Poetess of Metal
Line Vautrin
“I think that most of the time, it’s rhythm that pushes me to do something, and then the idea becomes embodied in the play of forms and surface … In a way instinct translates into rhythm, intelligence into the often unexpected fictions the rhythm evokes, sensuality into the modelling of the shape … A model must be pleasant to the touch; the hand must judge as much as the eye.” — Line Vautrin
In terms of taste, design enthusiasts are becoming increasingly niche in an attempt to separate themselves from the masses, loving nothing more than championing those more obscure names, that for the cognoscenti separate the wheat from the proverbial chaff. In a world dominated by trends with fakes and forgeries abound names such as Noguchi (1904-1988), Mouille (1922-1988) and Jeanneret (1896-1967) simply no longer cut the mustard, too conspicuous, too commonplace to justify the somewhat sanctimonious hashtag: If you know you know. To truly shine, a carefully curated interior of Henri Simmen (1880-1963) ceramics, Japanese lacquerware by Katsu Hamanaka (1895-1982) and Dupré-Lafon (1900-1971) armchairs, juxtaposed against contemporary works from the likes of Dana Arbib, Louis Eisner (b. 1988) and Green River Project are now pre-requisite to achieving the appearance of a truly cultured Millennial aesthete. The runaway success of social media has of course resulted in the rapid democratisation of design, whereby names once known only amongst a clique of cultivated design buffs, have now, in essence, attained almost the same cultural visibility as high-street behemoths. As such, luxury names struggle, increasingly, to maintain an aura of exclusivity, with even the Goyard “Saint Louis”, Loro Piana “Open Walk” and Cartier “Love” bracelet, once the preserve of those “in the know”, seeming almost as ubiquitous as seasonal fast fashion must-haves. For those looking to separate themselves from the pack, The Row has, in recent years, become the most desirable new kid on the block. Founded by one-time teen actors, Mary-Kate (b. 1986) and Ashley Olsen (b. 1986), the 37-year-old twins are, or so they profess, driven by a love of “beautiful things”, and as such, as the ultimate stamp of approval, storied French decorator Jacques Grange (b. 1944) designed their Upper Eastside boutique; replete with furnishings by a panoply of twentieth-century greats, including George Nakashima (1905-1990), Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960-1988) seminal work Procession (1986). Indeed the Olsen’s nuanced, blue-chip approach to art and design now extends as far as their catwalk presentations; for their 2022 summer collection, presented at their Paris home — a classically austere eighteenth-century hôtel particulier around the corner from Place Vendôme — a bevvy of models, wearing “ingeniously subtle” clothes, as Vogue referred to them, were clutching small, gilt bronze minaudières, or wearing eye-catching, abstract bracelets. These extraordinary objects, engraved with a seemingly cryptic mishmash of letters and symbols, were by Line Vautrin (1913-1997), a prolific twentieth-century French jewellery designer, known for her hand-wrought bijoux, cigarette cases and mirrors. “We have always admired Vautrin’s work and came across a rare collection of pieces before our summer collection show in Paris,” Ashley explained when asked by FT Editor Roula Khalaf of their decision to include such glittering works as part of their presentation.
