Émile Gallé, Bat vase, c. 1903 - 1904

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Glass seems particularly well matched to the aesthetics and aspirations of art nouveau. It lends itself naturally to sinuous, linear designs. Moreover, glass has an almost alchemical attraction that was especially appealing to symbolists. Base materials -- sand and chemicals -- are transformed by fire and air, by breath itself, into something shimmering and fragile. A contemporary called Émile Gallé a "fire magician." Mottled, translucent colors seem always on the verge of change. Like nature, glass appears to be in a constant state of becoming.

Over the gates of his factory Gallé inscribed the motto: "Our roots are in the depths of the forest. / Among the mosses, amidst the water." He had studied botany and mineralogy as a young man, and his designs are quite faithful to nature. We see the delicate bones of this bat and sense how the skin is stretched taut. Yet Gallé's work is never merely scientific. For him the forms of nature were also deeply mysterious, powerful, resonant. In the late 1880s he increasing sought to evoke, as he said, "the latent spirit beneath phenomena," something alive below the surface. Natural forms could express physical force, as the trees on this vase seem to bend before an unseen breeze. He described the pine tree as a "metaphor of energy in repose."

By plumbing the mysterious forces in nature, Gallé also examined imagination as an interior force -- psychic as well as physical -- to be tapped and communicated. He wrote to the jury of the 1889 Paris World's Fair that his work consisted "above all in the execution of personal dreams." Perhaps the bat on this vase is a reference to dreams. The nighttime creatures appear often in his work, and he inscribed another vase with a bat motif: "La silence des nuits panse l'âme blesée. La bonté de la nuit caresse l'âme sombre" (The silence of night tends the wounded soul. The kindness of night caresses the melancholy soul).

Symbolism and science coincided at the end of the nineteenth century in the new study of the unconscious. Gallé and several other art nouveau artists had strong links with two pioneering French neurologists, Jean Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim. Charcot (whose investigations contributed to the early ideas of his pupil Sigmund Freud) wrote often about the need for art to provide a soothing respite from modern life. Of even greater significance for Gallé was the hypnotist Bernheim's study of suggestion and the "transformation of ideas into images." Like dreams, inspiration sprang from Gallé's unconscious, triggered by a stream of visual suggestion. The art that emerged was itself capable of inducing a dream state in viewers and releasing their imaginations in turn.

Learning Activities

Art

• Discuss ways in which artists show movement.

• Design a vase or other object using a bat form.

Social Science

• Learn more about how Gallé or Tiffany ran their factories, and investigate the impact of new time and motion studies in various fields, such as automobile manufacture.

Art/Science

• Consider how the theory of evolution was an influence on art nouveau. Are artists today similarly influenced by chaos theory or fractals?

An Industrial Enterprise Despite Gallé's preoccupation with the dream world, he ran his factory in a down-to-earth fashion. Glass production, unlike ceramics and many other art nouveau media, relied on skilled artisans to accomplish an artist's designs. It takes years to master the techniques of glassmaking, and it is hot, dangerous work. Even Gallé, who trained and apprenticed as a glassmaker -- his father founded the company -- did not make his own glass and only rarely decorated it after he became owner of the glassworks. He managed the glassworks as an industrial rather than purely artistic endeavor, organizing the work by a strict division of labor and using the profits from lower-cost wares, produced in large numbers, to finance unique pieces like this one.

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