We are in such a
state of intellectual confusion, with such uncertain plans, in this no-man’s
land between active warfare and complete surrender, that we could make great
strides down the right path or proceed just as rapidly down the wrong one.
This
assessment delivered by archaeologist and statesman Léon de Laborde in his
monumental work De l’Union des arts et de
l’industrie, which was published shortly after the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, was a
harsh one. Despite the fact that technical advances, financial power, and a
political stability seemingly conducive to creativity were all in place, a
sterile revivalism was spreading across the Western world like a cholera
epidemic: “We have seen men of taste and imagination submit their genius to
this humiliating yoke and consent to imitate the old, resoling worn out ideas
instead of creating something new.… It might seem that art is no longer possible, that imagination
has been exhausted.” Trying to understand the reasons for this catastrophe brought
about by the “domination of tyrannical eunuchs,” Laborde invokes a “collapse of
the spirit” and a “moral abasement” rooted in an “abasement of taste by the mercantile
spirit.” Such a
sense of discouragement could be overcome only through some mad hope, a utopian
vision of a society resurrected by a transformation: “I would make … an
artistic nation, one that had an industry whose every last worker, including
those who purified the raw materials in a preliminary operation, could sense
what these would become and bring their intelligence to bear on their small
contribution to the entire process.… I would install talent, purity of taste,
and nobility of style everywhere, things presently nowhere to be seen.”
The struggle was first of all a
national one, for France had come to feel dangerously threatened by England
since the universal expositions had made readily visible the results of the
heated commercial competition between the two countries. Astonishingly, Laborde
advocated a strategy based on the primacy of “good taste,” which for centuries France
had proudly claimed was a national monopoly: “We must oppose the incursions of
bad taste in France, so as to combat the rebirth of good taste abroad.” But fighting
for or against good taste proved a hazardous enterprise, one dominated by
contradictory, subjective points of view and endless debates.
In 1855, the only certainty was the urgent necessity to look elsewhere, to
go beyond the ground that had been surveyed too often, in the hope of finding
fragments of foreign know-how that might literally be consumed and absorbed into
Western culture. Islamic art was already attracting curious collectors,
artists, and industrial designers, who experienced it as an invigorating breath
of fresh air. The most striking manifestation of the prevailing predatory attitude was
the 1860 sack of the Summer Palace outside Beijing by Anglo-French troops in
the context of the Second Opium War (1856–60), waged against China by the French
and the English. Four hundred precious objects from this imperial complex,
including superb cloisonné enamels, arrived in Paris in February 1861 and were presented
to Empress Eugénie by the victorious French forces. These pieces, “the
likes of which had never before been seen in Europe,” were immediately
exhibited in the Pavillon de Marsan of the Louvre, where visitors found the
cloisonnés especially fascinating. Also in 1861, an official envoy from Siam—received
with great pomp at Fontainebleau—presented Napoleon III with forty-eight cases
full of precious objects, including some cloisonné enamels, which the empress
decided to place on public display. Dazzled by the size and splendor of the entire
ensemble, she decided to exhibit part of the diplomatic gift and some pillaged
works in a “salon-musée” at Fontainebleau, which opened in 1863 after having
been realized to her specifications.
Christofle and the
Rediscovery of Cloisonné Enamel in France
This imperial collection stimulated
the curiosity of the cultivated elite about cloisonné enamels, an interest that
was intensified by the universal expositions and the merciless commercial
rivalry they fostered. Beginning in the 1840s, French scholars, artists, and
collectors, having grown weary of antique models, proclaimed the aesthetic legitimacy
and achievement of native artists and craftsmen; they were increasingly drawn
to medieval champlevé enamels and especially Renaissance painted enamels. The
manifest influence of such work on religious metalwork from the period attests
to this. Similarly,
the Sèvres manufactory began to produce copies of Renaissance painted enamels
on copper from the Limousin region in a new enamel workshop founded and directed
by Jacob Meier-Heine (1805–1879). Beginning in 1845 he assembled a group of
experts there, notably the painter-enameler Alfred Thomsen Gobert (1822–1894), who
was the mentor of Bernard-Alfred Meyer (1822–1894), who in turn mentored
Claudius Popelin (1825–1892), another passionate enthusiast of the French
Renaissance. The group also included other talented painters, such as
Alexandre Frédéric de Courcy (1832–?) and Charles Lepec (1830–after 1888), all
of whom took part in the feverish rediscovery of painted enamel. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855, the
manufactory was awarded a grand medal of honor for “enamels on iron, copper,
platinum, and gold” made by Gobert, whose works emulated not only Renaissance
models but also “Indian” ones.
