About

The Beaumont presents an exhibition of remarkable pieces by Lalique, the iconic French crystal house founded in 1888 by renowned avant-garde artist René Lalique, and the crown jewel of France’s crystal glass houses.

Still imbued with the sort of creative energy that René Lalique brought to the company’s inception, today Lalique enters into exclusive collaborations with major contemporary artists and designers, including Damien Hirst, Zaha Hadid, Nic Fiddian-Green, Mario Botta, Anish Kapoor, James Turrell and the Magritte Estate, to create unique and exceptional works of art. These extraordinary encounters between art and crystal give rise to new forms of creative expression, using the interplay of light, transparency, colour and contours.

Join us on 14 May in Le Magritte Bar at The Beaumont for a conversation on the Art of Lalique and its contemporary fine art collaborations between Frederick Fischer, Lalique UK Managing Director and Joy McCall, a globally renowned expert in Lalique, Art Nouveau and Art Deco and a senior specialist in design from 1860 to the present day. Previously at Bonhams Auctioneers and Christies where she was Head of the Decorative Arts and Design Department, she is now Associate Director at Lyon & Turnbull.

Since 1922, all Lalique’s pieces continue to be handcrafted in the house’s sole manufacturing site, located in the Alsace region in France, with many of the Lalique Art pieces using the lost-wax technique to realize some of these works of art. This long, delicate and arduous process is unmatched in allowing fine details to be brought to light, creating a unique texture akin to a “crystal skin”.

Each crystal piece can require up to 40 different steps to produce, using century-old gestures and know-how, passed down from generation to generation, from the crafting of the pots in which the crystal is molten, to the hot glass workshop where the material is gathered and moulded or the cold glass workshop where diamond-tipped saws work the crystal with water to achieve extreme attention to detail in the sculpture of each creation.