“Miroir Sorcière Sequins” (c. 1960) in talosel and mirrored glass, by Line Vautrin, image c/o Sotheby’s
Line Vautrin in 1946, wearing a “Horse” shoulder piece and cufflinks titled “The Hand of Friendship”, image from the collection of Marie-Laure Bonnaud-Vautrin, c/o Sotheby’s
Vautrin dazzled the Parisian beau monde with her endlessly inventive creations, elevating unconventional materials to the realm of fine art, taking inspiration from an array of historical sources, ranging from antiquity through to the eighteenth century and transforming them in a deliberately primitive style. She became known for her wit, whimsy and use of double entendres, making jewellery, buttons, small containers, umbrella handles and mirrors, often inscribed with allegories, metaphors and visual puns, revealing a variety of influences from mythological figures and verses from her favourite poets (such as Rimbaud (1854-1891), Dante (d. 1321), Prévert (1900-1977) and Apollinaire (1880-1918)) to the mystery and excitement of a Venetian masquerade ball and even declarations of love, soon earning her the sobriquet “poetess of metal”. Material and spiritual, Light and shadows, Stable and volatile, More and less, are just some of the antagonismes Vautrin carved into her covetable bronze boxes. These were often concealed in “rebus” puzzles, complex visual/phonetic puns, beloved of medieval craftsmen, an exercise in sense and nonsense whereby words are represented by an elaborate combination of pictures and letters. Contemporaneously the Dadaists were similarly enamoured by the rebus as a shocking art form, with Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Man Ray (1890-1976) instigating one of the greatest practical jokes of the twentieth century. Duchamp’s famous moustached and goateed readymade postcard of the Mona Lisa bore the inscription “L.H.O.O.Q”, the letters pronounced in French meaning, “She has a hot ass”. By contrast, Vautrin’s somewhat more charming rebus, a compact of a couple embracing, was inscribed with the letters “LAVQOQPAME”, “Elle a vecu occupé à aimer”, meaning, “She spent her life occupied in love”. Another rebus engraved on a compact, a capital letter “G” around a lower case “a”, with two “vous” is pronounced, “Jay grand a petit deux vous”, i.e. “J’ai grand appétit de vous” (I’m hungry for you). As well as her work in bronze, Vautrin also made boxes and powder compacts with delicate mother-of-pearl lids. Some depict mythological creatures, or animals such as fish and geese, while others feature Maritime designs based on drawings by her husband, set designer and artist Jacques Armand Bonnaud (1917-1980); an extraordinary symbiosis of artistry and functionality, in each example, Vautrin meticulously adapts the design to the shell’s inherent curvature. Perhaps surprisingly, given the closeness of their relationship, and especially so, as her husband had an early influence on her career, these mother-of-pearl boxes are their only known artistic collaboration, and as such provide a rare glimpse into what was a short-lived creative relationship.
“Vautrin’s career started very small and organically,” explains Benoist F. Drut, a partner at esteemed New York gallery Maison Gérard. “She offered her creations door-to-door at age twenty before being able to open her own showroom, and finished her career with an atelier on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.” Born in Paris in 1913 to a family of metalworkers, Vautrin was entirely self-taught; yet, despite her lack of formal art education, by the age of fourteen, she had already mastered the skills of casting, chasing and gilding in her father’s foundry workshop. As such, she left school at the age of fifteen to pursue metal craft full time, having hit upon the then entirely novel idea of creating artistic, costume jewellery in gilt and silvered metal. Despite advances in women’s rights following the Suffragette movement of the late nineteenth century, it was still considered a fairly unusual choice of vocation for a young girl, but with a singular, unerring vision, the aspiring artist spent her days alone, in a little room, designated as a workshop, experimenting with different materials. Vautrin found herself inextricably drawn to metal, from designing and sculpting to adding the finishing touches to a piece, polishing, carving and gilding. As such, after much trial and error, she set her sights on gilt bronze, a choice of material, in and of itself, somewhat radical as hitherto unheard of in the world of fine jewellery, it was limited solely to industrial use — and as such, her decision to use such a base metal was considered not only provocative but in bad taste. “I wasn’t much good in school”, Vautrin remembered, “I was a dreamer, so I left early and experimented with making bronze bracelets like big napkin rings, which I gold plated.” Despite breaking entirely from tradition, her jewellery was an immediate, almost runaway success, and she began selling pieces to a culturally savvy coterie of collectors; such a warm reception was, at least in part, a result of the particularity of her immediate target market who, having spent their formative years in a capital city at the centre of the European avant-garde, had undoubtedly developed aesthetic proclivities more outré than their immediate European neighbours. Something of a prodigious talent, Vautrin was still too young, legally, to be in business, sending bills out under her father’s letterhead; and to that end, concerned inexperience might hinder her future career prospects, she took a job as a “Welcomer” at the Place Vendôme atelier of Surrealistically inclined Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973), another female designer with characteristic determination. As events transpired, Vautrin handed in her notice within the week, choked and stifled by the strict rules and customs of a French couture house. Of the experience, the artist later lamented, “I greeted the clients all day with ‘Bonjour, Madame’ and ate lunch in the gloomy basement canteen.” Following a further unsuccessful four-week stint working as a representative for a firm of industrial photographers, she decided, despite her naïveté, that the only way forward was to be her own boss.