It is not surprising, therefore,
that two powerful industrial firms with considerable experience in
metalworking—the bronze foundry run by Ferdinand Barbedienne and the house of
Christofle, renowned for its work in silver and other precious metals—drew
inspiration from this same source. In 1863 Barbedienne was chosen to transform
a large Chinese cloisonné enamel vase into a chandelier for the Musée Chinois at
Fontainebleau. The impeccable workmanship of his firm was universally admired,
a state of affairs that would continue throughout the second half of the
nineteenth century, although, contrary to appearances, his technique was
different from that of cloisonné, as evidenced by his large vase with mounts in
the Louis XVI style. For several years, metalworkers had been obliged to
deal with the prickly question of the absence of color in their pieces. This is
evoked in an anecdote according to which Louis-Rémy Robert (1811–1882), head of
the painting workshops at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, remarked on “the
blandness of silver” and “the poor decoration” of goldsmith work to Henri Bouilhet
(1830–1910), director of the Christofle firm, at the 1855 exposition, thereby
reviving an old rivalry between porcelain makers and goldsmiths. In fact,
the competition between Barbedienne and Christofle in the realm of cloisonné began
at this very exposition, where the former presented “opaque cloisonné enamels
with floral decoration in the manner of the ancients” and the latter showed
only painted or perhaps champlevé enamels not in the cloisonné technique (see
chapter opener). Christofle did not exhibit cloisonné enamels until 1862,
when the firm displayed what they called “Persian” and “Indian” pieces at the
second industrial exhibition in London.
Contemporary observers were
unanimous in regarding the appearance of enamels “à cloisons rapportées” (with added metal partitions) as
something akin to a miracle: “a talented enameler” named Antoine Tard (act.
1860–89), “a skilled worker endowed with perseverance and determination,” who “did
not even know that cloisonnés existed,” had presented Paul Christofle and
Bouilhet, the directors of the firm, with “a small metal plaque with enamel
designs circumscribed by laminated copper wires, or cloisons.” Moreover, “his
sample, with its incorrect and Baroque design, was completely different from
Byzantine and Chinese examples.” Some contemporaries were insistent on this
point: “You will find no resemblance to Japanese designs, nothing reminiscent
of China, nothing imitative of Byzantine metalwork. The designer did his best
to devise pretty ornaments, scatterings of florets, scrolling branches and foliage,
and his creations have more in common with Persian and Indian decoration than
with any other style.… So cloisonné enamel was reborn solely as a means, as a
manual technique, and not as an art of imitation.”
This discovery was made “on the eve
of the Exposition Universelle of 1867,”
at a time when the search was under way for “new things.” The supposed
ignorance of the artist who made the rediscovery and the vision of the
industrialist who grasped its implications have their roots in the myth of
progress. This last could be achieved only through the fruitful collaboration
of artists and manufacturers within the bosom of a sacred union of art and
industry in the face of combating foreign competition. The technique used by
Antoine Tard, electrotyping—a specialty of Christofle’s—would have been used
only after the enamel had been fired, as a means of electrogilding the exposed edges
of the wires.
Why would the Christofle firm have
been interested in moving on from the production of painted enamels to that of cloisonné
enamels? Here the influence of designer Emile Reiber (1826–1893) seems to have
been decisive. He was placed in charge of the composition and design workshops at
Christofle in 1866, five years after having founded L’Art pour tous: Encyclopédie de l’art industriel et décoratif, a periodical with
a large circulation conceived by him as a “prelude to art for all,” in which he
encouraged artists to take up “wall decoration, domestic decoration,
embellishment of the many objects requisite to interiors conducive to well being.” Reiber was
fascinated by Chinese cloisonné enamels, and he was doubtless responsible for
the firm’s enamel designers having shifted their attention from Persian and
Indian models to Chinese and Japanese ones. He repeatedly visited two important exhibitions organized
at the Palais de l’Industrie—the Musée Oriental, mounted in 1869 by the Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts, and the
remarkable Henri Cernuschi collection in the Exposition des Beaux-Arts de l’Extrême Orient in 1873–74. The
notes and sketches that resulted led Christofle to make many works of
exceptionally high quality between 1865 and 1878, the year Reiber left the
firm: tea and coffee
services, garnitures
de cheminée, candelabra, vases, and jardinières,
all remarkable for their subtle refinement.
The most surprising of Christofle’s
initiatives was its decision to produce furniture with enamel decoration, an
audacious move for a firm specializing in metal tableware. Then again, the
introduction of bright colors into luxury furniture was one way to channel the
firm’s exceptional technical resources in a way that might trump the
competition. In fact, the celebrated silversmith François-Désiré
Froment-Meurice had exhibited a sumptuous dressing table and toilette service
for the duchess of Parma, designed by the architect Félix Duban (1798–1870) and
decorated with enamels by Jacob Meyer-Heine (1805–79), at the London exhibition
of 1851; in 1856 he had completed an “imperial cradle” designed by the architect
Victor Baltard (1805–1874) and decorated with enamels by Claudius Popelin (1825–1892).
