Alexandre Noll
All that could be made out of wood
“At a superficial glance, because of their rough exterior and apparently unsophisticated appearance, one might class them among the manifestations of primitive art, or the works of rustic artisans, those spontaneous testimonies of folklore, to which naïve sincerity always lends so much charm. But, on looking more closely, one recognizes the intervention of a more reflective intention: one discovers the refinements of a cultivated spirit, the expression of a sensibility both alive and personal” — René Chavance
Born to Alsatian parents in Reims, north-eastern France, Alexandre Noll (1890-1970) was self-taught as a carver and only really turned towards art in the 1920s, with the raison d'être “to make of wood all that could be made out of wood.” To him, the tree was representative not only of nature, but of an intellectual idea, thus possessing both a practical and intellectual value. Noll was something of a recluse and reticent man, turning down a teaching position at Ecole Boule, the Paris school of furniture making, saying that he preferred to keep his methods a secret. From the 1920s until shortly before his death in 1970, Noll worked from his atelier in Fontenay-aux-Roses — making only occasional visits to the cafés of the Paris left bank — creating small objects, then furniture, and finally large abstract sculptures from his suburban back garden. His body of work may have varied in function and style, but throughout his career Noll remained consistent to his beloved material — natural wood.
Noll’s relationship to wood and the trees from which they came was bordering on the spiritual and somewhat unique at a time when a new post-war generation of architects, designers and artists were preoccupied with pioneering the use of industrial design processes and man-made resources. Entirely eschewing the functionalist trend, his focus on the craft and production of wood-made totems, sculptures, chairs, and cabinets inspired him to create objects that were unique artefacts. His abstract, organic designs, poetic, yet with a hint of brutalism, manage to blur the line between furniture and sculpture. Noll discovered woodcarving during the First World War when, because of his German heritage (common in the Alsace region), he was sent as an air force conscript to the far-off Dardanelles in Turkey. There he met Lucien Jacques (1891-1961), who had a woodcarving workshop in Paris and encouraged Noll’s interest in the art, which quickly became both a newfound passion and a therapeutic tool against the horror of the wartime experience. “He was tormented by it,” says his grandson Dominique, in an interview he gave to Bonhams. “You can see that in the engravings he did at the time.”
Alexandre Noll in his workshop
Cabinet, pearwood (c. 1950) by Alexandre Noll, image c/o Alan Grizot
Following the war Noll gave up his banking job and began his career as an artist in the commercial environment of department stores. He began as a miniaturist of sorts, with the creation of small luxury accessories like parasol handles in ebony and maple, often with Asian designs, ornamented with ivory inlay, eggshell craquelure, and lacquer, that quickly garnered the attention of established designers of the period such as Paul Poiret (1879-1944) and the shoemaker Perugia, who commissioned him to design decorative objects and household goods such as lampstands and boot trees, respectively. He also began receiving private commissions from important clients such as the Comtesse de Comminges. It would not be until the post-war years that Noll’s desire began to create what Olivier Jean-Elie and Pierre Passebon in their book on Alexandre Noll describe as “furniture sculptures”. The objects Noll carved, chiselled and sanded over the next half century reveal an organic unity, a manifestation of the artists belief in the sacredness of wood, whether mahogany, sycamore, teak, elm, or ebony. His mastery of and engagement with every block of rough timber was a form of erudition, an expression of action between subject and object. Noll would take a base block, and through his close communion with nature, allowing the inherent natural qualities of wood to dictate the forms, give it new function as furniture and sculpture; he once said that, “Even felled, cut, the tree continues to live”. In this sense his every engagement with wood was a respectful confrontation resolved through final agreement. To an extent this positions him as a precedent for the American designer George Nakashima, whose great respect for trees and the wood itself attracted a huge following in the USA in the 1960s.
