GRASSET, Eugène-Samuel

French illustrator, decorative artist and printmaker of Swiss birth. Before arriving in Paris in the autumn of 1871, Grasset had been apprenticed to an architect, attended the Polytechnic in Zurich and travelled to Egypt. In Paris, he found employment as a fabric designer and graphic ornamentalist, which culminated in his first important project, the illustrations for Histoire des quatre fils Aymon (1883).

In 1881, he was commissioned by Rodolphe Salis to design furnishing in a medieval style for the latter's new Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre. This project brought him in direct contact with Montmartre avant-garde artists, among them Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Grasset's numerous posters include Librairie romantique (1887), Encre L. Marquet (1892), Grafton Gallery, London (1893) and the series of ten decorative panels produced in 1897 in which he combined his concern for design with the dramatic representation of women, a preoccupation characteristic of the 1890s. Most notable among Grasset's graphic achievements are the lithographs La Vitrioleuse (1894) for the album L'Estampe originale (1893-95) and La Morphinomane (1897), both of which are dramatic and frightening images of women, whose bold, decorative treatment is derived from Japanese prints. By the end of the century, Grasset's reputation as a leading figure in the development of Art Nouveau poster design was well established.

During the 1890s, Grasset applied the same method of design that he had used in Histoire des quatre fils Aymon to his compositions for posters, ceramics, stained glass and tapestries. He enclosed areas of local colour within strong outlines in the manner of leaded stained glass. Grasset's form of CloisonnismGLOSSARYThe term is based on a technical process in enamelling, in which the liquid enamel is poured into small cells formed by thin metal bands; it describes a painting process in which adjacent paler and darker surfaces are enclosed and separated from each other by strong, dark contour lines. Particularly prevalent in Late Impressionism in the works of Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, the representatives of "synthetic" painting. was reinforced by the theories of the NabisGLOSSARYLes Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian (Académie Julian) in Paris in the late 1880s. Paul Sérusier galvanized Les Nabis, and provided the name and disseminated the example of Paul Gauguin among them. Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis became the best known of the group.. He was one among several artists who created designs for Tiffany stained-glass windows that were included in the opening exhibition of Siegfried Bing's SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. de l'Art Nouveau in December 1895.

Grasset was an important figure in the Arts and Crafts movementGLOSSARYThe Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that began in Britain and flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920, emerging in Japan in the 1920s as the Mingei movement. It stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms, and often used medieval, romantic, or folk styles of decoration. It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s, and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards. The movement was inspired by the ideas of architect Augustus Pugin, writer John Ruskin, and designer William Morris. It developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America. in France. He acted as professor of decorative arts at the Ecole Normale d'Enseignement du Dessin, Paris. His two-volume La Plante et ses applications ornementales (1897-1900) is a graphic summation of his teaching on the subject during the previous two decades. Around 1900 he created the Grasset roman and italic typeface for Peignot Frères: this was followed in 1905 by Méthode de composition ornementale, which graphically explained basic design components valid for all media. His theories and designs were ideologically and stylistically compatible with those of the Vienna Secessionists, founded in 1897, and he was one of the few artists invited by the group to contribute to its magazine Ver Sacrum. At the Exposition Universelle, Paris, in 1900, Grasset was represented by tapestryGLOSSARYAs historical climatologists have not shown that Renaissance Italian winters and springs were warmer than they are now, it is puzzling that Italy did not fabricate tapestries to decorate and draught-proof the stony rooms of its palaces until 1545, when Cosimo I set up a manufactory in Florence. To hardiness or stinginess (tapestry was by far the most expensive form of wall decoration) we owe the existence of such secular frescoed decorative schemes as the labours of the months in the castle at Trent (c. 1407), the Arthurian scenes of Pisanello and the courtly ones of Mantegna in the Ducal Palace of Mantua, the delicious calendar fantasies of Cossa and others in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara - and, doubtless, many others that await liberation from whitewash or later panelling. These are all in situations where northern patrons would have used tapestries. These were imported, chiefly from Flanders, into Italy. The influence of their hunting and ceremonial scenes in particular registered on Italian 'gothic' painting or illumination and stained glass, and in literature. But the Italians did not make them. The most famous of all 'Italian' tapestries, those for the Sistine Chapel designed by Raphael, were made in Brussels from the full-scale coloured patterns, or cartoons, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Nor is it clear whether imported tapestries were used habitually or simply to add grandeur to special occasions. Even when Cosimo's manufactory was in being, and working from designs by court artists of the calibre of Bronzino, Salviati and Allori, his own headquarters, the Palace of the Signoria (now the Palazzo Vecchio), was being decorated with frescoes. The subject is underexplored., ceramics, stained glass and enamelled jewellery, while his students exhibited 150 wallpaper designs.

Grasset's series of brooches and buckles for the exhibition were designed for the firm of Henri Vever. They include such dramatic symbolist images as Apparitions, in which the haunting heads of two women are superimposed, as well as highly decorative floral designs based on tenets expressed in La Plante et ses applications ornementales.