A brief history of Rene Lalique (1860 - 1945)

Rene Lalique's life and artistic career bestrode arguably the three most important movements in the field of the Decorative Arts - Belle Epoque, Art Nouveau and Art Deco. His contemporaries, Emile Galle and the American, Louis Comfort Tiffany, worked predominantly in Art Glass, distinctive for its rich interplay of color, botanic motifs and iridescence. These facets, although of great beauty, tended somewhat to disguise the medium of glass itself. Rene Lalique, however, stood out from his contemporaries by being the 'purist', who applied his talent to the inherent merits of glass, and thereby elevated it to new heights of technical and artistic interpretation. ...