In 1925 Noll exhibited a series of sculpted objects at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, then in the Salon des Artistes décorateurs and the Salon d’Automne and from 1927 he began to exhibit regularly at La Crémaillère, a gallery devoted to discovering new talent. It was only, however, in 1930s that Noll’s style fully developed, designing objects (trays, bowls, cases, boxes, jugs), usually carved into blocks of one specific wood, primarily sycamore, mahogany, teak, or (and in fact most often) ebony; he preferred those woods without grains — partly because he perceived them as surface decoration — and refused to use nails, hinges, handles or metal accoutrements of any kind, stating: “Pourquoi infliger au bois la blessure éternelle du fer?” (Odile Noll, Alexandre Noll – Ville de Fontenay aux Roses: Histoire de familles, 2009, p 5.). Noll worked in the manner of a sculptor and would first cut down the timber roughly with a saw, before gradually refining the form, making the most of each knot, grain or imperfection and preserving the character of the tree. Finally, the surfaces would be polished so as to achieve his signature smooth touch and stone-like sheen. When René Chavance, a specialist on interior décor, wrote an appreciation of Noll’s carvings in 1938, he struggled to explain the feeling they imparted: “At a superficial glance, because of their rough exterior and apparently unsophisticated appearance, one might class them among the manifestations of primitive art, or the works of rustic artisans, those spontaneous testimonies of folklore, to which naïve sincerity always lends so much charm. But, on looking more closely, one recognizes the intervention of a more reflective intention: one discovers the refinements of a cultivated spirit, the expression of a sensibility both alive and personal.”
Untitled (c. 1950) by Alexandre Noll, image c/o Phillips
It was not until the Second World War that Noll began to forge his ideas concerning furniture design and sculpture, and this was when he really started to to develop the more expressive style for which he is so well known today. It’s unclear what led Noll to this change in direction, but Jean-Elie and Passebon have hypothesized that it was his raw material. During the war Noll needed to reinforce the cellar where he lived to use as a shelter, so he lined it with railway sleepers salvaged from an abandoned train-line. He later recovered them and began to produce pieces of wooden furniture that were half responsive to his material and half boldly interventionist. In these authors’ view, the material itself “enlarged his inspiration; he discovered the forms of his furniture, and later his sculpture, in its raw nature (nature brute).”
Seats, consoles, chests, tables, chests of drawers, sideboards were carved or modelled out of these massive billets, that are more akin to sculpture than to traditional furniture and bring to mind the sculptural works of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). Of course, unlike many of his contemporaries, Noll was not an interior decorator and nor did he share an interest in mass-production like the modernists of his time. Although some parallels can be drawn with Art Nouveau artists such as François-Rupert Carabin (1862-1932), who embraced the tradition of French wood carving, Noll’s work is thought to be largely a result of his own creative impulse. Waldemar George, the prolific art writer and editor, wrote that his works “display a new mysticism with regard to nature, which in certain cases comes close to idolatry. It is primitive, not so much because of its style but in terms of its conception and creation.”
The originality and quality of his designs soon caught the attention of Jacques Adnet (1900-1984), who in 1943 presented Noll’s first pieces of furniture to the Compagnie des Arts Français. In the 1950s, Noll became increasingly well known, his work resonating with the period’s taste for free forms, as seen in the furniture of Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) and Jean Royère (1902-1981) and gained prestigious clients such as Pierre Cardin and Francois Pinault. Perhaps a natural evolution, Noll soon chose to turn definitely towards sculpture, producing a small number of large-scale works. The medium allowed him to fully express the subtlety and depth of his creative imagination and sensitivity to his material. He made extensive use of irregular off-cuts rejected by industrial producers, seeing their natural voids and inclusions as a contrast between positive and negative form; an interest developed through his reading of mathematics, including the work of Henri Poincaré, and philosophy, including Hegel, master theorist of dialectics. A central tenet of post-World War II abstraction was the belief that art’s purpose was to distil universal truths. In pursuit of this essential meaning, or what Noll might have referred to as “absolute[s] of nature”, the artist would seek to imbue his work with symbolism, revisiting timeless archetypes in the history of forms.
