by The glazed porcelain vases with strong colors and geometric shapes of the 1920s and 30s are immediately recognizable for many people, says art historian Cécile Dubois. These vases were often awarded as a wedding gift and were usually passed on as family heirs, which revealed the accessibility of Art -deco works, she says, which was gestured on the glass cabinet next to her. “If you were a collector, you could find works that cost a fortune, but these pieces were intended for people with more modest means for very reasonable prices.”
Art Deco was the first artistic movement that appealed to a broader public beyond the elites, the organizers of a new exhibition, which were devoted to the artistic movement of the interwar years, were brought together by Dubois, the President of the Brussels Art Deco Society.
The exhibition, which opened this month in the Belvue Museum in Brussels, combines for the first time works by the King Baudouin Foundation, which was founded in 1976 by a donation from the late Belgian monarch. It is part of the Belgian capital of Belgian capital. Opulent materials.
Through this modest exhibition with sculptures, vases, furniture and everyday works of art, the museum aims to draw the development of Art-Deco: from luxurious hand-made goods for the few to mass production that are equipped for civil consumers worldwide. “It is the first style that spread in all social classes, from the richest to the poor people,” says Werner Adriaensens, another co-curator and professor of art history at Free University of Brussels.
During the interwar years, light -colored geometric ceramic tiles from Belgium’s industrial core country were exported around the world. Ships had the port of Antwerp loaded with tiles intended for kitchens, bathrooms and shops.
Art Deco was the first global style. From Paris, often attributed to the birthplace of the movement, it spread to New York, Soviet Moskau, Shanghai, Beirut and Brussels.
Many of the vases of the “wedding gift” were designed in the southern Belgian city of La Louvière by the French-Belgian artist Charles Catteau, who supervised the production of decorative ceramics in Boch Frères during the intermediate patient. The company was a Belgian offshoot of the Franco Luxemburg-Keramik dynasty, which was founded 14 years after the Belgian Revolution of 1830. Until 1935 she employed 1,350 people. Catteau did not design all parts, but monitored the models, colors and finish of the glazes. His signature was stamped on every piece, a kind of trademark.
As a kind of trade, the governments realized that the creative sector had economic weight. Economic considerations, the government of Belgium, in 1925 to participate in the international exhibition of modern decorative and industrial arts in Paris, prompted a show that was seen as a founding moment of the Art -deco movement, although almost nobody used this term up to decades later. “The only reason for Belgium in 25 was that the government was convinced that the decorative hearts had economic effects,” said Adriaensens.
This Paris exhibition in 1925 terminated a shift in Art Nouveau of the pre -war years, especially in the presentation of women. Women in Art -deco were no longer the dreamy female ideal of Art Nouveau. The Emblematic of the Shift is a sculpture from 1925 by the Flemish artist Oscar Jesper: The work that is influenced by cubism shows a female face that is abstract, modern, ghostly.
The vases of Catteaus reflect cubist influences as well as a fascination for exotic birds and animals that are probably inspired by the Belgian Congo. According to Adriaensens, Art -deco artist were the first to do market research. “You were really looking, what does the middle class want?” So they are not afraid of older topics such as the ancient Greek -inspired ceramic, but with modern geometric shapes and glazes.
Art Nouveau, as the name suggests, wanted to be new, observed Adriase senses. “Art Deco does not have the goal of being completely new, but being modern.”
