The career of the famed jewelry designer, glassmaker and decorative artist René Lalique spanned decades and artistic styles. Best known today for his works in glass, Lalique first won recognition for his jewelry. He was described as the inventor of modern jewelry by the French artist and designer Émile Gallé, and his luxurious naturalistic designs helped define the Art Nouveau movement. Later as a glassmaker in the 1920s and ‘30s, Lalique designed vases, clocks, chandeliers and even car hood ornaments that were the essence of Art Deco chic. Even now, the name Lalique continues to be a byword for a graceful, gracious and distinctively French brand of sophistication.

Born in 1860 in the Marne region of France, Lalique began his career as a jewelry designer in the last decades of the 19th century. His work employed now-classic Art Nouveau themes and motifs: flowing, organic lines; forms based on animals, insects and flowers — all rendered in luxurious materials such as ivory, enamel, gold and semi-precious stones. By 1905, Lalique had begun creating works in glass, and his style began to shift to a cleaner, sharper, smoother, more modern approach suited to his new medium. His Paris shop’s proximity to perfumer François Coty’s led him to experiment with beautiful perfume bottles. He offered the first customized scent bottles, transforming the perfume industry. By the end of the First World War, the artist had fully embraced Art Deco modernity, devoting himself to new industrial techniques of glass production and designs that manifest the sweeping lines and the forms suggestive of speed and movement characteristic of the style. Lalique’s work looked both backward and forward in time: embracing ancient mythological themes even as it celebrated modern progress.

Late in his career, Lalique took on high profile luxury interior design projects in Paris, Tokyo and elsewhere. He designed decorative fixtures and lighting for the interior of the luxury liner Normandie in 1935, and decorated the salons of well-known fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet. Today, Lalique’s influence is as relevant as it was when he opened his first jewelry shop in 1890. In a modern or even a traditional décor, as you will see from the objects offered on these pages, the work of René Lalique provides the stamp of savoir-faire.

A Close Look at Modern Furniture

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.

Finding the Right Glass for You

Whether you’re seeking glass dinner plates, centerpieces, platters and serveware or other items to elevate the dining experience or brighten the corners of your living room, bedroom or other spaces by displaying decorative pieces, find an extraordinary range of antique, new and vintage glass on 1stDibs.

Glassmaking is more than 4,000 years old. It is believed to have originated in Northern Mesopotamia, where carved glass objects were the result of a series of experiments led by potters or metalworkers. From there, the production of glass vases, bottles and other objects proliferated in Egypt under the reign of Thutmose III. Later, new glassmaking techniques took shape during the Hellenistic era, and glassblowing was invented in contemporary Israel. Then, on the island of Murano in Venice, Italy, modern art glass as we know it came to be.

Over the years, collectors of glass decorative objects or serveware have sought out distinctive antique and vintage pieces of the mid-century modern, Art Deco and Art Nouveau eras, with artisans such as Archimede Seguso, René Lalique and Émile Gallé of particular interest for the pioneering contributions they made to the respective styles in which they worked. Today, long-standing glassworks such as Barovier&Toso carry on the Venetian glasswork tradition, while modern furniture designers and sculptors such as Christophe Côme and Jeff Zimmerman elsewhere test the limits of the radical art form that is glassmaking.