Line Vautrin (right) posing outside her recently opened boutique at 63, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, image from the collection of Marie-Laure Bonnaud-Vautrin, c/o Sotheby’s
“Miroir Papyrus” (c. 1960) in talosel and mirrored glass, by Line Vautrin, image c/o Sotheby’s
The quintessential Parisienne, elegant, petite, witty — and in a city of stereotypes, not the typical offspring of a “fondeur” — as Vautrin later, candidly explained, “I put a few pieces together in a little suitcase, and set out with some trepidation as a door-to-door saleswoman in Paris … I was not yet 21.” An artist and intellectual at a time when many young women were afraid to be more than conventional and bourgeois, in 1937 she secured a small booth at the Exposition Universelle in Paris where she presented a wide range of powder compacts, boxes, brooches, necklaces and ashtrays in gilt bronze, including the celebrated “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden” necklace, to the acclaim of critics and collectors alike. The presentation cemented her reputation as a singular, creative innovator, and launched her on the international stage. As such, she attracted a sufficient clientele to warrant opening a shop on the Rue de Berri so small, that she rather charmingly referred to it as “the cupboard”, where she sold accessories and jewellery, including brooches, bracelets, earrings and buttons in limited editions. Despite its bijou proportions, “people came”, and Vautrin soon developed a devoted legion of collectors, who embraced her unorthodox approach to design. Whilst Schiaparelli before her used designer buttons as a mode for creative expression, famously collaborating with a panoply of modern masters including Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), Man Ray (1890-1976), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and Jean Schlumberger (1907-1987), Vautrin’s were truly unlike any other. Made in a variety of materials from her signature gilt bronze to more contemporary materials such as resin, they came in a multitude of geometric and organic forms, inspired by sources as diverse as ancient Greek coins, medieval folk art, animals, word-games, or, in her extraordinary abstract ensembles, the material itself. In 1939, she presented powder and pill boxes, in bronze engraved with riddles, bearing mythological symbols or inscriptions at the annual Société des Artistes Décorateurs fair. A gilt-bronze paperweight, titled “La dernière cène” (c. 1940), represents Jesus his Saints and apostles during the Last Supper. Engraved on the reverse is a poem by Prévert, a short satyr of the Christian religion. “Ils sont à table / Ils ne mangent pas / Ils ne sont pas dans leur assiette / Et leur assiette se tient toute droite / Verticalement derrière leur tête.” In essence, the apostles don’t eat as their plates are behind their heads mimicking halos. “There’s a playfulness in her work that sparks the curiosity of collectors,” explains Robin Beyries, a specialist in the Design department at Christie’s in Paris. “Her works also appeal on an emotional level, with her visual cues often evoking memories.”
Such was her success that in 1943 she moved to larger premises, an exquisite boutique on the chic couture shopping street, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the Elysee Palace, where a statue of St Eligius, the patron saint of goldsmiths, presided over the entrance, with her gilt-bronze buttons displayed in elegant Art Deco vitrines. Vautrin was a pioneer not only in terms of her artistic contribution but also in her commitment to workers’ rights. The same year she had the foresight and perspicacity to invest in the then run-down Marais district (later to be restored at the instigation of French novelist, art theorist and minister of cultural affairs André Malraux (1901-1976)). She invested in the spectacular seventeenth-century Hôtel Mégret de Sérilly, a vast twenty-six-room mansion in the Rue Vieille du Temple, which had formerly belonged to a slew of illustrious inhabitants, including Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1713) and Anne-Marie-Louise Thomas de Domangeville, Madame de Sérilly (1762–1799), Lady of Honour to Queen Marie-Antoinette, whose husband was paymaster general to Louis XVI; in terms of the latter, Madame de Sérilly’s husband was guillotined during the French Revolution, their house abandoned and its contents shipped to England by an opportune merchant. (One of its elegant panelled rooms, the decorative scheme for which was designed and painted by the Rousseau brothers, is on permanent display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.) Vautrin restored the building to its former glory, with a private residence on the ground floor and a theatrical atelier above, transforming it into both a workshop (devoted to casting, assembly, finishing, enamelling, bead production and ivory carving for jewellery), presentation space and design studio. Light years ahead of its time, and hailed as a model social enterprise, remembering her brief, unhappy experience with Schiaparelli, Vautrin provided her staff of fifty or so employees with a common room for relaxation, a library, a refectory and something that only post-pandemic has become a widespread norm, the possibility of working part-time from home. The overall mise-en-scène was as if Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) had been tasked with creating a series of Baroque interiors, with frescoed walls, painted plaster curtains, sconces in the form of disembodied hands, supporting chandeliers and accessories, delicate wrought iron furniture, by non-other than maître ferronnier Gilbert Poillerat (1902-1988) and a seventeenth century painted wood statue of Venus — the model for Vautrin’s lamp wound beads. Like a latter-day Marie-Laure de Noailles (1902-1970), Vautrin’s extraordinary Hôtel Particulier soon became a salon and meeting place for artists and celebrities such as Zizi Jeanmaire (1924-2020) and her husband Roland Petit (1924-2011), as well as a venue for glittering costume balls. “It was just after the war, and I was living in a fairy tale which was over too soon,” Vautrin’s daughter, Marie-Laure remembered. “My parents entertained a great deal, and the parties became très snob.”
