Lot 67

With his bold, muscular and wildly innovative glasswork, Maurice Marinot single-handedly redefined the medium's expressive potential and brought the genre of art glass well beyond the purely practical or merely decorative. Marinot began his artistic career as a Fauve painter, along with others such as Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice Vlaminck. In 1911 he visited the glass studio of his art school friends, Gabriel and Eugène Viard, at Bar-sur-Sienne near his home in Troyes and became enthralled. By 1913 he was no longer painting and, setting up at the Viard's shop, devoting himself exclusively to glass. Initially he painted with enamels onto traditional vessels, but by 1923 he was translating the intense artistic passion seen earlier in his painting directly into the form of the vessel itself, becoming known as Le Fauve du Verre. Creating each of his unique pieces by his own hand, Marinot pioneered numerous art glass techniques. He drew his inspiration from nature translating it into an abstract language of color, texture and effect. He blew thick, heavy glass vessels, incorporated profusions of tiny air bubbles, added colored oxides and created chemical reactions which often gave the effect of an internal lining of natural growth - bark or moss - or the illusion of a glowing core, perhaps the burning embers of the furnace itself or evoking geological strata, one surrounding another. He also used acid to cut intricate patterns into the surface of the glass itself, at times with a dramatic depth recalling jagged ice. The Viard glassworks closed in 1937, by which time the fumes from the hydrofluoric acid Marinot used had made him ill. Although he did continue to paint, from that time on and after some 25 years of working in glass, Marinot never touched the medium again. A SELECTION OF MARINOT GLASS FROM A NEW ENGLAND COLLECTION

MAURICE MARINOT (1882-1960)

A BOTTLE WITH STOPPER, CIRCA 1926

Details

MAURICE MARINOT (1882-1960)
A BOTTLE WITH STOPPER, CIRCA 1926
internally decorated glass
7 in. (17.8 cm.) high, 4 in. (10.2 cm.) wide, 3 in. (7.7 cm.) deep
signed Marinot with sticker marked 1927 and label marked Mr. + Mrs. G Seligman

Provenance

Cesar Mange de Hauke, New York;
Mr. and Mrs. Germain Seligman, New York.

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Lot Essay

This piece will be included in the upcoming catalogue raisonné by Felix Marcilhac.
Sold with copy of certificate from Florence Marinot dated 1994.

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