For example, in Untitled (c. 1950) Noll presents a massive three dimensional symbol for infinity. A well as the obvious physical appeal and associations to his own practice — unbroken lines, infinite multiplication, invoked by the concentric rings and swirling grains of wood — the infinity symbol holds layered symbolic significance. Introduced in 1655, the concept has a much older pedigree (for instance, it appears in the cross of Saint Boniface, wrapped around the bars of a Latin cross) and broad mythological, astronomical and mathematical meanings. One can also draw parallels between the concept of infinity and Noll’s continued exploration of variants on the same theme, for example, in this work, Noll also sought to portray the most universal of artists’ subjects: a reclining female form.
Lidded box, model no. 289, footed bowl and book cover (1950s) by Alexandre Noll, image c/o Phillips
Whilst no other artist applied these ideas in quite the same way as Noll, in recent years his abstract organic designs have come to be considered in the context of, and in parallel to other mid-century abstract sculptors such as Henry Moore (1898-1986), Jean (or Hans) Arp (1886-1966), and Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), who also produced abstract forms with strong anthropomorphic undertones. It’s clear to see how the development of abstraction and the move away from rigorous geometry to biomorphism and figuration must have impacted Noll’s emerging style. In the essay “Fitting Together”, in the 1968 exhibition catalogue for Henry Moore, published by the Arts Council, David Sylvester compares Moore to Jean Arp on the basis of their shared practice of piecing together limb-like shapes.
Noll’s work suggests the same morphing of elements, but the brilliance of his efforts are in the fact that his sculptures were carved from single blocks of wood. Having an extraordinary affinity for trees, describing them as “born of the earth yet imbued with the spirit, the upwelling force, to reach upward to the sky, air, and light”, Noll was informed as much by his poetic attachment to wood and the material’s inherent qualities as his own creative impulse, stating: “Je ne tue pas le bois, je lui obeis. Suivant docilement ses contours, ses noeuds, les moindres accidents de ses veines, j’en tire un oeuvre inspirée par la nature meme…” (Odile Noll, Alexandre Noll – Ville de Fontenay aux Roses: Histoire de familles, 2009, p 4.). He participated in numerous exhibitions in France, including “De la Sculpture de Rodin à nos jours” and ‘“Aux Arts de la table” at the Pavillion de Marsan (he was notably involved in Jacques Adnet’s stand), and in others abroad, in Munich, Madrid, Vienna, London, Varèse etc.
Noll represents something of a dichotomy as a primitive and a sophisticated intellectual. His beautifully modulated wooden forms, testament to the great efforts he went to in using the contours of the and natural colours of his material, continue to stand apart in that their naturalistic abstraction is as much derived from the properties of the material as his own hand. In Noll’s post-war sculptures and objects we see a muscular materialism, reflecting the inherent qualities of the block of wood from which they were carved. Michelangelo once said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”, and it is as if through his work, Noll sought to reveal the sculpture in a block of wood, enthusiastically embracing its accidental features of natural timber: its fissures, textures and knots. A description of Noll’s work by French playwright Jacques Audiberti (1899-1965) perhaps best sums up his artistic output: “‘Alexandre Noll trace et polit, dans l’ébène et dans le noyer des cheminements où la pensée trouve son compte. Il fait sortir du bois, non le loup, mais un univers musical et mathématique de formes” (Odile Noll, Alexandre Noll – Ville de Fontenay aux Roses: Histoire de familles, 2009, p 8.).
Tracing this connection between artist and material, Olivier Jean-Elie and Pierre Passebon write that “it was the sculpture’s nature that acted as model, and the decision to sculpt derived directly from the choice of a particular wood”. Ultimately, what appeals most about Noll’s oeuvre is the unique combination of human craftsmanship and natures innate artistry, which perfectly exemplifies the spiritual relationship between an object and its maker. Noll did not just work with wood, it was his sole passion, with his approach and techniques intimately bound up with nature in a way that was simultaneously poetic, intuitive and philosophical, producing an individuality in each work rather like that of a person.