A 1958 Florence mirror in a Gstaad bath by Mattia Bonetti, Photograph by Alexandre Bailhache
Two gilt bronze boxes by Line Vautrin, from top, “Ville et campagne” (c. 1980) and “Heureux parmi la foule” (c. 1980), image c/o Christie’s
The subsequent inter-war years were perhaps somewhat unexpectedly extremely fruitful for Vautrin. Horror and despair brought with it a longing for fantasy and ornament, and with precious metals scarce, Vautrin’s whimsical creations provided a much-needed dose of escapism. “Ils nous prennent tout” (They’re taking everything we have) was a heartfelt complaint voiced by Parisians during the German Occupation; yet, inherently resourceful, inventive and always up for a challenge, rather than seeing such stringent rationing as a hindrance, Vautrin used it to her advantage, breaking further from tradition and embracing readily available materials, such as cloth, feathers and wood. Her raison d’etre, as it were, was to inspire Parisian women to revive the quintessential French exuberance for beauty and style. “During the Occupation, the Parisian women bought jewellery and wore outrageous hats to thumb their noses at the Germans,” Vautrin told fashion historian Ginger Moro. “I made embroidered wedgies, and crazy hats which covered our faces. We changed our accessories often and when we walked by the Nazis, we refused to look at them. It was our luxe de la guerre, our way of defending ourselves against the Occupation.” As such, a frenzy of ceaseless innovation ensued, whereby, the artist embraced “frivolity” in all its forms, and in doing so, defied all traditional genres of the decorative arts. As well as clips, brooches and bracelets, she conceived the idea of buttons made of blown glass, containing tiny ships, and even buttons serving as scent bottles; materials such of mother-of-pearl and synthetic ivory were scarce, and as such, entirely unfazed, she pioneered buttons made of ceramic. German-American access and singer Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) even chose her gilt-bronze eyebrow buttons as a feminine foil to her signature tailored suits. These miniature works of art only further cemented her reputation for skill and inventiveness and were so celebrated that in the mid-1940s a journalist dubbed her “the queen of buttons”. After the war, such critical acclaim served to further encourage Vautrin’s experimentation with materials and techniques. In the June 1948 edition of Art et Industrie, Vautrin explained of her approach: “I think that most of the time, it’s rhythm that pushes me to do something, and then the idea becomes embodied in the play of forms and surfaces … In a way instinct translates into rhythm, intelligence into the often unexpected fictions the rhythm evokes, sensuality into the modelling of the shape … A model must be pleasant to the touch; the hand must judge as much as the eye.” Looking for a little escapism herself, in 1949 Vautrin moved to Morocco with her family, where she opened a shop, decorated by her husband, selling her exuberant creations alongside a carefully curated selection of vintage objet d’arts. While there she continued to innovate, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, including, famously, the palm leaves of Casablanca, always in search of new materials, designs and techniques.