For the 1873 Vienna world exhibition, Christofle produced an impressive jewelry
cabinet designed by Charles Rossigneux (1818–1907) to showcase the various metalworking
techniques that were a house specialty: cloisonné and translucent enamel,
inlay, damascening, colored gilding, and various chemical processes for
patinations. In 1874 Christofle was awarded a prestigious commission,
underwritten by subscription, for a monumental bookcase celebrating the
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary to be presented to the Vatican.
Designed by Reiber, it was conceived to house four hundred handwritten translations
of the 1854 papal bull proclaiming the miracle. The institution of this new dogma
had provoked an uproar among positivists and rationalists, in the face of which
Napoléon III and Eugénie decided to support this high-profile enterprise to
curry favor among French Catholics. The painted enamel frieze that decorates
the upper portion depicts the Triumphal March of Nations Bringing Volumes of
the Translation of the Papal Bull to The Holy Father; designed by the painter Charles
Lameire (1832–1910), it is in a medievalizing style quite different from the
Far Eastern idiom Reiber favored in his other furniture from this period.
Another interesting piece, also
designed by Reiber in 1874, is a guéridon with a cloisonné enamel top that
depicts a large pheasant shown in profile and leaning forward against a screen
of flowering plums against a light ground patterned with an unending swastika pattern
often used in Chinese and Japanese decorative arts. This table was shown at the
universal exposition of 1878, along with two other important ensembles produced
slightly later under Reiber’s direction, a pair of vase-torchères and a pair of encoignures, or corner
cabinets. The vases
are freely eclectic, combining Persian elements with Chinese motifs, while the encoignures are consistently of Japanese inspiration, but both pairs
manifest a complete understanding of their chosen models, as well as a rare
gift for arranging decorative motifs on the surfaces of furniture. Between 1867
and 1882, Christofle produced fifteen additional luxurious showpieces using
various techniques with great refinement.
The Fashion for Cloisonné Becomes More Widespread
Christofle had serious competition
from other renowned goldsmiths, beginning with Lucien Falize (1842–1897) and André
Fernand Thesmar (1843–1912), who created masterpieces of goldsmithing and jewelry.
Even so, the partnership of Émile Reiber and Antoine Tard played a key role in making
cloisonné enamel fashionable. By 1878, when Reiber left the house of Christofle, the die was
cast: fascination with the technique was spreading and the phrase “cloisonné
enamel” was beginning to evoke a style.
Théodore Deck (1823–1891), the
leading French ceramist of his time, introduced innovative “cloisonné enamels,”
by which he meant “work decorated with designs in relief; the hollows are
filled with transparent colored enamels that can be superimposed. This manner
of fabrication made its first appearance in the West at my exhibition [in 1874, at the Union
Centrale des Arts Décoratifs].” Deck was well acquainted with Émile Reiber, a fellow
Alsatian, and the two men collaborated closely. Reiber’s work made a profound
impression on Deck, who asked him to design an impressive jardinière for his
display at the 1873 universal
exposition in Vienna. For his
part, Reiber published Deck’s work in his periodical L’Art pour tous. The two men
thought along similar lines, and Deck reflected on the question of contour,
which he treated in relief and conceived as a transposition of cloisonné wires.
In 1864, Eugène Victor
Collinot (1836–1882) submitted an application for a patent for his relief
enamel technique in which he wrote: “The aim of this process is the production
of decorative cloisonné enamels modeled in relief on faience biscuit, porcelain
biscuit, and other surfaces. The phrase ‘cloisonné enamel,’ borrowed from a
specialty of Chinese vases, applies to my process only insofar as it clarifies
my own idea: to enclose within cloisons [partitions],
which keep them distinct from one another, the relief enamels with which I
decorate my faiences.”
Between 1859 and 1883, working in
collaboration with Adalbert de Beaumont, the painter Collinot published a series
of print portfolios intended to facilitate the access of artists and designers
to the decorative vocabularies of various foreign cultures, including Arabic,
Turkish, Venetian, Hindu, Russian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and so forth.
The faience manufactory at Longwy,
in northeast France, later produced relief enamels in which areas of different
color were not enclosed within metal wires but were surrounded by outlines
executed in black pigment, to lively effect.
In 1877 the widow Rosalie Duvinage submitted a patent application
for “mosaics combined with metallic cloisonné, for artistic objects and
furnishings.” In fact, this “metallic cloisonné” was
indistinguishable from a well known marquetry technique employing wood, ivory, metal,
and mother of pearl that reached its apogee during the eighteenth century in
luxury furniture made by the renowned ébéniste David Roentgen (1743–1807).
