Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer was born Lucien Lévy in Algiers on September 30, 1865. He entered the École communale supérieure de dessin et de sculpture in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris in October 1879, at fourteen, studying under Albert-Charles Wallet and the school’s director Alexandre Vion, and later taking advice from Raphaël Collin. He was sixteen when he sent his first work to the Salon of 1882: a small painted porcelain plaque after Cabanel’s Naissance de Vénus — a debut that was at once a ceramic and a copy of a painting. After working briefly as a lithographer, he joined Clément Massier’s pottery at Golfe-Juan in 1887 and was named directeur des Travaux d’Art in 1892. He remained until 1895, the formative period of his career. He began signing ceramics, jointly with Massier, from about the time of his promotion in 1892; most of his pieces bear the signature “L. Lévy.” He adopted the name Lévy-Dhurmer in 1896, drawing it from his mother’s name, Goldhurmer.

At Golfe-Juan, Lévy was far more than a decorator of forms devised by others. Working in close collaboration with Massier, he helped transform the manufactory’s technical experiments into a new artistic language. His interest in Hispano-Moresque ceramics fed the manufactory’s pursuit of metallic-luster glazes whose copper, gold, violet, blue and green reflections change as light passes across the surface. Islamic and Persian ornament, Japonisme and the emerging Symbolist imagination converged in vessels that abandoned conventional symmetry for irregular silhouettes, enveloping compositions and surfaces that seem illuminated from within.

Animals were among Lévy’s most fertile subjects. Fish, lobsters, octopuses, squid and starfish inhabit shimmering submarine worlds, while herons, swallows, spiders and other creatures appear suspended in air, water or darkness. He rarely treated them as isolated zoological specimens. Their bodies organize the entire composition: wings carry the eye around a vessel, schools of fish dissolve into flashes of iridescent color, webs spread across tapering forms, and tentacles merge with handles, ridges and contours. The animal thus becomes an agent of movement and transformation, animating both the ceramic surface and the vessel itself. Japanese-inspired cropping and asymmetry coexist with a distinctly Symbolist sense of mystery, producing creatures that appear observed from nature yet detached from ordinary reality.

Lévy left Golfe-Juan in 1895 and returned to Paris, where the poet Georges Rodenbach opened the city’s literary and artistic circles to him. His first monographic exhibition of paintings and pastels, at the Galerie Georges Petit from 15 January to 15 February 1896, was a celebrated success. He subsequently became known primarily as a Symbolist painter, portraitist and designer, but the foundations of that later career had already been established in ceramics. The veiled light, elusive atmosphere and psychological suggestiveness of his pastels have clear counterparts in the fluctuating lusters and dreamlike animal imagery of his Massier vessels. For the Bestiaire, Lévy-Dhurmer is not simply one of Massier’s gifted collaborators: he is one of the central creators of the Art Nouveau ceramic animal, responsible for an astonishing range of works in which marine, avian and terrestrial life seems to emerge directly from color, fire and clay.