Vase mit Clematisblüten 1900

This is Emile Gallé’s ‘Vase mit Clematisblüten’, a glass vessel made in France around the turn of the 20th century. Floral motifs were extremely popular during the late 19th and early 20th century, when there was a wider revival of artisanal crafts, partly in response to the industrial revolution. Gallé was one of the key figures in the Art Nouveau movement, which tried to move away from industrial manufacture and return to handcrafted, decorative objects that drew on natural forms. The Musée de l’École de Nancy, founded in 1964, holds many examples of his and other artists’ work and tells us a great deal about this movement. Art historians often draw on a range of social and institutional archives to understand why certain art movements emerge at particular times. We can see how the turn to nature was bound up with anxieties about industrialization, and how the revival of craft was both an aesthetic and a social phenomenon.