To celebrate the upcoming Halloween holiday in the appropriate spirit, we felt that a talk featuring the more exotic and macabre aspects of René Lalique’s work would be in order. This lecture was offered many years ago for ASJH members by Dr Walker, but it was so well received, so fascinating, and so appropriate for the fall season that we asked her to offer it yet again.
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René Lalique (1860-1945) was one of the foremost masters of Art Nouveau as well as one of the first true artist jewelers. He is rightly famous for transposing motifs from nature into beautiful jewels, but some of his most remarkable pieces pose further and more unsettling questions. What inspired his dragonfly women? What is actually happening in the pieces that involve this kind of metamorphosis? Often, designs that combine plants or animals with female figures imply a latent threat or a certain unease. This lecture investigates these topics by exploring Lalique's milieu, the writers and poets of his time, and his relationship to women.
Stefanie Walker is an independent scholar specializing in the history of jewelry and objects of precious metal, among other fields. After training as a goldsmith in Germany, she studied art history and received her PhD from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. Since then, Stefanie has worked as a curator, teacher, and lecturer for over 25 years. At the Bard Graduate Center, she curated the exhibition "Castellani and Italian Architectural Jewelry" and co-edited the catalog (2004), for which she was made an honorary member of the Roman Goldsmith's Guild. Stefanie has published essays and book chapters on Renaissance jewelry and on palace culture, including an article on collecting silver in Rome for "The Silver Caesars: A Renaissance Mystery", an exhibition and catalog at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017). She has been a frequent lecturer for the Smithsonian Associates in Washington DC. When not thinking about jewelry, Stefanie manages grant programs for the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington where she lives with her husband Dan, and their black cat Java.