Lot Essay
“He stands with the greatest names of all time in the history of art, and his very personal skills and outstanding imagination will be admired by the elite of the future.”
Calouste Gulbenkian, July 1945
The creative output of René Lalique must be considered some of the most important, and elegant, of the 20th century. After a noted career as an Art Nouveau jewellery designer, Lalique was one of relatively few visionaries to transition to the new modern style of the 1920s, which become known as Art Deco following the seminal Paris 1925 Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, at which his work was so admired. Alongside his vast range of moulded glass vases and objects, Lalique also produced a mere handful of larger scale furniture works, and just ten tables are documented in the catalogue raisonné. A rectangular table of 1930 (illus. Marchilhac, op.cit, p.887, fig.13), featuring the same geometric fluted supports seen to the current lot, is now in the permanent collection of the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Their survival and reappearance is exceedingly rare and the location of the current lot was hitherto undocumented.
This model was exhibited at the Breves’ Lalique Galleries, London, October 1931 and features in a period advertisement for the firm of that date.