Robert Lallemant: Céramiste et Décorateur d’une Génération Incertaine, by Jacqueline du Pasquier. Paris: Somogy, 2014. 152 pp. 32 Euros.
This is the first extended study of the work of the revolutionary French Art Deco ceramicist Robert Lallemant (1902-1954), who flourished in Paris between 1925 and 1933 before mostly abandoning ceramics for furniture design, interior decorating, architecture, travel and photography. Lallemant has been somewhat overlooked by French art history, partly because he was a successful artist-businessman, and partly also because of the brevity of his career, the originality of his designs, and his friendship with Maréchal Philippe Pétain, ‘Head of State’ of the collaborationist Vichy government during the Second World War. Du Pasquier, who has published numerous books on French art ceramics and glassware, particularly those of the Bordeaux region, devotes almost a third of the book to Lallemant’s two years – 1943-44 – as “Special adviser to the civil office of the Head of the State” or “Artistic Advisor to the Maréchal” – ostensibly to show the non-political nature of his devotion to the aging general.
Lallemant’s sister-in-law, Aline Montcocol, was the wife of Pétain’s close friend and personal physician, Bernard Ménétrel, who became his chief of staff during the Vichy period. After the war Pétain was convicted of treason, sentenced to death, and died in prison in 1951, age 95, having had his sentence commuted. Ménétrel was also tried but released in disgrace with the case against him declared unproven, and died shortly after in an automobile crash. His widow subsequently became president of a controversial ultra-nationalist association ("L'Association pour défendre la mémoire du maréchal Pétain" or "ADMP") founded to rehabilitate Pétain’s memory. Lallemant himself, who had joined the French navy when war was declared, had moved his wife and children to the relative security of
This is the first extended study of the work of the revolutionary French Art Deco ceramicist Robert Lallemant (1902-1954), who flourished in Paris between 1925 and 1933 before mostly abandoning ceramics for furniture design, interior decorating, architecture, travel and photography. Lallemant has been somewhat overlooked by French art history, partly because he was a successful artist-businessman, and partly also because of the brevity of his career, the originality of his designs, and his friendship with Maréchal Philippe Pétain, ‘Head of State’ of the collaborationist Vichy government during the Second World War. Du Pasquier, who has published numerous books on French art ceramics and glassware, particularly those of the Bordeaux region, devotes almost a third of the book to Lallemant’s two years – 1943-44 – as “Special adviser to the civil office of the Head of the State” or “Artistic Advisor to the Maréchal” – ostensibly to show the non-political nature of his devotion to the aging general.
Lallemant’s sister-in-law, Aline Montcocol, was the wife of Pétain’s close friend and personal physician, Bernard Ménétrel, who became his chief of staff during the Vichy period. After the war Pétain was convicted of treason, sentenced to death, and died in prison in 1951, age 95, having had his sentence commuted. Ménétrel was also tried but released in disgrace with the case against him declared unproven, and died shortly after in an automobile crash. His widow subsequently became president of a controversial ultra-nationalist association ("L'Association pour défendre la mémoire du maréchal Pétain" or "ADMP") founded to rehabilitate Pétain’s memory. Lallemant himself, who had joined the French navy when war was declared, had moved his wife and children to the relative security of
Robert Lallemant vase, ca. 1925, h. 25 cm. Vichy shortly after the French collapse and armistice of 1940, with the Lallemant-Ménétrel-Montcocol families evidently becoming a prominent part of Pétain’s social circle. In 1944, however, after Paris fell to the Allies, Lallemant had quickly rejoined a now American-supervised French navy in Marseilles and in 1945-46 served the new French republic under Maréchal Philippe Leclerc in Indochina. He died of a heart attack in 1954 while skiing in the Swiss Alps.
Du Pasquier offers a largely romantic portrait of Lallemant as a brilliant but unanalytical, non-reflective artist-entrepreneur who inexplicably intuited – at age 22 – the extreme aesthetics that his period was calling for. Obliged to write almost entirely on the basis of interviews with his widow, a family archive that appears to contain mainly designs and sketches, and diaries in which the artist recorded mostly mundane matters such as meetings and travels, she is left to explore his possible motivations and influences through speculation or rhetorical questions, or through the interpretations of the few 1925-33 critics who commented on him.
