In 1989, I corresponded with Peter Fuller about a book I was writing on Emile Gallé, the art nouveau designer of glass and furniture. I had just finished reading Peter’s ‘Theoria’ in which he called for a return to an art inspired by natural form. I noted that Emile Gallé had a similarly ecstatic approach to nature and art and forwarded several pertinent quotes to Peter. He was fascinated and wanted to review my book for Modern Painters, but sadly died before it was published.
Emile Gallé (1846-1904) could be termed an art nouveau glassmaker, but in many ways this is a terrible label to stick on him. He was primarily a natural historian devoted to expressing his delight in nature through his glassware and furniture. In ‘Theoria’, Peter Fuller criticised the wilderness of aestheticism in late 19th century art, and aspects of art nouveau certainly reinforce this. But it seems that in France, from 1880 to 1900, there was a strong thread of genuine naturalism in the decorative arts, especially in the school of Nancy. This was particularly well expressed in the writing of Gallé, gathered together as ‘Ecrits pour l’Art’ by his widow and published in Paris in 1908:
It was Moleschott [a contemporary biologist] who stated that plants, in their turn, make air. He said it is by their grace that we live on the earth, that they are our roots, that we are able to think because they vegetate, that virgin forests transform themselves little by little into fruits of the field and new men; that each day salutes a new world, that in this way at each sunrise everything is eternally new. As I sit at my ‘table potagère’, beneath a cluster of strawberries, looking towards a stream springing from the veins of the wood, I simply transcribe my feeling of gratitude to the plants, those nourishers of our bodies and our arts, to our common fatherland—the ancient forest whose edge we cultivate. [Ecrits, p133]
This passage by Gallé is a little prayer of thanks to nature. Like later environmentalists, such as James Lovelock, he wanted to emphasise the interrelationship of man to every aspect of nature. It was this belief that he chose to express in his art and this particular passage concludes a description of a table designed and carved to be a celebration of plants and their connection to man, ‘La Table aux herbes potagères’. Gallé’s writing is rich in hyperbole, but his appreciation of nature is ecstatic. On the door of his studio in Nancy, he carved his motto: ‘Our roots are in the depths of the woods—on the banks of streams, among the mosses.’ He wanted other artists to make this direct link too.
They can no more do without nature than the poets. It is everyone's property, their home ground, the living source... Right from the first primitive expressions, through to the moving gesture which has sent the spires of our cathedrals soaring towards the skies. This is what made so beautiful the green expansion of the 13th century. That it was no longer shut away in the studio. Like the ivy on the oak trunk, it was climbing towards freedom... [Ecrits pp218-220]
At the dawn of the 20th century, writing in 1900, Gallé had doubts about the continuation of this natural tradition.
Today, does the modern decorator have enough sincerity, enough faith, to make his work a source of regeneration for symbolism, of liberated art, by using a constant scrutiny of nature to achieve progress towards the highest and best ideals which have a right to be counted among an artist’s preoccupations? [Ecrits p223]
Gallé finds hope in the discoveries of science in the 19th century and he sees these being used to enrich the symbolic vocabulary of artists. Today, science offers [the artist] new symbols, signs, unknown to our ancestors and yet suitable for opening eyes, which have become blind to familiar things... On all sides, science opens to the decorator new horizons. Oceanography... is like the magic diver in ‘A Thousand and One Nights’, the king of the sea who carries away in his arms his earthly favourites so that they may visit his blue palaces... Now, of course, brave divers are bringing us the ocean's secrets. They empty their sea harvests into laboratories… They draw and publish these unsuspected items for the benefit of artists: the enamels and cameos of
the sea. [Ecrits pp223-225] *
In 1889, Gallé produced a ‘Deep Sea Vase’ adorned with creatures copied from oceanographic studies, while his ‘Pasteur Goblet’ of 1892 must be the only objet d’art of the period to feature micro-organisms in its decoration, based on plates from biology textbooks. Despite valuing the achievements of 19th century science, Gallé was a strong critic of industrialisation and agreed with William Morris.
This was one of the errors, one of the bitter pains of the Industrial age, dividing work from the hearth, from the family, and its natural atmosphere, setting it aside in an artificial, poisoned sphere. The closing century has no popular art, by which I mean art spontaneously produced and applied to everyday things; there has been no joyful production by true artisans... [Ecrits, p226]
Natural symbolism was an antidote to this modern artistic alienation and, for Gallé, was a journey of faith.
Search honestly to know, to study and to love and they are there, for symbols will spring spontaneously in decorative art from these combined forces: the study of nature, the love of nature's art, and the need to express what one feels in one's heart. [Ecrits p225]
The practise of this art was itself something religious.
We must proclaim our deep faith in the doctrine that gives art a function in human culture: awakening spirits and souls by translating the universal beauties of the world. [Ecrits p226]
In ‘Theoria’, Peter Fuller expressed a similar wish to see the vacuity of post-modernist art replaced by work drawing its inspiration directly from natural forms. How Peter would have enjoyed the rising environmental concerns of the early 21st century, only to be, I think, frustrated by the lack of this closer connection to nature being expressed in contemporary art. Too much art today is still stuck in the hell of Saatchi-patronised conceptualism that Peter Fuller strenuously criticised. I would have loved to have read Peter’s review of my book on Emile Gallé and hoped it would have given him yet more evidence of a ‘lost’ artistic tradition that deserves to be revived in a Green century.
