the magic of Lalique

“Lalique …revealed the beauty of glass as glass. His relief technique, with its adroitly selected design, gave full effect to rich material and rare craftsmanship…In a style which was altogether French.“

- Guillaume Janneau, "Modern Glass," 1931

The famed jeweler and glass designer, René Lalique had an almost instinctual talent for elevating seemingly mundane items, such as perfume bottles, vases and decanters, into undisputed works of art, deftly melding utility and beauty into a single, distinctive item. He was truly the embodiment of William Morris’s famous assertion to “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be beautiful or believe to be useful.”

Lalique trained as a fine jeweler at the height of the Belle Époque, an artistically fecund period of opulence and exuberance, and was soon inspired by such diverse styles as Japonisme and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Initially experimenting with the inclusion of glass elements in his jeweled necklaces and brooches, Lalique inevitably turned toward the design and production of the glass vessels for which he would soon become so well known. Employing virtually every known glass technique – blowing, molding, pressing, pâte de verre, cutting, opalescence and tinting – the resultant works were first representative of the Art Nouveau and, later, Art Deco movements that briskly swept across France and the world.

His preferred motifs were figural, natural and stylistically geometric, and his exceptional ability at rendering these in glass is evident in the fine selection of items offered here: the deft combination of the geometric Greek key with naturalistic birds and leafy vines picked out in sepia-patine of the “Gimpereaux” vases of lot 68; the classically composed “Lutteurs” vase with its base of hunched wrestlers in smoke-patine supporting the bulbous frosted glass bowl of lot 67; or the highly stylized “Rennes” vase with its ram antlers of aggressive swirls which almost obscure the delicately formed bodies of lot 66.

Lalique was artistically creative, technically trained and daringly inventive; his work has weathered the test of time.

- Michele Carolla, Fine Art Specialist