On his remarkable vases, bookends, lamp bases, cigarette cases and ceramic sculptures she follows those critics and the organizers of the 1984 exhibition “Robert Lallemant ou la céramique mécanisée” closely. “[S]es formes sont resolument nouvelles,” she writes, “eventuellment liées a l’esthétique de la machine” (27). They are geometric, with angles and straight lines, and strictly parallel planes, which suggest the influence of cubism, as well as reflecting the functionality of contemporary technical devices. Unlike Art Nouveau and earlier ceramic styles, they are not intended to be beautiful, merely mathematical. She also notes that he is among the first French ceramicists to adopt machine-age production methods – his productions are not unique objects, turned on a wheel, but series productions of the same form, “interchangeables,” produced in moulds. These methods reduced the price – and for a while the fetish-value – of the individual work, and democratized access to what had been high-end art work. Older ceramicists, such as Raoul Lachenal with whom Lallemant had apprenticed and who had been one of the pioneers of series creation, would begin marking some of their works “pieces unique” in order to distinguish them from the new ‘mass production.’
Du Pasquier offers a largely romantic portrait of Lallemant as a brilliant but unanalytical, non-reflective artist-entrepreneur who inexplicably intuited – at age 22 – the extreme aesthetics that his period was calling for. Obliged to write almost entirely on the basis of interviews with his widow, a family archive that appears to contain mainly designs and sketches, and diaries in which the artist recorded mostly mundane matters such as meetings and travels, she is left to explore his possible motivations and influences through speculation or rhetorical questions, or through the interpretations of the few 1925-33 critics who commented on him.
On his remarkable vases, bookends, lamp bases, cigarette cases and ceramic sculptures she follows those critics and the organizers of the 1984 exhibition “Robert Lallemant ou la céramique mécanisée” closely. “[S]es formes sont resolument nouvelles,” she writes, “eventuellment liées a l’esthétique de la machine” (27). They are geometric, with angles and straight lines, and strictly parallel planes, which suggest the influence of cubism, as well as reflecting the functionality of contemporary technical devices. Unlike Art Nouveau and earlier ceramic styles, they are not intended to be beautiful, merely mathematical. She also notes that he is among the first French ceramicists to adopt machine-age production methods – his productions are not unique objects, turned on a wheel, but series productions of the same form, “interchangeables,” produced in moulds. These methods reduced the price – and for a while the fetish-value – of the individual work, and democratized access to what had been high-end art work. Older ceramicists, such as Raoul Lachenal with whom Lallemant had apprenticed and who had been one of the pioneers of series creation, would begin marking some of their works “pieces unique” in order to distinguish them from the new ‘mass production.’
Lallemant vase, ca 1925, h. 17.5 cm Du Pasquier observes that while Lallemant’s extreme innovations in ceramic shapes were without precedent in the sense of traceable influence, there was related work being done in the middle 1920s in France by Rene Buthaud and André Fau, in Switzerland by Paul Bonifas, and similar series production methods and cubist decors being used by Boch Frères (director Charles Catteau) in Belgium. She notes too that Bauhaus designs had a strictness of form similar to that found in Lallemant, and at least twice quotes Walter Gropius in describing Lallemant’s forms. And indeed, the extremely spare Lallemant furniture designs that she includes photographs of would not have looked out of place in a Bauhaus context.
Cubism, however, had been evident in European painting since before 1910, and the idea that art did not need to be “beautiful” had been present at least there and in German Expressionism as well the work in the work of such different painters as Wyndham Lewis and Egon Schiele and in the "Imagist Manifesto" of Ezra Pound. Perhaps because more dependent than painters on substantial numbers of bourgeois buyers, ceramics had mostly resisted this trend, although one can see a considerable movement toward abstraction before and during the First World War in the Amphora potteries of Turn-Teplitz and the Bavarian work of Max Laeuger. Overall, there was much modernist art in Europe in the early 1920s that could have come to the attention of the youthful Lallemant -- even in ceramics. One could also argue that what was innovative about him was as much his insight that cubist forms and designs were now marketable to the bourgeoisie as it was his novel production of these in a serial ceramics medium. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, he was succeeding briefly but brilliantly in selling the largely unconsecrated symbolic goods of the recent past and present as commercial goods of the present and future.
Cubism, however, had been evident in European painting since before 1910, and the idea that art did not need to be “beautiful” had been present at least there and in German Expressionism as well the work in the work of such different painters as Wyndham Lewis and Egon Schiele and in the "Imagist Manifesto" of Ezra Pound. Perhaps because more dependent than painters on substantial numbers of bourgeois buyers, ceramics had mostly resisted this trend, although one can see a considerable movement toward abstraction before and during the First World War in the Amphora potteries of Turn-Teplitz and the Bavarian work of Max Laeuger. Overall, there was much modernist art in Europe in the early 1920s that could have come to the attention of the youthful Lallemant -- even in ceramics. One could also argue that what was innovative about him was as much his insight that cubist forms and designs were now marketable to the bourgeoisie as it was his novel production of these in a serial ceramics medium. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, he was succeeding briefly but brilliantly in selling the largely unconsecrated symbolic goods of the recent past and present as commercial goods of the present and future.
