolitan' style, and to the other the 'nationalists', who espoused a vocabulary of forms and motifs based on folk art. The latter developed a style that was also based on research by József Huszka into what was called national decorative art. However, the very best, especially the finest pieces coming from the studio of István Sovánka, the Schreiber factory and the Giergl studio, tended to be a fusion of both styles. In respect to their function, these were in part designed for domestic use or were decorative objects of all description made to meet the needs of the growing middle class and the aristocracy, such as tableware or individual pieces of particularly high quality, and in part designed as one-off pieces, produced for display at domestic or international fairs. An example of such a oneoff piece is a baptismal font by István Sovánka (1858-1944), an early piece designed for Hungary's Millenial Exhibition of 1896 and conceived in the spirit of that exhibition's national historicism. Sovánka based his work on what Huszka considered to be authoritative patterns and motifs of the national style that included a trademark peacock-eye floral motif. The works that he showed at the grander international exhibitions, from the early 1900s onwards, were produced in what at the time was arguably the most advanced glassworks in Hungary, the Zay-Ugrócz Works. These bore typical marks of the international Art Nouveau style, and the discernible influence of Gallé on his work was both noticed and seen in a positive light by commentators in Hungary.
The oeuvre of Miksa Róth (1865-1944), the stained glass and mosaic artist, was also internationally well known, with a considerable number of major pieces being commissioned by buyers outside Hungary. The bulk of them were produced following principles laid down by John Ruskin and William Morris, while in technique he employed opalescent glass in Tiffany's style. These were also the objects that met with the greatest success, with two compositions, 'Pax' and 'Sunrise', being awarded silver medals at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle.
In the present exhibition, the Museum of Applied Arts is presenting the outstanding pieces of its glass collection, those which demonstrate the hugely varied technical devices that the best artists brought to bear in order to achieve a beauty of form which conveyed a message to those lucky enough to possess these objects.

¹ Cited by William Warmus, in: Emile Gallé: Dreams into Glass. New York, 1984, p. 188.

 

Judit Pataki
is Head of the Department of Public Relations and Communications at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest and editor of the Museum's publications for the general public.