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Daum Sculptures

For collectors, Daum is a name in the first rank of the French makers of art glass, along with those of Émile Gallé and René Lalique. Led in its early decades by the brothers Auguste (1853–1909) and Antonin Daum (1864–1931), the company, based in the city of Nancy, established its reputation in the Art Nouveau period, and later successfully adopted the Art Deco style.

In 1878, lawyer Jean Daum took over the ownership of a glassworks as payment for a debt and installed his sons as proprietors. Initially, Daum made glass for everyday purposes such as windows, watches and tableware, but the success that Gallé enjoyed at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris — the international showcase for which the Eiffel Tower was built — inspired the Daum brothers to begin making art-glass pieces. They produced popular works of cameo glass, a decorative technique in which an outer layer of glass is acid-etched or carved off to reveal the layer below, but Daum became best known for vessels and sculptures in pâte de verre — a painstaking method in which finely ground colored glass is mixed with a binder, placed in a mold and then fired in a kiln. 

Though early Daum glass was never signed by individual artists, the firm employed some of the masters of the naturalistic, asymmetrical Art Nouveau style, including Jacques Grüber, Henri Bergé and Amalric Walter (whose first name is frequently misspelled). Daum also collaborated with furniture and metalware designer Louis Majorelle, who created wrought-iron and brass mounts for vases and table lamps. In the 1960s, Daum commissioned fine artists, most notably Salvador Dalí and sculptor César Baldaccini, to design glass pieces. As you see from the works offered on 1stDibs, Daum has been home to an astonishingly rich roster of creative spirits and is today a state-owned enterprise making pâte de verre figurines. 

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Artist: Daum
Dan Dailey : Daum Figurative Glass Sculpture "Les Danseurs (The Dancers)"
By Daum
Located in Detroit, MI
"Les Danseurs" (French for "The Dancers") is a 1979 collaboration between Daum and artist Dan Dailey. This glass figurative sculpture of two dancers, a man and a woman coated in an icy blue palate, was created with glass paste blown in a light blue mold and etched on the external surface. This work is numbered 57 from an edition of 200, signed on the sculpture in diamond-point with "D Dailey" and "DAUM FRANCE" and is included with a certificate of authenticity signed and numbered by Daum and Dan Dailey. Dan Dailey is an American glass artist who was born in Philadelphia in 1947. He emerged from the Studio Glass movement that was founded by Harvey Lilleton and collaborated with Crisallerie Daum for more than twenty years. His education includes studying under Roland Jahn and Harvey Lilleton at the Philadelphia College of Art in the 1960s and a teaching fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970 where he also became Dale Chihuly's first graduate student He is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art where he founded their glass program. His work has been exhibited and collected all over the world, spanning over a hundred exhibitions and collections. The studio of Daum is a name that precedes itself. The only crystal manufacturer employing the glass paste process for art glass, the studio was founded in 1878 by the Daum family in Nancy, France. The studio has become synonymous with the Art Nouveau period but continues to produce high end and high quality decorative art to this very day. Artists that have worked with Daum include Charles Schneider, Arman, Hilton McConnico, Philippe Starck, Salvador Dali, Cyril Phan, Richard Texier, Emilio Robba...
Category

1970s Daum Sculptures

Materials

Glass

Horse Carrying Fire by Hilton McConnico
By Daum
Located in Boca Raton, FL
A mythical piece of Daum's legacy, "Horse Carrying Fire" is inspired by legend. This magnificent horse with its fine silver embellishment appears to have stepped straight out of a th...
Category

