Exhibition Guide
Vase
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The Curator on sprouting Art Nouveau
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Art Object Info
Contemporary with Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glassmaking experiments in New York, Clément Massier and his artistic director, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, developed iridescent lustre glazes for pottery at Golfe-Juan in southern France. Their famed “Grand Champignon” Vase evokes mushrooms springing from the forest floor amidst a tangle of brambles in dappled late-afternoon light. Glazed with fumed metal salts, the vase shimmers like heat rising from the ground, evoking a Symbolist world somewhere between dream and reality.
Massier exhibited with Tiffany at Siegfried Bing’s Paris gallery, Maison de L’Art Nouveau. The gallery became synonymous with the style that dominated international design circles at the turn of the 20th century. The suggestive organic energy of Art Nouveau forms, with their sinuous whiplash curves, was a metaphor for the freedom sought by artists and designers trying to outgrow or cast off the weight of academic tradition and critical expectation.
Art Object Info
Contemporary with Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glassmaking experiments in New York, Clément Massier and his artistic director, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, developed iridescent lustre glazes for pottery at Golfe-Juan in southern France. Their famed “Grand Champignon” Vase evokes mushrooms springing from the forest floor amidst a tangle of brambles in dappled late-afternoon light. Glazed with fumed metal salts, the vase shimmers like heat rising from the ground, evoking a Symbolist world somewhere between dream and reality.
Massier exhibited with Tiffany at Siegfried Bing’s Paris gallery, Maison de L’Art Nouveau. The gallery became synonymous with the style that dominated international design circles at the turn of the 20th century. The suggestive organic energy of Art Nouveau forms, with their sinuous whiplash curves, was a metaphor for the freedom sought by artists and designers trying to outgrow or cast off the weight of academic tradition and critical expectation.