Encountering the Unknown Through a Translucent Wing
by Victoria Thomas
How should history honor great artists?
Many, including Rene Lalique, are remembered and represented to the public by priceless collections in the world’s museums. And many, including Lalique, have museums built exclusively to showcase their legacy.
But Art Nouveau jeweler, glass and enamel master Rene Lalique is probably the only artist who has been immortalized by the naming of a sea-slug after him: Hypeselodoris Lalique. This marine creature belongs to the large genus of nudibranchs, colorful, tufted gastropod mollusks, essentially snails without an external shell, in the family Chromodorididae. More than 360 identified species creep and ripple through tropic seas, and they are among the most brilliantly-hued beings on earth, lavishly striped, dotted and plumed to resemble everything from hallucinatory birthday cakes to psychedelic orchids.
This honor is hardly random, because the glowing, iridescent creature does indeed suggest Lalique’s rarified creations. He is best-known for his renderings of insects in particular in enamel and gemstones, especially dragonflies. If his creation can be summarized in one piece – and it cannot – it is the “Dragonfly-Woman” brooch the jeweler made for Sarah Bernhardt in 1897, who was then the most famous person in history.
Made of gold, enamel, chrysoprase, chalcedony, moonstones and diamonds, the piece captures the ambiguity and even the faint sense of dread that defines Lalique’s most fully mature work. A languid female figure crowns the brooch, but from there, the visual story gets a bit murky. Fiercely clawed feet grasp the air beneath her astonishing wings, which are far too massively scaled for even theoretical flight. Depending on the viewer’s disposition, she may appear to be emerging from a cocoon, or instead is perhaps being devoured by a terrifying beast that has nearly swallowed her.
Lalique often incorporated an element en tremblant – such as a dangling, trembling pearl. In this piece, the segmented abdomen and tail section of the woman-insect wiggles with every movement of the wearer, bringing even more animation to what seems to be a sort of primordial drama rendered in the most precious substances on earth.
Which brings us to the artist’s choice of medium. Although the “Dragonfly-Woman” is made with many valuable gems, Lalique is most immediately associated with glass. This choice opposed the preferences of the day, specifically in Parisian high society; glass was viewed as a poor imitation of diamonds and other “real” jewels. Lalique felt otherwise.
This rebellious turnabout returns glass to its most primordial origins and associations. Our ancestors valued glass as a supernatural gift, since the first specimens were collected from volcanic flows, and where meteors had fallen. In classical Rome, where men believed themselves to be omnipotent, glass smelted in a furnace was cherished as proof that man had in fact surpassed the gods in power.
And then there’s the question of his subject matter. While Lalique did create fairly traditional religious objects, as well as sleek greyhounds, gamboling nymphs and horse’s heads (the latter often as hood ornaments for automobiles) – all lucrative commissions -- his most compelling work is more complex, more personal, and more disturbing.
Lalique spent his boyhood sketching in the woodlands and marshes, and his view of nature is celebratory, but never sentimental. His most memorable pieces incorporate an element of menace, and of the grotesque, or at least the macabre.
Lalique integrated aspects of Japonisme with consummate skill, the ukiyo-e woodblocks which had recently surfaced in Paris guiding his virtuoso use of negative space. He often planted leggy female nudes among his insects, slightly threatening black swans, and sinuously snaking vines, thus placing Woman squarely into the mythic and dangerous realm of Eve and Lilith.
On an unconscious level, his masterfully rendered insects and reptiles suggest danger, death and decay.
To the ancients, these creatures suggested regeneration and eternal life. One of his most astonishing pieces in this darker spectrum is a brooch consisting of two scarabs clasping a faceted blood-red jewel between them, and surrounded by opalescent eggs – an ornament suited to Persephone herself.
Some pieces, like an extraordinary “cat collar” of linked, engraved rock-crystal panes, etched with feline motifs, would be a rock-star (pun intended) choice for today’s fashionista.
The artist also created heavenly doves, snuggling lovebirds and winsome pansies, dewy with diamonds, and these more mainstream creations were the most easily copied by his many imitators.
But Lalique’s place in history is not a place of mere technical mastery, nor mere beauty: it is an invitation to step into the shadow, and engage with the Great Mystery.
Why resist?
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.