French, 18th century, male.
Born 1728, in Lautrec (Tarn); died probably, in Lautrec (Tarn).
Painter, decorative artist, tapestry maker.
Alaux's father was Pierre Alaux, a master tapestry maker, and his grandfather was Gilles Alaux, a master sculptor.
maiden name: Fleischmann
German, 20th century, female.
Active in the USA.
Born 12 June 1899, in Berlin; died 10 May 1994, in Orange (Connecticut), USA.
Draughtswoman, textile designer, printmaker.
Having studied in Berlin and Hamburg, Anni Albers went on to study at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1930. She married Josef Albers and became an assistant teacher at a weaving workshop. In 1933, the two emigrated to the USA, founding the art department at Black Mountain College, a newly established liberal arts school in North Carolina. In 1949, Anni and Josef moved to New Haven (Connecticut) where he served as chair for the design department at Yale University.
As early on as her first teaching post at the Bauhaus, where she ran technical classes, she taught students to combine natural and synthetic materials in weaving, saying: ‘The material determines its own limits in the face of the tasks imposed by the imagination.’ After emigrating to the USA, she continued to teach this philosophy at Black Mountain College and was thus part of the considerable influence exerted by the college on the artistic movement that would go on to become the American School of the 1940s. Challenging historical distinctions between high and low art forms, she carved out space for fibre arts within the discourse of fine art. Her pedagogical approach not only integrated art, craft, and industry, but also emphasised the cultivation of moral character, self-sufficiency, and independence from machinery....
Descriptive term applied to a style of decorative arts that was widely disseminated in Europe and the USA during the 1920s and 1930s. Derived from the style made popular by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, the term has been used only since the late 1960s, when there was a revival of interest in the decorative arts of the early 20th century. Since then the term ‘Art Deco’ has been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the inter-war years, and even to those of the German Bauhaus. But Art Deco was essentially of French origin, and the term should, therefore, be applied only to French works and those from countries directly influenced by France.
The development of the Art Deco style, or the Style moderne as it was called at the time, closely paralleled the initiation of the 1925...
[Fr.: ‘new art’]
Decorative style of the late 19th century and the early 20th that flourished principally in Europe and the USA. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, its chief manifestations were in architecture and the decorative and graphic arts, the aspects on which this survey concentrates. It is characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms; in a broader sense it encompasses the geometrical and more abstract patterns and rhythms that were evolved as part of the general reaction to 19th-century historicism. There are wide variations in the style according to where it appeared and the materials that were employed.
Art Nouveau has been held to have had its beginnings in 1894 or 1895. A more appropriate date would be 1884, the year the progressive group Les XX was founded in Belgium, and the term was used in the periodical that supported it, Art Moderne: ‘we are believers in Art Nouveau’. The origin of the name is usually attributed to ...
Informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts that championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman, and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself.
The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th, drawing its support from progressive artists, architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs, and middle-class women seeking work in the home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques, and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. The movement was strongest in the industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an unfocused reaction against industrialization. Although quixotic in its anti-industrialism, it was not unique; indeed it was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City movement, vegetarianism, and folksong revivals, that set the Romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life....
[Bauhaus Berlin; Bauhaus Dessau, Hochschule für Gestaltung; Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar]
German school of art, design and architecture, founded by Walter Gropius. It was active in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, in Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and in Berlin from 1932 to 1933, when it was closed down by the Nazi authorities. The Bauhaus’s name referred to the medieval Bauhütten or masons’ lodges. The school re-established workshop training, as opposed to impractical academic studio education. Its contribution to the development of Functionalism in architecture was widely influential. It exemplified the contemporary desire to form unified academies incorporating art colleges, colleges of arts and crafts and schools of architecture, thus promoting a closer cooperation between the practice of ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ art and architecture. The origins of the school lay in attempts in the 19th and early 20th centuries to re-establish the bond between artistic creativity and manufacturing that had been broken by the Industrial Revolution. According to Walter Gropius in ...
(b 1845; d 1908).
American interior decorator and founder of the first tapestry factory in the USA. He worked for Herter Brothers (see Herter, Christian) on the decoration of a series of grand houses, notably William H. Vanderbilt’s house on Fifth Avenue, New York, and William Welsh Harrison’s Grey Towers Castle (now part of Arcadia University) in Philadelphia. When the Vanderbilt house was completed in 1882, Christian Herter returned to Germany and Baumgarten took over the company. In 1891 he started his own company, William Baumgarten and Company, Inc., and in 1893 complemented his interior decoration business with a tapestry factory in his Fifth Avenue premises. He recruited weavers and dyers from the Royal Windsor Tapestry Manufactory (which had closed in 1890), including five weavers from the Foussadier family. The factory’s tapestries include one at Grey Towers (1898).
A Short Résumé of the History of Tapestry Making in the Past and Present...French, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active also active in Italy.
Born 31 October 1957, in Bordeaux.
Architect, designer, draughtswoman. Furniture, rug design.
Martine Bedin was awarded a bursary to study architecture in Florence in 1978, and then graduated from the École d'Architecture in Paris. She began her formal research in ...
German, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 14 April 1868, in Hamburg; died 27 February 1940, in Berlin.
