We are very proud to present to our readers one of the first 3D images of an Art Nouveau object generated in the course of the Partage Plus project!

This time:

Coffee pot, made by Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik, Geislingen about 1900, NBA Finland.

If the above embedded image doesn’t show up, open this page with a different browser or download the PDF file by clicking here.

Keep checking back regularly to discover more masterpieces and highlights from the Partage Plus project!

(Partage Plus, All rights reserved – Free access)

Close-up

Partage Plus provides the ideal opportunity to closer examine Design museum Gent’s Art Nouveau collection. On a regular basis this section places a chosen object or ensemble, that is often not on display, in the spotlight. You get to know the story behind the piece and can look at it in detail with the different pictures.

The first object in Close-up is an inkwell made by Adrien Dalpayrat and Edouard Colonna (?) for Bing’s L’Art Nouveau.

Inkwell

Adrien Dalpayrat and Edouard Colonna (?) for L’Art Nouveau
red-green glazed stoneware, gilded bronze mount
stamped on the bottom: L’Art Nouveau / Bing, impressed on the bottom: a flaming ball
Bourg-la-Reine (F) (stoneware) and Paris (F) (bronze), ca. 1898-1903, inv.nr. 2003/101

Siegfried Bing opened his parisian art gallery L’Art Nouveau in 1895. He engaged the best artists who were working in the new style that was en vogue in Paris and Brussels. For designs and realisations of stoneware with flaming fluid glazes (‘grès flammés’) he appealed to Adrien Dalpayrat (1844-1910). Since 1889 this ceramist headed a ceramic workshop in Bourg-la-Reine, a rural community ten kilometers south of Paris. It did not take long before Dalpayrat became famous for his oriental inspired models and glazes.

The stoneware inkwell with fire gilded bronze mount was commissioned by Bing for L’Art Nouveau. The ink mark on the bottom of the inkwell proves this. All items were sold exclusively in the gallery, where beside a permanent collection temporary exhibitions were presented. Bing’s great breakthrough with the international public came at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition. However, declining sales figures forced Bing to close his gallery and adjoining workshops in 1904.

The fire gilded bronze mount is attributed to the virtuoso designer Edouard Colonna (1862-1948). He worked for Bing from 1898 till 1903. If the attribution is correct, the inkwell can be dated in this period. The integration of the mount and the pot is very good. The flowing lines on top of the lid evolve into a whirling movement towards the stylised plant motives, that delicately descends into the softly flowing fluid glaze.

Eager to learn more? Check out the Close-up section of DmG`s website!

Some of the most beautiful Art Nouveau objects  from the collection of Röhsska Museum, Göteborg, were 3D-scanned last week.

The 3D scanning event – which was open to the public – was also videotaped by the colleagues from Röhsska Museum.

Click HERE to watch the short clip!

Josefin Kilner from GC handling a delicate Art Nouveau vase

3D scanning of an upturned vase

Last week Swedish regional news payed Partage Plus Partner RÖRM a visit during a session on 3D scanning. A short clip was included in the Swedish news on the national television channel “TV4″.

For us this is a great opportunity to take a sneak peak at some of the exquisit objects from Rörstrand Museum!

You can watch the video clip on the internet for the next 30 days HERE.

“Vojtěch Preissig”

concept and text: Lucie Vlčková

Published in 2012 by the publishing house Arbor Vitae in Řevnice and Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague as the first volume of the series Design – profiles – key figures.

Available in Czech and English edition.

ISBN: 978-80-7467-032-9 (English edition)

Vojtěch Preissig (1873 Světec u Bíliny – 1944 Dachau) was one of the most prominent Czech artists of the first half of the 20^th century and his influence on the fields of typography and graphic design extended well beyond the borders of his homeland. Abroad, and particularly in the United States, where Preissig worked from 1910 to 1930, he was much more appreciated in these two professional circles than he was in Czechoslovakia, where for a long time his work was not properly understood and therefore lacked acknowledgement.