20th Century Art Deco Daum Sculptures

Materials

Glass

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An official artist of the Nazi regime, trained in Montparnasse in the 1930s, Arno Breker continued to sculpt after the fall of the Third Reich, producing large-scale public commissions in Germany and portraits of prominent figures. The two small bronzes presented here, dated around 1978, are part of a long tradition of prancing horses dating back to antiquity. The asymmetrical treatment of the two front legs and the inclination of the head make these two copies of the same artwork a highly decorative pair. 1. Arno Breker, a prolific sculptor, from the Bohemia of Montparnasse to the commissions from the Third Reich ... and from the Federal Republic of Germany The son of a stone carver, Arno Breker studied fine art and anatomy in his native Elberfeld. At the age of 20, he entered the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. He moved to Paris in 1926, where he continued his training in the studio of Maillol, who dubbed him "the German Michelangelo of the twentieth century". He shared a studio with Alexandre Calder and frequented Jean Cocteau, Foujita, Brancusi, Pablo Picasso and other artists of the bohemian Paris of the time. It was also in Paris in 1933 that he met Demetra Messala, the daughter of a Greek diplomat who posed for Maillol and Picasso, whom he married in 1937. Having won the Prussian Prix de Rome in 1932, he left Paris to stay at the Villa Massimo, the German Academy in Rome. Returning to Germany in 1934, his style evolved towards a more marked imitation of ancient sculpture. He created two monumental statues for Berlin's Olympic Stadium, before being appointed professor at the Berlin College of Fine Arts in 1937. He came to the attention of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, which awarded him several commissions and provided him with three large studios in which Breker produced many monumental sculptures to the glory of the regime. On June 23, 1940, Breker accompanied Adolf Hitler during a visit to Paris. During the Occupation, his political connections enabled him to intervene on behalf of many artists pursued by the Nazis: for example, he protected Pablo Picasso (then a Communist) from Kommandantur officers. Most of Arno Breker's work was destroyed in Berlin at the end of the war in 1945 by bombing and intentional destruction perpetrated by soldiers of the victorious powers. After the fall of the Nazi regime, however, Arno Breker was never prosecuted. He opened a new studio in Düsseldorf, where he sculpted until his death in 1991. He then carried out several public commissions in Germany (Bayreuth, Wuppertal), as well as portraits of numerous personalities, including King Mohammed V of Morocco, Léopold Sedar Senghor (commissioned by the Académie Française in 1978) and the two chancellors of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard. The Arno Breker Museum in Nörvenich is now exhibiting some of his artworks. 2. Related artworks: from the Wild Horses of the Quirinal to the Horses of Marly The prancing horse is a major iconographic theme, found in a series of sculptures from Antiquity, the Renaissance and the Classical Age. Various photos from Arno Breker's studio in Berlin confirm the predominant place of equine representations in his work (alongside male nude statues), and confirm that this reduced version created in 1978 is part of the artist's preferred repertoire. Prancing horses are generally associated with a male figure in a group that, through a reference drawn from Antiquity, symbolizes man's domination over nature. In this respect, it is very interesting to compare our small bronzes with the horse forming part of a large sculpture by Arno Breker (made in 1936 and probably destroyed in 1945) depicting Alexander taming Bucephalus. This statue is itself directly inspired by one of the best-known works of 18th-century French sculpture...
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French Contemporary Art by Paul Gallaud - Acrylic Osmose Solaire Rouge
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Acrylic glossy glass + inkjet painting Paul Gallaud is a French visual artist born in 1984 who lives and works in Croix, near Lille, France. After graduating with a BAC STI Applied ...
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Plaster Sculpture Relief Art Deco Plaque WPA Artist Peace Swords to Ploughshares
By George Aarons
Located in Surfside, FL
Size includes wood mounting. George Aarons (born Gregory Podubisky, in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1896 - died in Gloucester, Massachusetts 1980) was a distinguished sculptor who lived and taught in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for many years until his death in 1980. He had, many students in the area and he designed Gloucester's 350th Anniversary Commemorative Medal. Aarons moved from Russia to the United States when he was ten. His father was a merchant. He began taking drawing classes during evenings at Dearborn Public School in Boston as a teenager and went on to study at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1916. Aarons later moved to New York City to study with Jo Davidson, and other Paris-trained masters at the Beaux-Arts Institute. He eventually returned to the Boston area and established studios in Brookline and Gloucester, Massachusetts. During his lifetime, he was recognized internationally and won several prestigious awards. Aarons had studios in Brookline, Massachusetts and Gloucester, Massachusetts where he produced large bronze and marble figures and wood carvings. He produced several projects for the Works Progress Administration including a group of three figures for the Public Garden (Boston), a longshoreman, fisherman and foundry worker, as well as a large relief (1938) for the South Boston Housing Project and façade of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregational Building (1956). His works are at the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, Israel; Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts, Musée de St. Denis in France; Hilles Library at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Hillel House at Boston University in Massachusetts. He did reliefs for Siefer Hall at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts (1950); Edward Filene (the founder of Filene's Department Store and a philanthropist) on the Boston Common; Fireman's Memorial in Beverly, Massachusetts; a memorial to Mitchell Frieman in Boston; the U.S. Post Office in Ripley, Mississippi; and at the Cincinnati Telephone Building; the Combined Jewish Philanthropies building in Boston (1965); and a commemorative medal for the 350th Anniversary of the City of Gloucester, Massachusetts (1972). Characteristic of his era, George Aarons was among the foreign-born American sculptors of the early 20th century who started their careers as academicians and evolved into modernists and increasingly abstract artists. Over thirty pieces spanning the length of this sculptor's career were featured in this exhibition, including work in various medium bronze, wood and original plasters. Like his contemporaries, Aarons experimented with direct carving in wood, and he was one of the few academically trained sculptors who consistently cut his own works in marble. His early work was classically inspired figurative work, along with sensitive portraits. Some of his most powerful sculpture comes from his middle period, when he worked through his emotional pain following the global realization of the Jewish Holocaust. He depicted humanity deep anxiety over this tragedy with figures that are at once symbolically charged and movingly beautiful. Aarons late work consists of radically simplified forms that continue to reference the human form and often are carved directly in wood and stone. Aarons summered and taught classes on Cape Ann for many years before moving to Gloucester full-time with his wife about 1950. While Aarons is best known locally for his domestic-scale works, he also executed numerous monumental, public commissions that can be found throughout the United States in cities such as Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; and Cincinnati, Ohio; as well as in France and Israel. As noted in a Gloucester Daily Times Article, Aarons wanted his sculptures to honor the struggles and nobility of people and rail against the evil done against them. And that was why, even as his work grew more and more abstract, stylized and simplified, he never left behind the form of the human figure that had been his focus from his earliest works. Aarons told the Gloucester Daily Times in September 1954 that he found it hard to remember at just what age he started studying art, but he recalled that the nude model had to partially dress when he was in class because he was so young. He initially studied painting and drawing at the museum school, but he once said he became fascinated by sculpture when he met an established sculptor at the Copley Society in Boston who invited Aarons to his studio and offered him some clay to "play around" with. After he graduated, he apprenticed under sculptors Richard Brooks, Robert Baker and Solon Borglum. He worked as a carpenter, shipbuilder, dishwasher and chimney sweep. He fashioned architectural decorations, including figures for fountains and now and then a few commissioned portraits. He returned to Boston by the early 1920s and began to exhibit his own works and get commissions for portraits, fountains and reliefs. His sculptures from this time are dreamy and romantic in the realistic, academic style of the time. A painted portrait of the young Aarons that is included in the North Shore Arts Association exhibit shows a determined fellow with dark brown hair, a suit and bow tie. However, in 1922, this determined young artist was living with his parents on Calder Street in Dorchester. In the 1930s, Aarons adopted the streamlined, monumental style of the socialist works of the time. Aarons made money, as he would all his life, from commissions, selling his personal work and teaching sculpture, but the Depression of the 1930s was tough for everyone. So Aarons found work though the federal Works Progress Administration, one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs. He received his first major commission when he was asked to create a public sculpture for the South Boston Harbor Village public housing project around 1937. He was elevated to the position of supervisor for the project and received a corresponding $5 pay increase to make his weekly salary $32. The raise convinced him he was fit to marry and he proposed to Gertrude Band, an attractive brunette dancer whom he had been dating for more than a year. They were married before the Harbor Village project was dedicated on Labor Day 1938. Aarons' design featured a brawny, larger-than-lifesize fisherman, longshoreman and a laborer flanked by a boy and girl at either end to portray the children who would live in the apartments. Aarons elected to do the piece in cast stone to employ carpenters and laborers as well as craftsman for a total of 10 men. In his sculpture, Aarons focused more and more on the theme of oppressed people as he worried about the spread of fascism and Nazism during the 1930s, World War II and after. He had done pieces during the mid-1930s about the oppression of African-Americans, including "Negro Head," which is in the North Shore Art Association retrospective. After the war, he also delved into Jewish themes and became increasingly known as an important Jewish artist, leading to commissions from Jewish organizations across the country and abroad. "He gets into raw emotion. Some people describe him as an expressionist because of the emotion (in his work)," Reynolds says. But Aarons, also sculpted sensual sexual nudes...
Category

