MAJORELLE, Louis
French cabinetmaker. His father, Auguste Majorelle (d. 1879), was a cabinetmaker and potter who specialized in reproducing 18th-century furniture and ceramics. Majorelle trained as a painter and studied under Jean-François Millet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1877-79). Following his father’s death in 1879, he abandoned painting and returned to Nancy to run the family business in partnership (until 1889) with his brother, Jules. They continued to produce furniture in Louis XV and Louis XVI revival styles but soon abandoned the production of ceramics.
Around 1894 Majorelle, under the influence of the Nancy glass- and cabinetmaker Emile Gallé, began to develop a more personal, Art Nouveau style by 1897, he seems to have abandoned the revival styles altogether. The years between 1898 and 1908 were his most successful, by 1910 he had retail stores in Nancy, as well as in Paris, Lyon and Lille. Along with furniture, a range of objects including lighting, metalwork and fabrics were produced in Majorelle’s workshops. His reputation as the pre-eminent French cabinetmaker of the time was established at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris, where he exhibited an ‘Orchid’ bedroom suite, whose decoration, in the form of inlay and gilt-bronze mounts, is based on an orchid theme (examples: desk in Musée d’Orsay, Paris; chair in Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Majorelle relied extensively on naturalistic ornament; however, his use of it was always more abstract than Gallé’s. His “Nénuphars” studio was acclaimed as one of the most attractive creations of Art Nouveau.
In 1904, he exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts exhibition in Paris. His furniture in this period, in its sumptuousness, its use of lavish gilt-bronze mounts and its high-quality craftsmanship, rivals the best 18th-century French furniture. Between 1906 and 1908, probably due to the changing economic situation in France, Majorelle decided to mechanize his workshop, which marks the end of his more lavish production.
In 1914, due to World War I, Majorelle was forced to move to Paris, where he worked as an interior decorator. By the end of the war, he had abandoned Art Nouveau, and his furniture of this period, much more restrained and rectilinear and less original than his earlier work, reflects the Art Deco style.