The publication sums up current knowledge and for the first time presents the complete facts on Preissig’s rich body of work as a designer, which encompassed a wide range of activities, from bespoke graphics, to work on books and periodicals, to creating ornamental patterns and designs, right through to typography. Preissig’s American period includes the key time he spent teaching at the Teachers College of Columbia University in New York and in particular at Wentworth Institute in Boston, his work for a number of publishing houses, and finally his successful war posters, assessed here for the first time within the context of his work as a whole. The publication traces the fate of the artist and his work within the context of his era, and looks back reflectively on Preissig’s work during his individual creative periods. These are presented in chronological order, from his Parisian period, characterised by the influence of Alfons Mucha on Preissig’s work and his discovery of the craft of graphic design, to his Prague period, a time of bold ambitions culminating in disillusion and in the collapse of his own studio, followed by the ‘American dream’ period, interrupted by the First World War, and then eventually presenting Preissig with the dilemma about returning home, and finally his ultimate turn towards a new vision, the optimistic pursuit of which was however definitively thwarted by the onset of the Second World War.

The publication presents previously unpublished facts about Preissig against the backdrop of the artist’s thrilling life and career marked by a series of fateful turning points, successes, failures, heroism, and tragic events.

Yesterday evening people from Finland had the opportunity to watch a demonstration about 3 dimensional scanning on TV. Ismo Malinen from the National Museum of Finland provided information about the Partage Plus project and its mission. Also, in the short clip people could get a better understanding of how 3D scanning actually works.

You can watch the video clip on the internet for the next 28 days HERE. (starting at 08:00)

It is our pleasure to inform our colleagues from the Partage Plus team and all other Art Nouveau admirers about the superb acquisition of a body of works by Alphonse Mucha that will greatly enhance the Art Nouveau holdings in the Museum of Decorative Arts. Within the context of Partage Plus, selected artworks from the collection will be available in digital form via the Europeana portal.

A Unique Collection of Works by Alphonse Mucha Donated to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague

The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague has received an extraordinary gift – a large group of illustrations and prints by Alphonse Mucha that has been generously donated to the museum by Vera Neumann, an art sponsor living in Switzerland. From the collection assembled together with her husband Lotar Neumann, Mucha’s original preparatory designs for his famous Le Pater book from 1899 have arrived in the Czech Republic. The donation contains the uniquely preserved, complete mockup of the book, complemented by a the exceptional first impresion of the book printed on Japan paper, as well as numerous preparatory sketches, studies and lithographic prints.

The ornamental and figural compositions for the Pater Noster, published in book form by Henri Piazza and Ferdinand Champenois in Paris, represent one of the peaks in Mucha’s oeuvre at the time. The artist explores in his illustrations a theme that is entirely different from his commercially successful theatrical and advertisements posters, rendering in them his theosophical concepts about Man’s spiritual path that liberates him from the bondage of the material world and leading him toward perfection and enlightenment. The compositions’ rich symbolism attests to Mucha’s profound interest in esoteric spiritual philosophy that resulted in his admission into a Masonic Lodge in 1898; that is, shortly before initiating work on the Le Pater.

The donated collection of more than seventy drawings, accompanied by a number of trial impressions, documents in great detail the genesis of this bibliophilic treasure of rare book publishing., providing a glimpse into Mucha’s creative process from the initial compositional layout to the final execution that served as a model for the printing of colour lithographs and heliogravures. The definitive version of the work is the exceptional first impresion of Le Pater with the exclusive number 1 that Mucha donated to his friend, the Czech-born Charles Freund-Deschamp, a paints manufacturer. The significance of the first printed impression with the mockup bound into the book is indicated by the fact that afterwards it was in the possession of Raymond Poincaré, President of the Third French Republic. Much later, in 1972, the collection as a whole was publicly presented at an auction in France, where it was sold as three separate lots most likely to different bidders. That same year, the Neumanns succeeded in acquiring and completing the dispersed parts. In collaboration with the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Foundation Neumann presented the reassembled collection of Mucha’s illustrations for the Le Pater book in an independent exhibition mounted at Prague’s Municipal House in 2002. Now, thanks to the Neumann family, these artworks have returned permanently to the artist’s native country.