La Lorraine Artiste: Nature, Industry, and the Nation in the Work of Émile Gallé and the École De Nancy
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La Lorraine Artiste: Nature, Industry, and the Nation in the Work of Émile Gallé and the École de Nancy By Jessica Marie Dandona A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Chair Professor Anne Wagner Professor Andrew Shanken Spring 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Jessica Marie Dandona All rights reserved Abstract La Lorraine Artiste: Nature, Industry, and the Nation in the Work of Émile Gallé and the École de Nancy by Jessica Marie Dandona Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art University of California, Berkeley Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Chair My dissertation explores the intersection of art and politics in the career of 19th-century French designer Émile Gallé. It is commonly recognized that in fin-de-siècle France, works such as commemorative statues and large-scale history paintings played a central role in the creation of a national mythology. What has been overlooked, however, is the vital role that 19th-century arts reformers attributed to material culture in the process of forming national subjects. By educating the public’s taste and promoting Republican values, many believed that the decorative arts could serve as a powerful tool with which to forge the bonds of nationhood. Gallé’s works in glass and wood are the product of the artist’s lifelong struggle to conceptualize just such a public role for his art. By studying decorative art objects and contemporary art criticism, then, I examine the ways in which Gallé’s works actively participated in contemporary efforts to define a unified national identity and a modern artistic style for France. My dissertation begins with an examination of Gallé’s works produced for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, works that focused on forging consensus among members of the French nation through their appeal to patriotic values. I argue that the divisive events of the Dreyfus Affair, however, led Gallé to reevaluate the idea of both artistic and political consent. In response to these challenges, Gallé developed a Symbolist style that privileged subjective sensation as an expression of the artist’s political commitment to the rights of the individual. I contend that Gallé’s encounter with Japanese art, meanwhile, informed his decision to abandon conventional forms of allegory in favor of defining the national through the natural. My dissertation concludes with a discussion of Gallé’s role as the founder of the École de Nancy, a group that brought together artists and industrialists in an attempt to reformulate ideas of artistic community and national identity in the wake of the Affair. In his works, then, I argue that Gallé sought to redefine what it meant to be French and, in the process, transformed the way in which his contemporaries viewed the decorative arts and their cultural significance. 1 Contents Introduction ii Chapter 1. Carved Into the Flesh of France: Gallé and the Franco-Prussian War 1 Chapter 2. The Franco-Russian Alliance: Unity and Memory 43 Chapter 3. Poetry in Glass: The Evolution of a Symbolist Aesthetic 61 Chapter 4. The Anxiety of Influence: Japonisme, Nature, and the Formation of a National Style 75 Chapter 5. Gallé and Dreyfus: A Republican Vision 134 Chapter 6. One for All, or All for One? Gallé and the École de Nancy 169 Conclusion 217 Images 220 Endnotes 445 Works Cited: 19th and Early 20th-Century Sources 571 Works Cited: 20th and 21st-Century Sources 590 Appendex 1. Image Credits 607 i Introduction Object Nation: The Role of the Decorative Arts in Defining a Modern Style for France Prologue: Requiem The new century has only a handful of years to its name. A man, just this side of gaunt, sits draped like an empty sack in a hard wooden chair. In his hands he holds a delicate, spiraling shape made of light and color and the hard smoothness of glass. He is dying. His life is as brittle and as ephemeral as glass itself. The hand that he holds in his own is not human, but mineral—the substance to which he, too, will soon be reduced (fig. 0.1). And yet, to him, this glass hand, reaching eternally up from the depths of the ocean, is not cold and dead. It is alive with the energy and brilliance of light, with the pulsation of color, and with the writhing torsion of its complex shape, alive in a way that transcends mere existence. This fragile, barely formed and yet eternal object, he thinks, this will be his legacy—a hand that reaches out from the depths of the primordial sea, coming into being as it emerges, symbolizing our shared humanity and our common struggle. For Émile Gallé (1846-1904), the glass he holds is life itself—a crystal matrix permeated with the energy of fire and the mystery of transformation. The Politics of Arts Reform While this description of Gallé’s Main aux algues (Hand with Algae, 1904) might seem at first glance rather extravagant, I think that it is one with which Gallé and many of his contemporaries would have concurred. Gallé and his fellow arts reformers placed an enormous importance on the ability of the decorative arts to communicate profound truths through formal means and on what they perceived to be the pivotal role that the decorative arts played in (re)defining what it meant to be French. As the visual expression of French taste and French style, arts reformers such as Gallé’s friend Roger Marx (1859-1913) hoped that the decorative arts would reestablish France’s superiority in the spheres of culture and commerce.1 By the time of his death in 1904, critics of all persuasions praised Gallé’s art in particular as exemplifying the essence of French style and the pinnacle of French taste. Neither the artist’s lifelong interest in the arts of foreign nations nor his demonstrated commitment to his native province of Lorraine prevented his work from being consistently described as somehow quintessentially French in character. Gallé’s career spanned nearly four decades and coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of the decorative arts in France. Critics, cultural commentators, and government arts officials had decried a “crisis” in the French arts of design as early as mid-century. Rapidly changing methods of production, increased competition with other industrialized nations, and the proliferation of historicist styles all contributed to a widely held perception that the decorative arts were in decline. In the course of the subsequent half-century of design reform, one common theme emerged: the belief that the arts, and the decorative arts in particular, were absolutely central to both the prosperity and unity of the French nation. The Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851, offered visitors a unique opportunity to compare the products of their country’s arts industries with those of rival nations. Whereas ii previous exhibitions held sporadically since the late 18th century had displayed the goods of a single nation, the Crystal Palace exhibition brought together products from around the globe. Visitors from the official French delegation were dismayed by what they witnessed: it seemed to them that France risked losing once and for all its preeminence in the twin realms of art and industry. The official report of the exhibition published by the French delegation included a widely circulated essay entitled “Application de l’art à l’industrie,” by Comte Léon de Laborde (1807- 1869).2 In his report, Laborde claimed that England’s creation of government-supported schools and museums devoted to the decorative arts posed a serious threat to French supremacy in the area of design.3 In order to compete with its European rivals, Laborde argued, France needed to establish similar programs encouraging innovation and excellence in the decorative arts. It was hoped that educating producers would aid in the creation of a new style, one not reliant on historical pastiche but one that would instead express France’s modernity and its unique character as a nation. Laborde’s arguments in favor of educating artists and manufacturers are characteristic of the early years of the decorative arts reform movement. France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and the economic recession of the 1880s gave added urgency to the search for a modern, national style that could be successfully marketed at home and abroad. In the second half of the 19th century, the French government sponsored numerous studies of arts institutions in Germany, England, Austria and other European countries, focusing on design education and the establishment of museums devoted to the decorative arts.4 Marius Vachon’s study Nos industries d’art en péril (1882) was influential in this regard, as was a series of official reports on the arts institutions of other European nations that Vachon published in the 1880s and 1890s.5 In 1894, government officials also commissioned arts reformer and entrepreneur Siegfried Bing (1838- 1905) to study the decorative arts in America. His report, delivered to the director of the Administration of Beaux-Arts, was published in 1896 as La culture artistique en Amérique.6 Although they purported to discuss the fine as well as the decorative arts, such publications invariably emphasized the latter as the area of greatest concern and of greatest potential for reestablishing France’s status as the taste-maker of Europe. Private interest groups met government initiatives with efforts of their own to encourage reform in the decorative arts. The founding of the Société pour le Progrès des Arts Industriels in 1851, for example, was in direct response to the perceived threat posed by other European nations’ progress in the arts of design.