Marcel Corrette (1896-1946) Study Of Common Toadflax, Pencil, Gouache And Watercolor

Marcel CORRETTE
Fennervilliers 1896 - Nancy 1946

Study of Common Toadflax or Linaria Vulgaris
Gouache pencil and watercolor
47 x 61 cm
Very good condition

Furniture and decoration designer for the Majorelle family during the heyday of the Nancy School, Marcel Corrette helped introduce the Art Deco style, which was still influenced by Art Nouveau. Between 1920 and 1930, he created numerous glass paste objects with the ceramist and designer of glass paste objects Amalric Walter.
The herbariums available to artists were a true source of inspiration for Art Nouveau, which was booming at the end of the 19th century. The Nancy School was one of its most important European centers. If nature was an infinite source of inspiration for the artists of the Nancy School, this was no accident. This can be explained by Nancy's undeniable horticultural reputation. Indeed, in 1877, the Société Centrale d'Horticulture de Nancy was created, with Emile Gallée, both an artist and a botanist, as general secretary. Through numerous works and exhibitions, the Société Nancéenne d'Horticulture contributed greatly to spreading the interest in plants among artists. The study of plants from nature is therefore fundamental to explaining the success of this movement in Nancy. In the series of drawings by Marcel Corrette that we are presenting, we can see that the representation of plants oscillates between a naturalistic vision and a certain stylization. To achieve this decorative stylization, which would serve him to create ornaments used by the decorative art workshops in Nancy for which he collaborated (glass paste objects, vases, jewelry, furniture), the artist represented plants from different angles to better isolate certain aspects such as rhythm, color, and certain geometric structures in order to extract a decorative motif.