Around 1953, Vautrin discovered a mysterious resin made of cellulose acetate (similar to that used in sunglasses, and available for 15 Francs a kilo at the Bazar de L’Hotel de Ville, a department store on the Rue de Rivoli specialising in tools and materials for plumbers, craftsmen and artisans), for which she filed a patent, initially under the name “Oforge”. “The first letter,” she explained to a journalist in 1958, “as I drew it, represents the sun. I have always been fascinated with suns … The sun, however, is also fire. ‘Forge’ is the symbol of work through fire, but I add to this fire water which is purity, calmness … Oforge is basically an alloy of two materials: glass or mirrored glass (which can be tinted or plain) in the form of fragments, amalgamated with a plastic binding substance and inset in a plastic material so that only a surface of spangles or sparkling flakes appears in a solid mass. Once completed, Oforge represents the union of fire (which melted the material) and water, as represented by the transparency of glass.” Made up of thin layers of resin, and malleable under the effect of heat, Vautrin devoted over thirty years of her life to perfecting the technique, which, in the late 1960s, she renamed “Talosel”, an acronym derived from the French term for the material: aceTAte de celluLOSe ELaboré, or worked cellulose acetate. It was a meticulous, fastidious and dangerous medium. “The resin is flammable; it lights like paper,” explains Marie-Laure, who instructed Vautrin’s students in the technique. “If you threw a Talosel bracelet into the fireplace, it would melt. But it was not as flammable as celluloid. We just had to pay attention when heating the material.” Vautrin scratched, sanded, scraped, bent, and scarified with the use of pliers, scissors and scalpels, worked with fire, and inlaid with fragments of glass and smoked mirror; the final product, like wreaths or snowflakes gone mad, evoking schist, bone or wood, corroded by time.
Line Vautrin at work in her studio, image c/o © Adagp, Paris
“Vis” bracelet (c. 1950) in gilt bronze, Line Vautrin’s material of choice, image c/o Sotheby’s
The artist soon began producing her famous mirrors, which she called her “witches”, a reference to the convex “miroir ardent” or “miroir sorcière” (sorcerer’s glass) at the centre, which she used almost exclusively. In each piece, as with her jewellery, one can discern Vautrin’s various inspirations, whereby she took from myriad historical sources, combining and reinterpreting stylistic motifs and decorative details into new and novel designs. Perhaps most immediately apparent, the hand-wrought appearance and jewel-like surfaces of her Talosel mirrors bring to mind the richly ornamented mosaics and cloisonné metal works of Byzantine art. Similarly, her signature technique of applying mirror fragments is evocative of the heavily faceted Venetian mirrors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where a large, central mirror pane was bordered by an elaborate frame of etched and cut glass mirror pieces. This is something that, of course, ties into the French tradition of innovation and savoir-faire, as in the late seventeenth century Louis XIV (1638-1715), who, at least in part due to their intrinsic value, had a particular fascination with mirrors — as seen to ultimate effect in his Baroque style Galerie des Glaces (1678-1684) at Versailles — brought the finest artisans, including Venetian glassmakers, to Paris to work in his royal manufactories. One might go back even further, as, whilst convex, or, witches mirrors were, undoubtedly fashionable in the 1950s, Vautrin’s hark back to the Renaissance; with the tab-shaped outline and circular decoration of her “Mazarin” (c. 1965) mirror for example, baring a striking resemblance to that holding centre stage between the betrothed couple in Jan van Eyck’s (1390-1441) renowned Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 (such mirrors, highly prized in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were an important part of a bride’s dowry).
