Vase

The interest of this small glass vase lies in the absence of any motif. It illustrates Daum's wish to explore new avenues, where there would be no place for plant decorations. Since 1900, both critics and a clientele in search of novelty had started to tire of this style. So we see Daum developing the newly acquired techniques for applying coloured backgrounds, and see these backgrounds achieving the status of decoration through the intensity of the colour.
There is no trace of the natural world here, even if the mind's eye might detect a full-blown rose or a rock covered in lichen here and there amongst the multi-coloured clouds and veins.
Sometimes very strong, sometimes shaded off, this colour play is accentuated by the lightly indented sides. These moulded distortions of the vase echo ceramic works, particularly those from the Far East. Similarly, the decoration recalls the experiments into non-figurative, coloured effects, undertaken by the masters of western ceramics in the last twenty years of the 19th century: Ernest Chaplet (1835-1909), Auguste Delaherche (1857-1940) and Albert Dammouse (1848-1926).