Artist / Capitalist

Todays post: is about Rene Lalique, a guy who started, lived and finished his life as an artist. In fact, not only did he make a living at it - he also built a (so far) permanent family financial empire on it. I say: cut me a big slice of whatever he was having.

Along the way, he created magnificent jewelry like this:

Dragonfly Woman Corsage Ornament (ca. 1898)
[original image HERE]

and this:

Opal and Enamel Pendant Earrings
[original image HERE]

and, later, incredible perfume bottles, vases and other mass-produced art-piece glassware, as well as a beautiful series of luxury car "mascots" (hood ornaments):

Cinq Chevaux (Five Horses) - Rene Lalique, 1925
Clear glass, 6" high
[original photo from secondchancegarage.com: HERE;
See this REALLY COOL SLIDESHOW of these pieces under this NYTimes story]

Born in the rural champagne region of Northeastern France in 1860, Lalique was apprenticed at age 16 (due to his father's death) to a goldsmith in Paris. He began as a freelance designer for acclaimed design houses like Cartier and Boucheron at 21, and opened his own shop at 25. He rode the early-20th-century Art Nouveau movement to fame and more fortune, and went on to become one of France's leading jewelers, turning exclusively to glassware in about 1908 and adapting industrial production methods. Unfortunately, Lalique saw his workshop and entire inventory seized by the rising Nazis in 1939, but his work is still in demand by collectors and investors - a complete set of 30 hood ornaments recently sold at auction for $805,000 [there's a really good full bio HERE.]

So, to the obvious question: HOW did he DO it? He was born in an agrarian district, not (by all accounts) into privilege; won his first award - for drawing - at age 12; studied abroad; did freelance design, from which the quality of his work was obviously recognized; changed from jewelry to glass as his major medium; and then: got really rich and famous. How did he make that last major jump? Apparently, by creating - and then dominating - a mass market. In fact:

"he turned from creating unique jewelry and objects d'art, to the mass production of innovative and usable art glass. He brought glass into the home of everyday people where it had never been before, and he worked out the industrial techniques to mass produce his useful art glass objects on a scale and cost to complement the spreading industrial revolution and resulting worldwide appetite for his products."

[emphasis added; source is good professional bio HERE]. 

In short, he was a Capitalist - at precisely the right time in history: the "glory days" of the Industrial Revolution.  He was apparently gifted in the core artistic skills (unlike the later "Visionary" Steve Jobs who, it seems, was not much of an engineer - Bill Gates has said Jobs "never really understood much about technology" - though he was clearly a genius at recognizing and/or creating markets), but that wasn't enough. He was apparently successful in the  creative-productivity sense, having been hired to do work for Paris' major design houses and embraced by the Art Nouveau movement, but that wasn't enough. He was prolific in both the range and amount of his creative output (an impressive overview of the media, techniques, clientele and sales outlets which he mastered and pioneered over his career is HERE), but ...

None of these attributes, though, seem to explain his ultimate financial success; he didn't "Hit It Fat" until he started using emerging industrial manufacturing techniques to (1) create and (2) fill the newfound (maybe "invented" is a better word) needs of consumers for "useable art glass." He made stuff they didn't know they needed until he gave it to them. Sounds kinda like the iPod story to me. The guy was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs.

How to match this up with the "starving artist" model many of us (okay, by that I mean "me") carry around? Why did Van Gogh supposedly only sell one painting during his lifetime while his works regularly sell in the hundreds-of-millions today? Why, as the joke goes, are the first four words you hear from an Art School Grad: "(w)ant fries with that?" Based on the success of Lalique, the answer is "Capitalism", I guess.

Something to ponder the next time you're buying Art from a card table at a flea market. Please go ahead and buy it, by all means; just think about this as you hand over the cash.

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Today's Creation is: these two half-sheet flyers for courses Kristin's planning to offer at a friend's pediatric clinic:

[© me, today]

and:

[©me, today]

I did 'em in InDesign/Photoshop. Not thrilled with the 2nd one yet; the text is kind of busy for a half-sheet size because the class times/requirements have gotten complex since the first drafts. I hate to go to a full-page spread just to accommodate the new amount of text, but it might be the only solution. Both look fine as an 8 1/2" X 11" wall poster; I'd just rather use a smaller-scale flyer so people might be more inclined to grab one off the desk than if it were a full page. We'll see what happens.
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