Lallemant vase, form 2095, h 17.5 cm. Du Pasquier 28. More interestingly, du Pasquier offers new interpretations of his choices of decor, many if not most of these produced by his friend Michel Bouchaud, finding in them the basis of her subtitle, “ceramist ... d’une génération uncértaine.” Much of that decor was as demonstratively modernist as his forms: the geometric cubism of the vase, for example, that she has pictured on her book’s cover. Most of the other artwork he chose was also contemporary in form – artwork that reflected the cartoonish drawing styles of 1920s advertising and the comic strip. But the themes of these drawings, she notes, whether humorous or documentary, frequently reflected traditional France: its folk songs, its 19th-century ships and trains, its clothing styles in other centuries. The one exception was his sport series, from which she reprints designs representing twenty contemporary sporting activities, from golf and tennis to sculling, the long jump and shot putt – most likely inspired by the 1924 Paris Olympics. Her conclusion is that her “uncertain” iconoclastic artist had sentimental bourgeois commitments – similar to those that were to keep him loyal to the aging Pétain – “Un gout incontestable de la modernité et de ce qui est nouveau, et conjointement une nostalgie des valeurs et des images traditionelles” (130). This split may have also caused him to be lured him away from ceramics and to the more conventional, lucrative and larger fields of furniture design, architecture and real estate development – although du Pasquier is silent about that.
The T R Lallemant mark. She does reveal without comment that Lallemant never had to struggle for money. His father Théophile, who had prospered in the wine export business, paid for his first Paris studio in 1924 and was the “T” in the “T R Lallemant” of the new ceramics firm’s logo. He died shortly after, in 1928, enabling his son to build on the Quai d’Auteuil, in the 16th arrondissement, the elegantly modernist Seine-front studio, showroom and apartments which he owned throughout his career. (As Bourdieu wrote, “the only way [artistic industries] can combine the economic profits of ordinary economic enterprise with the symbolic profits assured to intellectual enterprises is by avoiding the crudest forms of mercantilism” [The Rules of Art 142].) When Lallemant discontinued his decorating business in the 1930s and went to work in the construction firm of his wealthy father-in law, Célestin Montcocol, he advertised a closing sale, and offered various apartments for rent: “Dans cet immeuble où les salles d’exposition et bureaux n’occupent que 2 étages, il reste quelques apartements à louer, avec vue sur la Seine et convenant tout spécialement a des installations modernes.” On returning from Indochina in 1946 he moved his family back into that building, into their old top floor river-view apartment. His ceramics studio was still there, in the basement, and intact. Did he do more work there? – du Pasquier is not sure.
An engraved R. Lallemant signature. Lallemant is generally believed to have produced ceramics under the T R Lallemant mark only in the 1925-33 period. However, du Pasquier includes a photograph of at least one vase that he created for a vacation complex he and his father-in-law built and apparently operated on the French Riviera in the later 1930s. There were quite possibly others. She writes that some unmarked Lallemant vases may have been produced in his last months as an apprentice, or in the year immediately preceding the establishment of his first studio, and suggests that these were glazed but undecorated. However, I have seen two Lallemant vases with possibly Michel Bouchaud decor that are unmarked. I have seen another with a handwritten R. Lallemant signature engraved beneath the glaze. I’m somewhat surprised that she does not mention similar ones. In general, du Pasquier is unhelpful about such matters, most likely because the Lallemant records are incomplete. Although she reproduces various decors she has found in Lallemant’s archives, there are many that she does not illustrate. She is also unable to produce a list of form numbers, which I’m sure many collectors and museums would have appreciated.
Leaflet (ca 1933) announcing Lallemant's closing of his Paris showroom Despite these limitations, this is still a welcome book on an artist who is arguably one of the most original and important ceramicist of the French 1920s. It is lavishly illustrated with more than fifty colour photos of the best of his work. A North American reader may find the restraint and discretion with which it lengthily presents Lallemant’s war years somewhat odd. Du Pasquier goes to great detail to describe Pétain’s and Ménétrel’s relationships with Hitler, Goering and Speer and to dissociate Lallemant from the gifts of Sèvres porcelain that they ordered and helped design for them, but is extremely vague about how Lallemant managed his speedy segue from Vichy bureaucrat to Free French sailor, or on how the Vichy period may have affected Montcocol and Lallemant finances. He was not a collaborator, she implies. He was merely an adventurous, energetic, unreflective and family-loving artist burdened with subconscious traditional values. Partly this vagueness appears to be caused by her indebtedness to the assistance of Lallemant’s now deceased widow and to their youngest daughter, Mme Martine Lallia, who – with "bien légitimes appréhensions" du Pasquier writes (13) – granted the author access to the family archives. In part it also may reflect the pain and discord which the Vichy period continues to be able to evoke in France.
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