These extraordinary creations rarely show the reflections of those who look at them, and as such, the artist’s unique and identifiable iconography, infused with elegance, poetry and humour, takes precedence over pure functionality. It was a laborious process, cutting, inlaying, setting, splitting and diffracting around a dazzling disc, and as such, they can be seen akin to fine jewellery. While eighteenth-century Baroque mirrors were framed with sunbursts of gilt-gold wood, Vautrin was the first modern artist to frame her sorcières with colour. “There’s an ethereal quality to her mirrors,” enthuses Beyries, noting that many take the form of celestial bodies such as stars and moons. “They seem to radiate light and depict other worlds. Even the images they reflect of our world are transformed thanks to the curvature of the glass.” The walls of Vautrin’s Faubourg Saint-Honoré boutique were partly sheathed in curtains, hiding a bravura of glittering mirrors from view: “If you saw them all at once, they cancelled each other out,” the artist explained of her scenography. Like her buttons, jewellery and objets d’art, Vautrin’s mirror frames, ranging in scale from small hand mirrors to a giant “Satellite” sorcière for three-star restaurant La Tour d’Argent, were often inscribed with poems and playful phrases. One small compact, for example, held a type-written note inside reading: “If this mirror breaks, don’t worry. You won’t have seven years of bad luck. Believe in Line Vautrin.” It’s important to remember, that whilst the artist’s Talosel mirrors might have their roots in history, contemporaneously speaking, they were avant-garde and entirely of their time. The Second World War saw an explosion in the manufacture and use of plastics, accelerated by a scarcity of traditional materials; subsequently, such new technologies were appropriated and assimilated by a design world looking to create and innovate using the very latest cutting-edge advances. Synthetic resins are, of course, now commonplace, used for cheap and cheerful, mass-produced tat, but at the time they were inherently bound up in ideas of scientific advancement, and as such, Vautrin’s use of such unconventional materials, in fine, handcrafted objects, elevating what was, in essence, a mass-produced, byproduct of consumerism to the realm of art was phenomenally progressive; an approach entirely in tune with the pervasive spirit of modernism that had come to define French decorative arts, from Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941) to Marc du Plantier (1901-1975), Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) and Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) et al.
À la mode as they were innovative, one of the first to buy a “witch” was Vautrin’s friend, the notorious playwright, novelist and screenwriter Françoise Sagan (1935-2004), best known for her 1954 work “Bonjour Tristesse” (Hello Sadness). Soon after, free-spirited French decorator Jean Royère (1902-1981), famed for his whimsically rotund “Ours Polaire” sofa, started using them in his colour-saturated interiors; quickly followed by a deluge of celebrities such as Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982), Yul Brynner (1920-1985) and, the fashionable seal of approval, Brigitte Bardot (b. 1934), Paloma Picasso (b. 1949) and art obsessed couturier Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) — who would later pay homage to Vautrin with the flacon for his 2006 fragrance “Cinéma”. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, Vautrin sculpted some seventy shapes, all hand-made with productions adapted to both her and her clients’ varied tastes. Some, like the “Soleil à Pointes” (c. 1955), were made en masse, while only two examples of her “Monaco” mirror (c. 1965-1970) are known to exist. Carpenters Workshop Gallery recently staged the exhibition “Poetic Refléxion” (2023), showcasing Vautrin’s extraordinary Talosel mirrors, which, something of a departure from their usual roster of cutting-edge contemporary talent, was their first foray into purely historic design. According to gallery co-founder Julien Lombrail, Vautrin’s mirrors perfectly encapsulate a particularly Gallic art de vivre, “Elegant, refined, artistic, and astonishing, they evoke joy and fantasy”. Each and every object produced in Vautrin’s workshop was made to a design conceived by her, expertly crafted and wholly proprietary, each a unique, one-of-a-kind, singular piece, an unexampled symbiosis of romanticism and fantasy. Vautrin’s approach, which, akin to the Giacometti brothers, Diego (1902-1985) and Alberto (1901-1966), and husband and wife duo Claude (1925-2019) and François-Xavier Lalanne (1927-2008) — or “Les Lalanne” as they came to be known — was purely artistic, breaking down boundaries between fine and decorative arts, resulting in a wholesale rethink of the way in which we view the classical canon.
