Vision, design & craft

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time when painting and sculpture had already achieved their own revolutions, a whole, young generation of artist-artisans in Belgium were engaged in blurring the boundaries between the fine and applied arts - in other words, between those arts regarded as 'major' and 'minor'.

Their aim was as simple as it was ambitious - to lead practitioners of disciplines such as cabinet-making, glasswork, ironwork and ceramics to free themselves from the constraints of past styles, with a view to embracing a new aesthetic. In this way, they would create objects that were both beautiful and well adapated to the intellectual and material needs of the era. These instigators of this rebirth of the decorative arts soon enjoyed success, both in Belgium and elsewhere - however, this made the subsequent fall in popularity all the more painful to bear.

Over the course of the twentieth century, most of them were completely forgotten and a large number of their creations, which had fallen into obscurity, were scattered, lost or simply destroyed. Unlike architecture, which has been the subject of a great many publications, the applied arts remain, for the most part, little known today in the context of Belgium's Art Nouveau period. For this reason, the Horta Museum Editions have launched a four-volume collective work based on Jonathan Mangelinckx's private collection, intended to serve as a series of missing links in academic research.