Owl, c. 1889. Faience, reddish flakes, float glaze mottled in brown, white, and olive green, height: 33.5 cm, diameter: 13.5 cm (base). Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
“Fleurs ornemanisées” plate, “Fleurs héraldiques” service, 1889. Faience, grey flakes, blue paste tin glaze, height: 3.5 cm, diameter: 26 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen.
“Herbier Lorrain” plate, c. 1870. Faience, grey-yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 3.5 cm, diameter: 23.1 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.
This presents a question: What is the decorative quality of the symbol? To use a professional term, is the symbol in the ornament ‘furnishing’? Does the symbolist not sacrifice the pleasure of the eyes to mind games? It is certain that the symbolic sign of the noblest idea will not make a more decorative mark than any ordinary rosette, if it is not invigorated by drawings, enhanced and emphasised by simulacrum, using the prestige of reliefs or shades of colours. Equally evident is the fact that it is not the use of the symbol that will magically give special graces to a decor, without the presence of talent and genius.
But will he who does not consider that the artist looked at reproducing the flower, the insect, the landscape, the human figure, and seeks to extract the personality, the inside feeling, perform a more vibrant work and of a more contagious emotion than the one whose tool will be nothing but a camera or a cold scalpel?
The most scrupulous naturalist document reproduced in a scientific work does not move us, because the human soul is absent, whereas the reproduction, albeit a natural reproduction of the Japanese artist, for example, captured the spirit of the evocative motif in an inimitable way, or the little faces sometimes mocking, sometimes full of melancholy of the human being, the thoughtful thing. He will unconsciously, moved only by his passion for nature, create true symbols of Forest, of Joys of Spring or Sorrows of Autumn.
Thus, in the ornament, the symbol is a bright spot within the quiet and anticipated meaninglessness of the foliage and the arabesques; the symbol captures attention, it is the symbol that introduces the thought, the poetry and art. The symbols are the point where reality translates into ideas.
But also, frankly, it would be useless to advise the decorator against the use of the symbol, which is so readily accepted in poetry. And as long as the mind guides the pen, the brush, the pencil, there can be no doubt that the symbol continues to charm men. Moreover, the love of nature always leads to symbolism: the flower beloved by all, popular, will always play a major and symbolic role. Gutskow says that a researcher of true happiness, having questioned the flower, then questioned the star. In turn the star said to the man: “Go quickly back to the cornflower.”
No more than poets can jewellers or lace makers do without nature. It is their right, it is their expertise, and it is the living source! Victor Hugo, the great agitator of symbols, admitted:
We could do nothing of note
Without elm or holly,
And the bird works with us
In our poems.
Calderon paid the flower this tribute: “If my voice is new, if I got a new heart, it is to the flower that I owe my renewal!” And for him, the flower became the symbol of the reconciliation with moral beauty, with divinity.
To banish the symbol of the decor, we will have to clear our sphere from the firmament:
This golden sickle in a field of stars!
We should turn off “the morning star and the evening star”, we should erase these quotes, the constellations. For the symbol to disappear forever in art, we will have to clear, “God, the sacred star that perceives the soul”, being, in fact, the word of the entire nature, from reign to reign, from symbol to symbol, from reflection to reflection:
The word is God: The constellations say this to the silence!
And that is precisely what has been the strength of our national art, from its primitive manifestations until the emotional gesture that ascends the prayer of our cathedrals skyward. That is what made its beauty in its green expansion of the 13th century: because it was not locked up in the studio, like ivy on the trunk of the oak, it clung to the free nature, this is to say, to symbolism itself. Baudelaire worded in a grand way this view of harmonic resonances in the vast creation:
In Nature’s temple living pillars rise,
And words are murmured none have understood,
And man must wander through a tangled wood
Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
And herein lies the history of our national Celtic decor, Gallic, proud child of the harsh nature, son of the druids, the bards, always coming back, after all the invasions, those of the South and those in the East, after all the mixtures, all the styles, Roman and barbarian, to its Nature, to the Nature with its free genius, to its sources, native flora and fauna, to the joy of the worker to freely adorn his home to his liking, lovingly.
And hence, our popular decor, unknowingly symbolist, like nature itself, as the green oak and the moor, goes from the foliated pottery from Champagne to the ivy and these vines of these delicate Gallo-Greek works, concede this neologism for the century. The spirit of terror then formulated in joyful wishes on cups talking of Reims and Vichy, which recalled the Greek chalices, and presaged our gallant Gallic pottery of the 16th and 18th centuries. Similarly to our contemporary repentance towards decorative art, are happy returns to the Brocéliande, the legendary Celtic Forest, as were the glorious national foliage of the 13th and 16th centuries.
Bowl, 1872–1874. Faience, yellow flakes, light blue tin glaze, height: 9.5 cm, width: 29 cm, depth: 7.5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Coffee pot, c. 1882. Faience, yellow-reddish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 35.5 cm, width: 16 cm, diameter: 11.5 cm (foot). Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Barrel Rider pitcher, c. 1876. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 28 cm, width: 16 cm, depth: 13.5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Candlestick, c. 1878. Faience, yellowish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 21.5 cm, diameter: 13.5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Cup, 1872–1874. Faience, yellow-reddish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 10 cm, diameter: 7 cm (mouth); 6 cm (base). Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.
Clock, c. 1880. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 41.6 cm, width: 35 cm, depth: 11.8 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.
Because it is the ancient pottery of Gaul which in ‘rustic earthenware’ by Bernard Palissy, reappears, moulds closely to nature like a fossil footprint, is dressed in true colours, wetting objects with a liquid enamel, it is clear that, in prevailing reproductions, the specific characteristics of our various fern fronds, and at the brink of still freshwater or flowing water, the nature of our marsh or river shells, our crustaceans and our fish.
Yes, we know it was once fashionable for some individual professors to belittle from the top of some oxymora pulpits, in some sectarian sanctuaries, applied art and works from our traditional crafts. Let me seize this opportunity to proclaim the principle of the unity of art, paying homage to the proud ancestor, to one of the leaders of the French arts of fire, to the Symbolist of terracotta art. And just to do it justice, let us