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René Lalique’s Extraordinary Art Nouveau Jewelry
The master jeweler and glassmaker has become synonymous with a timeless Art Nouveau style.
I n 2018, the Art Deco Society of New York posed an in their print journal: Who could plausibly claim the title of “Fꦿather of Art Deco?” T𒉰he movement’s breadth and complexity, writes author Nicholas Dawes, makes that a daunting prospect. Yet he went on to conclude that “one person may deserve it more than any: René Lalique.”
An ingenious French decorative artist of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Lalique is synonymous with staggeringly beautiful works that defined and subverted the emergent Art Nouveau movement. Lalique became famous for his glass pieces, an oeuvre that included exquisite vases, perfume bottles and plates. Yet this ℱdecorative wor♓k is inextricable from his origins as a jeweler and his use of three-dimensional modeling, among other techniques. “Lalique is considered the ultimate jeweler,” says Alexia Palmer, a Senior Cataloguer in Sotheby’s Jewelry Department. “It’s a combination of design, craftsmanship and style.”
Lalique began apprenticing for jeweler Louis Aucoc as a young man, going on to design pieces for the likes of 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Boucheron and Cartier. Although major fashion houses used his jewelry designs, he became frustrated when clients balked at taking on his increasingly daring pieces. Lalique struck out on his own in 1885, where he was able to experiment with form and function at the cusp of the nascent Art Nouveau and, later in life, Art Deco movements. “That’s really when he started working under his own name,” Palmer says. “And really started to revolutionize the📖 design and materials he was using.”
Five stunning Lalique jewelry pieces are included as a part of Sotheby’s 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Luxury Week sales. Some pieces, such as a striking pendant and brooch, are representative of styles that he returned to frequently. Others are more unusual, like the spectacular gold and diamond 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:lorgnette – a piece of corrective eye gear that opens with a dramatic flick of the wrist – that showcases Lalique’s technical prowess as a jeweler. This lorgnette is extraordinary in that it simultaneously features several innovative enameling styles, including the plique à jour style introduced during the Renaissance. “What you end up with are these translucent enamel panes that almost look like stained glass windows,” Palmer says, “and so th🐲e light can pass entirely through it.”
In addition to pulling from Renaissance jewelry traditions and Japanese aesthetic influences, Lalique often imbued naturalistic motifs into his jewelry including plants and human figures. One piece in the auction – a peridot, glass and diamond brooch – is an astounding example of how Lalique employed human figures to tell unique stories through jewelry. The scene, wherein several people appear to be tugging at pry bars, appears to be depicting a “sacked city where looters have come in and they’re taking away the treasure, and the citizens on the sides are aghast at this terrible turn of events,” as Palmer describes. For this piece, Lalique worked with glass with an ethos not unlike that of a sculptor: He was inspired by his father-in-law
and brother-in-law, who both worked in Rodin’s workshop, to employ a “monument𒊎al human muscular figurality,” Palmer says. “So it is almost like having mini Rodin sculptures, in glass, on your brooch.”
“Lalique is considered the ultimate jeweler.”
- Alexia Palmer, Senior Cataloguer
But Lalique also didn’t shy away from experimenting with unusual (and occasionally mythic) motifs in his works, including snakes, wasps and monsters. Another inventive piece in the auction, a double-sided pendant crafted from emerald, enamel, gold and pearl, features a sea sprite-esque creature whose tresses transform into tendrils of seaweed. Indeed, Lalique’s audacious imagination, coupled with his mastery of the craft, is what distinguishes his one-of-a-kind jewelry. He certainly, as he once said, made good on his determination 🦋to “create something completely new.”