The “invention” of the widow Duvinage amounted to the
use of ivory as background, thin metal strips for the stems and branches of
vegetation, and woods of various hues in the principal motif, all of which were
glued to a wooden support with precision—but without any use of soldered cloisons. In many instances, the vegetal stems form a
metallic network that helps to stabilize the composition as a whole. In other
examples, such as the Duvinage cabinet in the Musée d’Orsay, there are no such vegetal
stems, but thin strips of metal comparable to the wires of Chinese enamel
separate and secure the pieces of ivory that constitute the ground. In all
likelihood, the widow Duvinage resorted to this abusive use of the term
“cloisonnement” to underscore her adherence to a striking visual aesthetic that
was then much in vogue, thereby downplaying her indebtedness to a marquetry
technique that had been in use for two centuries. Her use of materials—notably
ivory, copper, and wood—whose colors made for strong contrasts also made her
work seem analogous to the Far Eastern cloisonnés that were then so
fashionable.
The case of James Tissot (1836–1902)
remains exceptional. A successful painter, he also collaborated in the design
of cloisonné enamels, an activity that was a byproduct of his fascination with
the esoteric thought and spiritual traditions of the Far East. In the jardinière,
a straightforward imitation of a Chinese object in his own collection, the landscape
and figures are made legible by the use of contrasting colors. But the contours
of these elements are all but obscured in the complex linear interplay of the
background, in such a way that the conventional hierarchy between figure and
ground is virtually nullified. Moreover, there are no straight lines in the
composition, only irregular and asymmetrical curves that are difficult for the
eye to follow. Tissot’s two vases demonstrate an ability to transform
Sino-Japanese models into an original creation. The regular geometric motifs on the sides, which have
no specific meaning, seem to make the surface vibrate and express the painter’s
determination to manipulate the primary elements of foreground and background
in a way that many of his contemporaries would never have dared do, namely to
fragment the surface and geometrize the constituent forms. His impressive model
for a fountainhead, entitled Fortune, made between
1878 and 1882, is a fulfillment of his artistic process.
The figures and animals, sculpted with great exactitude, are contrasted
with smooth enameled areas whose metal partitions trace small geometric motifs as well
as the mysterious
adage “Tout vient à point à qui sait
attendre” (All
things come to those who wait), translated into various languages and
calligraphies.
The Role of Design
In the face of these proliferating
innovations and patent applications, as well as of an expanding market and the attendant
consumerism, the warm welcome accorded cloisonné enamel and its enthusiasts
cannot be explained solely by a growing fascination with things Chinese. Since
1830 the influence of art from foreign traditions had manifested itself in the
West in various forms, summoned from diverse sources—including Byzantine
Russia, Islam, and India—to reinvigorate a culture that sensed it was dying.
But cloisonné played a special role in this drama, and its significance should
not be underestimated, because of the novel and radical importance that France
accorded to design.
As it happens, during the same
period that Christofle, encouraged by Émile Reiber, was being seduced by cloisonné,
the firm was studying another technique just as distinctive, which was
damascening. This is an inlay technique whereby grooves are made in a metal
surface into which other, differently colored metals are then hammered. Like cloisonné enamel, this technique emphasizes
outlines and thus privileges the graphic element in decoration, including the
outlines of any subordinate designs within the overall composition. In both
cases, goldsmiths accustomed to working in relief with precious metals instead fashioned
inlay designs that were smooth, without a trace of relief. This entailed
something like a revolution in the craft of goldsmithing, a shift that
Christofle was all the more willing to make because the requisite skills
resembled those used by luxury jewelers, who were familiar with the techniques.
Moreover, since damascening had been used in the making of armor, notably in
the Near East, it responded to the current fashion for exoticism, and
Christofle’s process of damascening by electrotype was consistent with the goal
of industrializing traditional metalworking techniques.
The fact that the two techniques
were perfected by Christofle about the same time points toward a preoccupation with
dessin (which can mean
both drawing and design), a word that figures prominently in French
descriptions of cloisonné enamel technique: “Before beginning a cloisonné enamel,
it is indispensable that the overall design [dessin] of what
one wants to represent in decorative terms, whether figures, chimeras, flowers,
or purely ornamental caprices, be predetermined, in both its principle outlines
and its main subdivisions.” These divisions of the surface can be compared to a
network that is “perfectly analogous to an elaborate ironwork fence” or to the
cells of a beehive that form something like an “armature of completely
irregular forms” or a “sparkling wire mesh.”
The intersection of drawing and
design was at the heart of animated debate in this period about the training of
craftsmen and the quality of surface decoration. The stakes were political, for
the role of drawing instruction in French primary schools was a central focus
of the debate. Émile Reiber,
who was very much involved in this question, tried to intervene in his capacity
as a theorist of drawing. Shortly after he left the Christofle firm in 1878, he
showed his book on primary teaching of drawing at the Exposition Universelle in Paris as an
unaffiliated exhibitor. In its pages he argued that it was a matter of the
utmost importance that everyone receive drawing instruction: “It can also be
said that in just a few years, the teaching of drawing properly
understood, which is
to say reduced
to linear outlines, will
constitute, in all nations, the true basis of primary instruction.… Since
writing itself is only a kind of conventional drawing … drawing alone enables
one to SEE ACCURATELY.”
