Designer: Possibly Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Maker: Clément Massier
Date:
c. 1900
Medium:
Earthenware with lustre glazes
Size:
Width: 8 1/4″
Height: 14 3/8″

Contemporaneous with Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glassmaking experiments in New York, Clément Massier and his artistic director, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, developed iridescent lustre glazes for pottery at Golfe-Juan in southern France. Their famed Grand Champignon vase evokes mushrooms springing from the forest floor amidst a tangle of brambles in dappled late-afternoon light. Glazed with fumed metal salts, the vase shimmers like heat rising from the ground, evoking a Symbolist world somewhere between dream and reality.

Massier exhibited with Tiffany at Sigfried Bing’s Paris gallery, L’Art Nouveau. The gallery became synonymous with the style that dominated international design circles at the turn of the 20th century. The suggestive organic energy of Art Nouveau forms, with their sinuous, whiplash curves, were metaphors for the freedom and release sought by artists and designers trying to grow out from under the weight of academic tradition and critical expectation.

Mary Louise Gutman Bequest Fund BMA 2012.574