Abstract

This essay examines the display of artistic labour embedded in Émile Gallé's glass objects. As a starting point, it takes the telling discrepancy between Gallé's representation as an artist working in the solitude of his studio in the well-known portrait painted by Victor Prouvé in 1892 and the actual involvement of many hands organized under a strict division of labour in his glass manufactory. His glass objects thus exist somewhere between the logic of the singular work of art and that of serial production. The essay looks closely at Gallé's exhibition practice at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars as well as at his public statements about the making of his glass works in order to trace contemporary negotiations of the relationship between art and industry and, more broadly, notions of what constituted an adequate modern art around 1900.

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