Accordingly, drawing should be
understood as a kind of “universal language, speaking to the eyes of all, intelligible to all, and
of which we now ask that it produce results that are useful.” Reiber
maintained that this language is spoken to us by works of the past, which
reveal to us that “Art is ONE in all its manifestations; that all of its
productions, like those of Nature, derive from a single law, that of the Combination of
Lines.… The Primary Alphabet of Graphics summarizes
and reconstitutes in its entirety the ancient and venerable Science—now all but
lost through the use of unreflective routine practices—of the Laws of the
Combination of Lines, the basis of all Creation, as much in the domain of
Nature as in that of Art.”
He goes on to announce the imminent
publication of a “portable library” of the arts of dessin: “In this series, all of the artistic productions of
various peoples, from antiquity to our own time, will be analyzed by means of Diagrams, or tracings of
the bone
structure or fundamental construction of each work.”
This French debate unfolded in the
wake of sustained reflection on analogous matters in England, where Owen Jones
implicitly broached the impact of drawing on design in his book The Grammar of
Ornament, published
in 1856: “Proposition 7: The
general forms being first cared for, these should be subdivided and ornamented
by general lines; the interstices may then be filled in with ornament, which
may again be subdivided and enriched for closer inspection.… Proposition 8: All ornament
should be based upon a geometrical construction.… Proposition 13: Flowers or
other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional
representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the
intended image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are
employed to decorate. Universally obeyed in the best periods of
Art, equally violated when Art declines.”
But the situation in France was
distinctive in that the two camps were violently opposed to one another, with
one defending a linear drawing that supposedly embodied a kind of pictorial freedom
and the other advocating a geometic drawing more constrained by rules inherited from the
architectural tradition.
In fact, raising the dual issue of
drawing and design—and thus of ornament—from the vantage of a universal language
reactivated a fundamental conflict with a long history. Since the eighteenth
century, the question was whether dessin should reflect “the order of the world” as willed by
God since the creation (in other words, whether it should conform to the design
of the Creator), or whether it could depart from this to produce decorative
fantasies contrary to the “laws” of Nature, as rocaille ornament had famously done. The complex
interdependency of structure and decoration was the focus of lively debate
between architects and ornament designers. Some claimed that what was at stake
was a choice between reason and a form of chaos expressive of “disordered minds.” Reproduction of
the “natural order” inevitably led to the question of legibility: in other
words, whether a motif’s contour evoked a form that was known and thus
recognizable or, by contrast, failed to do so because there was no known
comparable referent. All the French writing about cloisonné enamel techniques
emphasized the fundamental role of its thin partitions in both defining the
design of a scene or motif and preventing the various colors from blending, implying a
logical relation between these two functions. But close examination reveals that these “partitions”
by no means serve only to outline figures and separate colors. Quite the contrary.
They often break up a single color field by adding lines that represent
clothing folds, facial details, or the veins of plants. They may also serve
more purely graphic ends by breaking up an otherwise uniform background color
and making it “vibrate,” in which case the lines simultaneously consolidate the
surface and enrich the visual effect.
This fragmentation of the surface
into often irregular components calls for further comment. In Chinese cloisonné,
these background interventions are schematic and simplified translations of
landscape details: clouds in the sky, plum branches, the cracked ice of a
frozen lake, and so forth. In Western usage, these descriptive “signs” lose
their meaning and become mere geometric play. The eye perceives them, shining
discreetly in the background, without becoming aware of them; rarely if ever
mentioned, they effectively pass unnoticed. In many instances, these
“gratuitous” background tracings become confused with the contours of “legible”
motifs with clear real-world referents. The resulting dissolution of the
figure-ground hierarchy enables the background to “surface”—in itself a revolutionary
development, for it heralded a geometricization of decorative systems that went
hand in hand with the emergence of modernism, the arrival of which it
anticipated in a confused way.
The liberation of shapes and the
increasing independence of the formal treatment of figure-ground conventions were
made possible by the loss of their original meanings, which had come from a
distant and mysterious China. Seized as booty by armed Western invaders, the collection
of cloisonné enamels from the Summer Palace outside Beijing was perhaps a
crucial stimulus behind a metamorphosis that was to transform visual culture in
the second half of the twentieth century: without being fully aware of it,
Western artists and industrial designers gradually discovered in these objects
a liberty of “writing” that effectively gave them permission to disengage from
the models they had inherited from a Western tradition that had become too
confining. The fundamental debate during this period about the internationalism
of line, construed as the privileged sign of a universal language, was
contemporaneous with the beginnings of semiology, and this at a moment when the
fashion for Chinese enamels was at its peak. The historical confluence of these phenomena is what
gives the “cloisonnés” produced in France, in whatever manner, their historical
significance; in their limited but omnipresent way, these objects bear witness
to a profound shift in modes of thinking that has made it possible to see this
gratuitous playfulness as one of the most original responses to the urgent
necessity to effect a cultural renaissance by means of a new aesthetic.
© Bard Graduate Center, Odile Nouvel-Kammerer.
