What Is Emile Gallé's Theory Of Symbolism?

Strangers were generously welcomed into Emile Gallé’s enormous production studio for faience, cabinetmaking, and glassware by a hospitable gardener. He told them about the plants on the way to the shop surrounded by tall trees that created a peaceful and calm realm providing guidance for the objects produced within this place. It was in the midst of the fin-du-siécle, not too long after Charles Darwin had put forth his theory of evolution, which Gallé’s contemporaries strove to prove that the opposite process was also possible, that mankind was capable of regression as well as evolution. (3) Art Nouveau’s shared this preoccupation with natural plant forms, specifically branches of botany and biology for they overlap with esoteric spiritual ideas. Gallé hovers in between these two sides, melding natural symbolism of objects with the physical technology of making which surmounts to decoration.

Gallé’s pieces were never an end point in themselves but a symbiotic guidance. When confronted with issues of design Gallé asked himself “how nature had resolved the problem”(1). It is quite easy for designers to loose sight of the object in the midst of its making and stray from its original purpose and appropriateness. Beginning in his cabinetry woodworks, he advocated following a linear inspiration where joint should be neither disguised nor concealed but to grow like a plant stem divides. To appropriate this he used marquetry, veneered sheets of wood pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle (5), in which he subtly melded floral themes into a natural landscape. The whole is then overlaid onto a thicker backing. The process was essentially constructed piece by piece until it was complete as an object that became simultaneously decoration and ...

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...r, soon drooping with the weight of its olives, modeled out of crystal the color of savory nephrite.”(4)

I see these human qualities Gallé attributed to nature through his suggestive words being exactly mirrored by natural growth processes determining the method of his control of chemical and technical glass processes used to depict what can only be suggestive natural forms. This process was a linear attachment, for Gallé was a present mediator for both, paying close attention to what the object desired while being made. His pieces were never an end point in themselves and because of this, they had the power to transcend differing cultural backgrounds. Instead there was a universal nature in the intuitive familiarity for a mysterious exoticism through the simple hybridity of embracing natural techniques performed by a craftsman depicting nature’s fleeting moments.