After turning fifty, Vautrin became increasingly disillusioned, bored of the constraints of commerce and its inherent obligations. In the early 1960s, when higher rents forced her to leave the Marais, she shut up shop and set up a craft school for women, in conjunction with the Association of the Development of Manual Arts. “I noticed that there was a sudden surge of interest in handcrafting in the Sixties,” Vautrin explained. “Women were knitting again, creating jewellery, making ceramics and glass beads.” Over the next decade, travelling around France as the spirit moved her, she taught a new generation of artists, her “sorcerer’s apprentices”, how to handle and design with synthetic resins. In 1980 Vautrin chanced upon an entirely new technique, which she called “Pellimor-phoses”, from which she created translucent, coloured resin sculptures — defined variously as “surfaces or forms in resin, charged with psychic powers”, or, more concretely (for those asking “Psychic powers?”), in the realm of science, as opposed to metaphysics, “expansions of coloured plastics caught between two transparent surfaces”. Vautrin may have grown world-weary, but ceaselessly curious and creative, she was equally enamoured by this new invention as she had been by Talosel; not that her devotion to new and novel techniques precluded past endeavours, as she had always developed her body of work in tandem, investing the same passion and poetic sensibility in every item produced. Perhaps key to understanding Vautrin’s wholly novel approach is that: despite her highly refined creations, technical mastery came second to the singular creative imagination. It was an innate desire to fully realise the extent of her artistic vision that pushed her to develop new and innovative techniques and materials.
Long after her retirement, Vautrin continued making pieces in her apartment, but by the time she decided to sell part of her collection at the Hotel Drouot in 1986, her work had been largely forgotten. Gallerist and collector David Gill bought the lion’s share, showcasing her work in exhibitions around the world, from London to Barcelona, New York and Tokyo (with Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo (b. 1942) of Comme des Garcons), and in doing so, putting her back on the map. Galleries Chastel-Maréchal, Naïla de Monbrison and Jaqueline Subra all subsequently championed her work. Somewhat slow on the uptake, in 1999 the curators of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs caught on and staged an exhibition of 180 pieces: “Line Vautrin, Secrets de Bijoux”. Vautrin never attended the opening; she had a heart attack while talking on the telephone in April 1997. However, she did at least live long enough to see herself established as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Latterly, the 2015 sale of her daughter’s collection in Paris triggered a fresh flurry of interest in Vautrin’s work and introduced her to entirely new audiences.
On a purely superficial, visual level, there’s a certain playfulness to Vautrin’s work, instantly sparking the curiosity of collectors, but then, when one has a greater understanding, her use of complex symbolism from religious and classical sources, often has a way of evoking memories or emotions with such Proustian force, that it appeals on a deeply spiritual level. For a long while, despite her ceaseless innovation, Vautrin’s work was considered inferior to that of other artists as it was seen as purely “decorative”, something of a dirty word in fine art circles; now her mirrors, gilt bronze jewellery and Objects are in the permanent collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Only relatively recently however have people en masse come to understand not only the importance of her oeuvre but the strength of artistic vocabulary she created, infused with her passion for language and symbology, where poetry, romanticism and fantasy are inherently bound up in creation and craftsmanship. A designer of both fashion and ornament, she was a true sculptor and one of the most brilliant figures of the “esprit Parisien”. Collectors are becoming increasingly refined, and better educated, in part, increasingly so, due to the inherent monetary cost of acquiring top-notch decorative arts. In terms of that magical period of French twentieth-century design, Vautrin is, undisputedly, one of those archetypal personalities — others, include Diego Giacometti, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) and Christian Bérard (1902-1949) — whose passions, and ergo, talents, are a peculiar amalgam of dreams, poetry, historical references and an often mischievous and wicked sense of fun. Vautin’s idiosyncratic vision and refined craftsmanship gave rise to a highly original and singular body of work; spanning jewellery, boxes, mirrors, powder compacts and other gilt-bronze whimsies, each piece, baring testament to her profound passion and unbridled spirit of experimentation. “Vautrin famously claimed to have one idea a day,” explains Beyries. “To this day, we’re still discovering new models and rare variants, so there’s always something new for the collector to marvel at.” Through her idiosyncratic vision, Vautrin transformed unconventional, unfashionable and everyday materials into highly original jewellery and decorative objects, cast and chased in symbolism, an incarnation of true, refined luxury as well as a testament to a period of unrivalled creativity and invention. Vautrin’s life and work truly encapsulate the concept of French art de vivre in its truest possible sense. While researching her book, “Line Vautrin, Behind the Sorcerer’s Looking Glass” (2000), Ginger Moro, speaking with the artist, jestingly bemoaned the scarcity of available work and rapidly escalating prices. “Tant pis,” Vautrin replied, laughing, somewhat more amused than exultant, and with the faintest of Gallic shrugs, “Too bad, c’est la vie.”