the moon in the stone

who, after all, is the artist? or has the concept of the individual artist always been a myth? even the most solitary of the arts, writing, is probably only solitary in a small percentage of the time; as an editor, i have seen unedited manuscripts. editors, like trans- lators, are the silent hand in the process of creating art in literature.

what about painting? there, i will admit, it's hard to imagine paintings to be group endeavors. but let's look at it from another perspective: beyond even the time when students collaborated on the master's pieces, the history of art is crammed with stories of agents and galleries telling the painters what the public wants, what they can sell.

who is the artist in these little birds, the carver of the form, or the maker of the color? for me, the color in the work of almeric walter is the revelation. turns out, though, that the two ele- ments were contributed by two different people. henri berge carved the creature, walter himself developed, or rather refined, a method of calling the most from his production of pate-de-verre.

which is just like what it sounds like, mashed then made malleable glass, poured into moulds (of the little statues) which have been painted on the inside, and then with various powders and chemicals to insist on the color to go where the artist wants. who is the artist?

pate-de-verre, marqueterie-de-verre, pate-de-cristal.... numerous glass artists were avid to employ these revived methods which had been originally popular in ancient greece and rome. to my mind, of the first, walter and berge were the undisputed mas- ters, but there were other artists who offered some wonderful pieces.

one of these was gabriel argy-rousseau, who, as far as i can determine, designed his own pieces (and is a very early user of a hyphenated last name, borrowing the 'argy' from his wife's name). i really like this piece, and some of his other work is mesmerizing, but in the end the limited pallet of both color and style, loses my interest.

francois-emile decorchment produced some spectacular pieces, his experimentation drew some fabulous results, but his output of this style was limited to far fewer than the 100 or so pieces walter and berge produced.

when i was in paris, the one item in the museum of decorative arts that most aston- ished me was a simple string of glass flowers, a necklace by lalique in which every little flower seemed to contain the light of the moon. i can't tell you how that moonlight is inserted into these pieces, nor why i am so profoundly touched by it, but it is, and i am, and for this i am grateful.

the maestro, without a doubt, despite the grand trickery of decorchement, the cool brilliant elegance of lalique, the constant charm of argy-rousseau, or the radiance of walter and berge, was, of course, emile galle.

there was no technique with which he did not experiment and excel. there was nothing in the range of art nouveau styles and techniques which he did not only make his own, but take the form to an incandescent new level.

the saddest case is that of daum, the entire clan, who were the ones to bring glassmaking to nancy. galle came to nancy a bit later, establishing his own firm, a companion and competitor to the daums. sad because while they were the first, while walter and berge started off working for him. though walter sold him the rights (non-exclusively) to his methods, to my eye, the daums were never able to quite pull it off.

daum was salieri to galle's mozart; while some of his (their) work is beautiful, as a whole it is just not a revelation of genius. but i can't presume sadness from this distance. nor envy. nor pride. what is important is that the daums created an atmosphere in which great miracles could happen, and they continue still.

i must add my gratitude for a wonderful blog
for seeing this amazing, mostly regional, work: HERE

perchance to dream

SENSATION

Through blue summer nights
I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat,
trampling short grass:
Dreaming,
I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.


Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge
through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature -- as happily as with a woman.

Arthur Rimbaud

Emile Galle was born into his craft, and at first he carried on the traditions of the Victorian Era, flounces on pottery, but he came of age in a time of massive transitions; those of them most influential to this student of horticulture (as well as art) were the psychology of dreams and the unconscious, and the tremendous influx of Japanese culture.

Allied with him in these interests and perspectives were the Symbolists, particularly the poets, several of whom were his friends.

A SLEEPER IN THE VALLEY

A green hole where a river sings;
Silver tatters tangling in the grass;
Sun shining down from a proud mountain:
A little valley bubbling with light.

A young soldier sleeps, lips apart, head bare,
Neck bathing in cool blue watercress,
Reclined in the grass beneath the clouds,
Pale in his green bed showered with light.

He sleeps with his feet in the gladiolas.
Smiling like a sick child, he naps:
Nature, cradle him in warmth: he's cold.

Sweet scents don't tickle his nose;
He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his motionless chest,
Two red holes on his right side.

Arthur Rimbaud

Thus far, when we've looked at Galle, we've looked at beauty, as well as Japanese influence, but now we must look deeper. the work of the Japanese was not merely a new graphic direction as much as, like Van Gogh, a religion. to begin to deeply absorb himself in the holiness of nature. Gabriel Weisberg points to subjects like frogs eyeing dragonflies (and dragonflies themselves), as evidence of this. 1 Galle, like the Japanese, also inscribed lines from symbolist poetry into much of his work; this one: Hugo's Escape from motionless shadows.

for dream is occasionally nightmare; where does that difference exist? Debora L. Silverman tracks the new science of psychology on developing artists. 2 Galle's deepest motivations became those to record his dreams, to recreate them in glass, and then to provoke them in anyone who held his work. He proposed to evoke the "latent spirit beneath phenomena." what better medium to reveal layers than glass.

Among the foliage, green casket flecked with gold,
In the uncertain foliage that blossoms
With gorgeous flowers where sleeps the kiss,
Vivid and bursting through the sumptuous tapestry,

A startled faun shows his two eyes
And bites the crimson flowers
with his white teeth.
Stained and ensanguined like mellow wine
His mouth bursts out in laughter
beneath the branches.

And when he has fled -- like a squirrel --
His laughter still vibrates on every leaf
And you can see, startled by a bullfinch
The Golden Kiss of the Wood, gathering itself together again.

Arthur Rimbaud
translated by Oliver Bernard 3

the establishment of reverence should be the goal of any art; the artist must therefore be on the road to open himself, to remove the layers of interpretation which blind one from genuine experience. Galle's pursuit of the dreamworld and its language was clearly this. He writes,

How can one explain the power exerted on the least noble and most delicate of our senses by the dizziness of the scent of carmine, by the flattery of subtle colour, burrowing more deeply into our souls than the thrust of crude colour, finally, by the dream-inducing, dusty velvet feel when you touch -- more subtle than any shining glaze.

Verlaine adds, We want nothing but suggestion/ No more colour, just suggestion!/ For suggestion alone can marry/ The dream to another dream, the flute to the horn.

Whether Verlaine or Hugo, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Leconte le Lisle, Villon or many others, the addition of haiku-like bits of poetry into Galle's creations brought both halves of the brain into the experience, at the same time as the fingers touch solid where the eyes see liquid. We still today ask the question, where do dreams come from? Galle's answer intrigues and informs us still.

Emile Galle was inventing Modern Art just at the moment when the depths of dreams were beginning to enter the common language, suggesting the reality and the symbol, were both real, and both not real. That plus his invitation of glass into the universe of poetry, makes him worthy of examination to this day.

The clouds gathered over the open sea
which was formed of an eternity of warm
tears. in In the woods there is a bird,
his song makes you stop and blush. -- Rimbaud.