Art: Lalique

Wingen, in Alsace, is a one-factory town near the Maginot Line. Last month Wingen was evacuated. From Paris hurried short, scholarly, white-mustached René Lalique, now 79 and ailing, to salvage his irreplaceable molds. He found his factory’s fires out, soldiers at its gate. “No one goes in here,” they told him. Sick at heart, Glassmaker Lalique went back to Paris. Closed, possibly forever, was a glassworks which combined art with the assembly line.

At the Paris Exposition of 1900, René Lalique was acclaimed the leading jeweler of France. Craftsmanship in jewelry meant working for a small circle of elegant ladies and learned amateurs. Lalique wanted a larger audience, so he turned to glass, presently managed to reproduce his designs in quantity without lowering their quality. Noteworthy were the four-part molds he devised to permit deeper reliefs, the color effects he achieved by varying the size and shape of one-tone glass. Soon he was designing everything from glass crucifixes to glass radiator caps. “Lalique” became a word for glass at its French best.

Last week a showing of Lalique glass went on display at Saks Fifth Avenue, Manhattan smartshop, which served to commemorate a notable craftsman’s career. The glass ranged the Lalique shades from frosty blue to smoky amber, the Lalique styles from severe to elaborate, the Lalique sculpture from playful to precise. In many an onlooker’s mind was the Rond-Point on Paris’ Champs-Elysées, where Lalique fountains, illuminated in pre-blackout evenings, sent showers of crystal drops curving high in air.