Painter, draughtsman, engraver, architect, designer, decorative artist, graphic designer. Posters, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, glassware, ceramics, table services, jewellery, silverwork, objets d'art, typefaces.
Jugendstil, functional school.
Die Sieben (Group of Seven), Deutscher Werkbund...
French, 20th century, female.
Born 23 April 1940, in Hyères.
Painter, decorative designer. Designs for carpets, designs for jewellery.
Andrée Bellaguet studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, where she won the first prize for painting.
She has created decorative works, particularly in 1972 for Claude Parent's architecture of inclined plains. Her murals, paintings and reliefs can be found on various public buildings in Paris, Épernay, Créteil and Giens. She has also designed carpets and baroque-style jewellery....
German, 20th century, male.
Active in the USA.
Born 15 March 1883, in Stuttgart; died 29 May 1972, in New York.
Painter, sculptor, graphic designer, poster artist, illustrator, architect, designer, decorative artist. Designs for carpets, advertising art, furniture, lamps, wallpaper.
Jugendstil.
Deutscher Werkbund.
Lucian Bernhard studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Munich, but taught himself design. He was active in Berlin. In ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 26 June 1909, in Dijon; died 6 December 1996, in Paris.
Painter, collage artist, engraver, draughtsman. Wall decorations, designs for mosaics, stained glass windows, tapestries, stage costumes and sets.
A pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons in 1930, Bertholle studied in Paris from 1932-1934, and subsequently attended classes run by the painter Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson, where he met his friends and associates Manessier, Etienne-Martin, Le Moal and Véra Pagava. He was artistic director of the Gien porcelain factory from 1943-1957, and taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1965-1980. He was a member of the Institut de France, a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur and a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Initially an admirer of Puvis de Chavannes, whose work he had encountered at the city museum in Lyons, Bertholle later discovered Manet (at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1932), and through the latter, Van Gogh and Renoir. Following his early, highly-coloured Expressionist period, Bertholle was greatly influenced by the Flemish fantasies of Breughel and Heironymus Bosch, and ultimately by the Surrealists - as may be seen in his painting of the ...
German, 20th century, male.
Born 1873, in Munich; died 1933, in Bad Nauheim.
Tapestry maker, glassmaker, interior designer. Designs (furniture).
Jugendstil.
Karl Bertsch was a self-taught tapestry maker. In 1902, with Adelbert Niemeyer, he created a workshop making furniture and interior decoration items, which they called the Müncher Werkstätten für Wohnungseinrichtung. In ...
British, 20th century, male.
Active in Crays Pond, near Reading.
Born 1909, in Essex; died November 1996, in London.
Painter, printmaker, sculptor, ceramicist, textile designer. Portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes.
London Group.
André Bicât was a self-taught artist. Born to French and Anglo-Irish parents, he worked as a theatre designer and scene painter in the 1930s. His theatre work included work for Mercury Theatre Productions in ...
Swiss, 20th century, male.
Born in Lausanne.
Decorative designer. Designs for carpets.
Ernest Boiceau exhibited carpets and a complete interior in the decorative arts section of the Salon d'Automne in 1928 and 1929.
French, 20th century, female.
Born in St-Omer.
Painter, decorative artist. Designs for carpets.
Boileau exhibited landscapes, carpets and cushions at the Salon d'Automne from 1920 to 1923.
(b 1754; d 1825).
French painter and designer of textiles and embroideries. He trained with Philippe de Lasalle and went on to become one of the most celebrated designers of textiles and embroidery for Lyon silk manufacturers. His clients included the Empress Josephine, for whom he designed the furniture fabrics at Malmaison (near Paris), and the Empress Marie-Louise, for whom he designed a coronation robe. His work in every medium is chiefly remarkable for its flowers. It is sometimes difficult to attribute work with confidence to Bony or de Lasalle; the silk wallpaper for Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom in Versailles (of which some is now in the Musée Historiques des Tissus in Lyon), for example, could be by either artist....
(b 1717; d 1812).
English tapestry-weaver, upholsterer and cabinetmaker. In 1755 he assumed control of the Soho tapestry works owned by his relative William Bradshaw. In 1757 he worked with the tapestry-weaver Paul Saunders (1722–71) to make tapestry and furniture for Holkham Hall, the Norfolk seat of the earls of Leicester; their work (designed to match a set of Brussels tapestry panels) can still be seen in the Green State Bedroom. Bradshaw subsequently supplied furniture to Admiralty House in London (...
(b Cockerham, 1700; d after 1762).
English furniture-maker and tapestry-weaver. He founded a London workshop in 1728, and in 1755 passed control of the workshop to George Smith Bradshaw. He was unusual in his ability to undertake both the joinery and the tapestry upholstery for furniture (e.g. four armchairs. New York, Met.).
G. Beard: ‘William Bradshaw: Furniture Maker and Tapestry Weaver’, ...French, 20th century, female.
Born 19 November 1889, in Verdun; died 25 June 1972.
Painter, draughtswoman, humorist artist, watercolourist, illustrator, designer. Religious subjects, figures, portraits, genre scenes. Church decoration, furniture, frescoes, designs for tapestry, posters, costumes.
The third child of Edouard Branly, a doctor, Elisabeth Branly trained with Claire Chevalet, as well as with Jacques Cancaret at the Académie Julian until ...