Léon de Laborde, De
l’Union des arts et de l’industrie, vol. I (Paris: Imprimerie impériale,
1856), 403–7 (“Nous sommes dans un si grand désordre
d’idées, dans une telle incertitude de projets, dans ce vague qui côtoie à distance si égale l’ardeur du combat et le découragement de la lutte, que
nous pouvons, selon que sera la direction, marcher à pas de géant dans la bonne voie ou nous enfoncer aussi rapidement dans la
mauvaise”).
Ibid., 171–72 (“Nous avons vu des
hommes de goût et d’imagination courber leur génie sous ce joug humiliant, et
consentir à travailler dans le
vieux, à ressemeler des idées
usées, au lieu de créer à neuf.… Il sembla
de ce moment qu’il n’y eut plus désormais d’art possible, que toute imagination
était éteinte” / “domination d’eunuques tyranniques” / “affaisement de
l’esprit”/ “abaissement moral”).
Ibid., 203–5 (“abaissement du goût
par l’esprit mercantile”).
Ibid., 496 (“Je voudrais faire …
une nation artiste, pour qu’elle ait une industrie dont le dernier ouvrier,
celui qui dégrossit la matière à la première opération, ait déjà le sentiment
de ce qu’elle deviendra, et lui apporte son concours intelligent dans sa
petite participation à l’accomplissement de l’œuvre entière.… Je voudrais
mettre du talent partout, de la pureté de goût, de la noblesse de style, et je
n’en vois presque nulle part”).
Ibid., 398 (“Nécessité de
s’opposer à l’envahissement du mauvais goût en France, pour lutter contre
la renaissance du bon goût à l’étranger”).
See Purs Décors? Arts de l’Islam, regards du XIXe siècle, exh. cat.
(Paris: Musée des Arts décoratifs, 2007), esp. the article by Rémi Labrusse,
“Une traversée du malheur occidental,” 32–53.
See Colombe Samoyault-Verlet, “Le musée
Chinois de l’Impératrice Eugénie,” L’Estampille—L’Objet
d’art 479 (January 1992): 61–69.
G. Pauthier, “Des curiosités
chinoises exposées aux Tuileries,” Gazette
des Beaux-Arts 2 (1861): 27 (“comme en n’en avait pas encore vu en Europe”).
After a restoration campaign, the
Musée Chinois at the chateau de Fontainebleau reopened to the public in 1992;
an impressive collection of Asian objects is currently on display there.
See Daniel Alcouffe, “Les
émailleurs français à l’exposition universelle de 1867,” Anthologia di Belli Arti 13116 (1980): 102–21.
Research carried out by this
enamel workshop led to the invention of pâte-sur-pâte
decoration circa 1848; the workshop closed in 1872; see The Second Empire 1852–1870: Art in France under Napoleon III, exh.
cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1978), 160ff.
Claudius Popelin published L’Émail des peintres (Paris: A. Lévy,
1866), a veritable manifesto advocating an alliance between high art and the
“applied” or “industrial” arts.
I would like to thank Anne Gros,
in charge of the Christofle collection, for her generous assistance.
I am grateful to Vincent Droguet
for having provided me with a letter signed by the Administrateur du Mobilier
de la Couronne, dated May 23, 1863, containing a request that the “large
cloisonné enamel vase with a pointed tip to receive a candle” be sent to Paris
“to be fitted with a bouquet of lights” (“grand vase en émail cloisonné, armé
d’une pinte pour recevoir un cierge” / “pour y ajuster un bouquet de
lumières”), Archives du château de Fontainebleau.
See cat. 157.
M. Josse, “L’art japonais à
propos de l’exposition organisée par M. Gonse, Lettres de M. Josse,” Revue des arts décoratifs (1882–83): 332
(“la fadeur de l’argent, la pauvreté du decor [dans l’orfèvrerie]”).
From the moment of its
establishment in the 18th century, silversmiths saw the Sèvres porcelain manufactory
as a professional threat, thinking that it might lure away customers who were
tempted by the prospect of colorful table furnishings. Indeed, porcelain makers
often used forms initially developed by silversmiths as models for their table
services.
This description (“émaux opaques
cloisonnés et affleurés à la manière des Anciens”), like that of other critics
writing about the exposition, is probably misleading, for the objects shown by Barbedienne
do not seem to have been “cloisons rapportées” (enamels made with cloisons
soldered to the body of the object) but champlevé enamels, since it is not
possible to obtain partitions of the thinness and regularity necessary for cloisonné
with the casting process; see Daniel Alcouffe in The Second Empire, 114–15, no. II-34. I would like to thank Olivier
Tavoso, metal conservator, for his clarification of technical questions. The
cloisonné enamel production of the Barbedienne firm has not yet been studied.
