Louis Majorelle

Louis Majorelle (1859-1926), French furniture designer and a prominent member of the École de Nancy founded by Émile Gallé in 1901. Louis, the son of Auguste Majorelle, a Nancy cabinet-maker specializing in reproduction 18th-century furniture and ceramics, studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean-François Millet. When his father died in 1879, Louis returned to Nancy to continue the family furniture business. By the 1890s, under the influence of Gallé, he was turning away from reproductions and beginning to produce furniture in the new, organic Art Nouveau style.

In 1900 Majorelle showed his Water Lily Room at the Paris Exhibition and demonstrated his ability to marry the naturalistically inspired shapes of high fashion with fine gilt-bronze mounts in the 18th-century tradition. By this time he was the acknowledged leader in the production of Art Nouveau furniture, and by mechanizing his workshops he was able to keep prices within range of the middle classes; at the same time he was rigorous in maintaining traditional 18th-century standards of quality in design and construction.

His furniture was produced mainly in suites—for the living-rooms and bedrooms of fashion-conscious mid-Europeans, who revelled in the simplified naturalism of his fronded and foliaged forms with their opulent mounts. For special pieces, however, he used marquetry decoration, again perpetuating the craft of the 18th-century ébéniste.

Metalwork was an abidingly important aspect of Majorelle's output; at the École de Nancy Exhibition of 1903 (when he was vice-president of the organization) he showed gilt-bronze lighting as well as furniture. He also produced metal frameworks for clocks and ceramics, and for glass bowls and vases made by Daum Frères, the firm established by Auguste and Antonin Daum.

During World War I he was forced to close the factory and flee to Paris. However, in 1918 he returned to Nancy, reconstructed the workshops (which had been badly damaged by fire in 1916) and resumed production. From this time Majorelle's sinuous, naturalistic shapes were giving way to circles, squares, and rectangles: Art Nouveau was passé. At the Paris Exhibition of 1925 (for which he was a juror) Majorelle showed furniture, lighting, and other objects in the luxurious but geometrically severe style that proclaimed Art Deco.