20th Century Art Deco Daum Sculptures

Materials

Plaster, Wood

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Category

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Located in Houston, TX
Sculpture of a head. Done from patinated bronze. Inscribed "Werkstatte Hagenauer Wien" on the bottom Austria, c. 1930s 18"h x 11"w x 11"d
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Materials

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Category

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Materials

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Joseph Mario Korbel (Czech/American, 1882-1954). Period fine example bronze, dark brown patina, modeled as a nude female kneeling and tying her sandal, raised on a stepped black marb...
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Category

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Materials

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Located in PARIS, FR
"Young girl sitting at her toilet" also known as "Young girl with braids" by Joseph BERNARD (1866-1931) Sculpture in bronze with a nuanced brownish dark green patina Signed on the ...
Category

1920s Art Deco Daum Sculptures

Materials

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Previously Available Items
Daum Nancy Vase Origin African Mask Art Deco Lines Crystal Paste Ocean Blue
By Daum
Located in Paris, FR
Daum x Gims 2021 Crystal vase designed by Gims and made by Maison Daum Patinated bronze ring Original artwork of 8 copies + 4 AP (2 for the artist, 2 for the Daum Museum) The artwork...
Category

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Daum sculptures for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Daum sculptures available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Daum in glass and more. Not every interior allows for large Daum sculptures, so small editions measuring 10 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Aharon Bezalel, Sergio Bustamante, and Jenny Day. Daum sculptures prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $3,600 and tops out at $5,200, while the average work can sell for $4,400.
Questions About Daum Sculptures
  • 1stDibs ExpertJune 6, 2024
    To identify Daum crystal, look for the maker's mark, usually found at the bottom of the piece. Most crystal ware produced by the luxury maker will feature the brand's logo or a hand-applied artist's signature. You can compare the markings on your piece with images featured on trusted online resources to learn more about them. Alternatively, you can consult a certified appraiser or knowledgeable antiques dealer for assistance with identification. On 1stDibs, explore a selection of Daum crystal.
  • 1stDibs ExpertApril 5, 2022
    Yes, all Daum vases are signed. Authentic Daum glass work will have the signature “Daum Nancy” and incorporate the cross of Lorraine. Looking for a signature is one of the best ways to ensure authenticity. Browse a range of authentic Daum vases and other glassware on 1stDibs.
  • 1stDibs ExpertMarch 15, 2024
    Yes, Daum crystal is typically marked. The French maker usually adds the word "Daum Nancy" and its logo, a double cross called the Cross of Lorraine, to its pieces. You can locate the mark in a discreet area, such as on the bottom of stemware and decorative objects. Find a selection of Daum Nancy crystal wares on 1stDibs.
  • 1stDibs ExpertMarch 22, 2022
    Yes, Daum glass is normally signed. The location of the company's mark varies, but it usually says "Daum Nancy" above, below or beside the cross of Lorraine, a cross with two crossbars. Find a variety of Daum glass on 1stDibs.
  • 1stDibs ExpertApril 5, 2022
    How Daum glass is made involves a process unique to the manufacturer, called pâte de verre. It involves filling a refractory mold with finely crushed glass and then baking the piece in a kiln. Shop a collection of Daum glassware on 1stDibs.

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