The official jury report
mentions “some pieces belonging to two tea sets of identical design; one is
solid silver; the other silver plate, and both are enameled. The applications [of
powdered colored glass] are fine-grained, quite regular, and homogenous, and
the objects could not be better made” (Rapports
du Jury mixte international de l’Exposition universelle de 1855 [Paris:
Imprimerie impériale, 1856], 462: “des pièces appartenant à deux thés de même modèle; l’un est en argent massif,
l’autre en cuivre argenté, et tous deux sont émaillés. Les dépôts sont à grains fins, très réguliers et homogènes, et les
objets sont dans les meillures conditions possible”). Some of these pieces are
now in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, London (now the V&A Museum of
Childhood).
Reliable information about the
enamels presented by Christofle at the 1862 universal exposition in London has
proved elusive.
Josse, “L’art japonais,” 332 (“Vous ne découvrirez aucune ressemblance avec les dessins
du Japon, aucun souvenir de la Chine, aucune imitation des orfèvreries
byzantines. Le dessinateur s’était ingénié à composer de jolis ornaments, des semis de fleurettes,
des enroulements de tiges et de feuilles, et ses créations avaient plus d’analogie
avec les décors persans et indiens qu’avec tout autre style.… Donc l’émail
cloisonné renaissait uniquement comme moyen, comme procédé de main d’œuvre et
nullement comme un art d’imitation”).
Ibid., 332–33 (“à la veille de
l’exposition universelle de 1867”). My efforts to date this “invention” by Antoine
Tard more precisely have been unsuccessful.
Ibid. (“du nouveau”).
Not being a conductor of
electricity, enamel is not a viable medium for electrolysis.
L’art pour tous. Encyclopédie de l’art industriel et décoratif
(1864), introduction.
Marc Bascou, “Émile Reiber. Le
Japon pour tous,” L’Estampille—L’Objet d’Art 13 (1988): 53–61 (“vers la décoration murale, vers
l’ornamentation du foyer domestique, vers l’embellissement de cette multitude
d’objets nécessaires au bien-être intérieur”).
Guide du visiteur au Musée oriental (Paris: Union des Beaux-Arts
Appliqués à l’Industrie, 1869). Among the named lenders of cloisonné enamels
are Ernest André, Barre, Baur, Dugléré, Evans, B. Jaurès, and A. de Rothschild.
Reiber left Christofle under duress,
after having been reproached for spending too much time away from the workshops
gathering information about Asian objects for his personal use.
The exhibition of this piece of
furniture at the Exposition Universelle
of 1878 was a triumph for Christofle.
Originally conceived as vases,
these pieces were transformed into torchères by the addition of gilt-bronze bobèches for the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris; they
were exhibited again at the 1900 exposition in Paris.
One of the pair is now in the
Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris (inv. 27662); the other is in a private
collection.
Théodore Deck, La Faïence (Paris:
Librairies-imprimeries réunies, 1887), 266 (“émaux cloisonné” / “un travail
dont la décoration est ornée d’un trait en relief; les creux sont remplis
d’émaux colorés transparents que l’on pent superposer les uns aux autres. Ce
genre de fabrication a fait sa première apparition en Occident dans mon
exposition de 1874, à l’Union centrale des arts décoratifs”).
It bore the signature E.REIBER. INVT TH DECK.1873. Deck
illustrated it in his book (ibid., 195, fig. 112). See Bernard Bumpus, “Émile
Reiber and the Deck Connection,” The
Decorative Arts Society 27 (2008): 39–51.
As cited by Jacques Peiffer, Longwy: faïence & émaux,
1798–1998 (Metz: Serpenoise, 1998), 100 (“Ce procédé a pour objet la production décorative d’émaux
cloisonnés et modelés en relief sur biscuit de faïence, de porcelaine et autres
surfaces. L’expression ‘émail cloisonné,’ empruntée à une specialité de vases chinois, ne s’applique à mon
procédé que pour faire comprendre mon idée: emprisonner à l’aide d’une cloison qui les empêche
de se mêler les uns aux autres, les émaux en relief dont je décore mes faïences”).
Collinot, E[ugène-Victor] and
Adalbert de Beaumont, author-engravers, Recueil
de dessins pour l’art et l’industrie, issued in installments (Paris:
Collinot, 1859–83).
Brevet dated June 4, 1877,
Institut National de la propriété Industrielle, Paris (“une mosaïque combinée avec cloisonnement métallique”). Neither Christofle nor Barbedienne submitted
patent applications for their cloisonnés, since they used established
techniques that were quite well known.
Bill G. B. Pallot, “Une
production étonnante. Marqueteries en cloisonné de la veuve Duvinage,” L’Estampille—L’Objet d’art 427 (September
2007): 72–82.
Musée des Arts décoratifs,
Paris, inv. 10645a,b.
Musée des Arts décoratifs,
Paris, inv. 14755 bis.
His project here should be
understood within the context of the extended debate about the respective roles
of sculpture and painting (the so-called paragone
debate), as well as within the framework of a more recent one in which the
“decorative” value of sculpture was pitted against its supposed function as a
quasi-scientific transcription of reality. See Rossella Froissart-Pezone,
“‘L’Esprit heureux se déroule en ornements’: Sculpture et décoration en France
au temps de Rodin,” in Rodin: Les arts décoratifs,
exh. cat. (Evian: Palais lumière, 2009), 52–71.
Philippe Burty, Les Émaux cloisonnés anciens et modernes
(Paris: Martz, 1868), 14–16, 69 (“Avant de
commencer un émail cloisonné, il est indispensable que le dessin général de ce
que l’on veut représenter décorativement, personnages, chimères, fleurs ou
caprice ornemental pur, soit bien arrêté dans la silhouette générale et dans les
principales divisions” / “absolument analogue à ce qu’est en massif une grille
de fer ouvragée” / “armature mais de formes tout à fait irrégulières” / “treillis
éclatant”). Burty concludes by citing Eugène Delacroix on the
irregularity of lines: “Some lines are monstrous: straight lines, irregular
serpentine lines, and above all two parallel lines. When man establishes them,
the elements consume them. Regular lines exist only in the mind of man. Hence
the charm of things that are old and ruined: ruination brings objects closer to
Nature” (“II y a des lignes qui sont un monstre:
la droite, la serpentine irrégulière, surtout deux parallèles. Quand l’homme
les établit, les éléments les rongent. Les lignes régulières ne sont que dans
le cerveau de l’homme. De là le charme des choses anciennes & ruinées: la
ruine rapproche l’objet de la Nature”).
See Renaud d’Enfert, L’enseignement du dessin en France: figure humaine
et dessin géometrique (1750–1850) (Paris: Belin, ca. 2003).
Émile Reiber, L’Enseignement
primaire du dessin, à l’Exposition universelle de 1878. L’alphabet de la
graphique primaire, base préliminaire de l’enseignement des arts du dessin (Paris: the author, 1878). Reiber exhibited in the
French section, Group II, class 6.
Ibid., 6 (“on peut aussi dire qu’avant peu d’années, l’Enseignement bien entendu du Dessin, c’est-à-dire réduit aux Tracés linéaires, formera,
chez toutes les Nations, la véritable base de l’Instruction primaire.…
L’écriture elle-même n’étant qu’un dessin conventionnel
… le dessin seul permet de VOIR JUSTE.”
Ibid., pp. 7–8 (“une langue universelle, parlant à tous
les yeux, intelligible pour tous, et à laquelle on demande maintenant des résultats utiles.” / “l’Art est UN dans toutes ses
manifestations; que toutes ses productions dérivent, comme celles de la Nature,
d’une même Loi, celle de la Combinaison
des Lignes … L’Alphabet de la
graphique
primaire résume et
reconstitue de toutes pièces cette antique et vénérable Science (aujourd’hui presque totalement perdue par l’usage de
pratiques inconscientes routinières) des Lois
de la Combinaison des Lignes, base de toute Création, tant dans le domaine
de la Nature que dans celui de l’Art”).
Ibid., 8 (“Dans cette suite de
Fascicules, toutes les productions artistiques des divers peuples, depuis l’antiquité
jusqu’à nos jours, sont analysées au moyen des Diagrammes ou tracés graphiques de l’ossature, de la construction primordiale de chaque œuvre”). In 1879, Reiber delivered a lecture at the Société
pour l’Instruction éleméntaire about the teaching of drawing as writing (“Le
Dessin enseigné comme l’écriture”).
Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856), n.p.
On this subject see Rossella
Froissart-Pezone, “Théories de l’ornement en France au tournant du XIXe
siècle: l’abstraction entre nature et géometrie,” Ligeia, Dossier sur l’Art et Abstraction, year 22 (2009): 47–63.
The phrase dérèglement des esprits
comes from Jean-Bernard, l’Abbé Le Blanc, Lettres
d’un Français, concernant le gouvernement, la politique et les moeurs des
Anglais et des Français 1737–1744, vol. 2 (The Hague, 1745), 41–52, letter
36; reprinted in Svend Eriksen, Early Neo-classicism
in France (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 226–29.
See esp. Burty, Les Émaux cloisonnés.
The same period saw the
development of several theories advocating the use of geometry in the early
stages of drawing instruction. See Froissart-Pezone, “Théories de l’ornement.
The word sémiologie appears in Émile Littré’s
revision of the medical dictionary by Pierre-Hubert Nysten, Dictionnaire de médécine, de chirurgerie, de
pharmacie, des sciences accessoires et de l’art vétérinaire, 10th ed.
(Paris: J.-B. Ballière, 1855). Ferdinand de Saussure, the founding father of modern
semiotics, published his first contribution to this nascent field—and the only
full-length work whose publication he oversaw himself—in 1878, having delivered
some of its contents the previous year at the Société de linguistique de Paris (Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles
dans les langues indoeuropéennes [Leipzig: Teubner, 1878]).
