What elevates a worldly workshop to an atelier? Is it the use to which a place has been put in the service of art? The peculiar skills of artisans working à l’ancienne? Or, if transcendence is the aim, is it a particular atmosphere determined by the presence of a suffusive patina and dust-specked light? Maybe what’s created in ateliers reaches for a higher, more numinous, plane, whereas it’s earthly toil that takes place in workshops. Writing in the late 19th century – the same time ateliers were particularly prevalent and popular in France – sociologist Emile Durkheim distinguished between the sacred and profane: those things we classify as divine or transcendental and those we designate mundane. The real question is not into which category something falls but why.
Heritage design specialist John Whelan splits the difference on this dichotomy for the title of his book on 28 workspaces: Ateliers of Europe: An Atlas of Decorative Arts Workshops (Prestel, 2023). ‘The word “workshop” is of course accurate, which is why we have kept it in the book’s subtitle,’ explains Whelan in his introduction to the volume. ‘We have simply used “atelier” in the title to emphasise the beauty, heritage and character of the companies featured… What I hope to express is that “the atelier” is in itself a genre, being “a workshop of the decorative arts”.’
Whelan stumbled on most of the ateliers while sourcing materials for his company the Guild of Saint Luke when it was engaged in restoring brasseries in France. Although most true ateliers have disappeared – a result of both mass production and an artistic shift away from collective craftsmanship towards individual practice – those in the book continue to produce sought-after objects in glass, wrought iron, textiles, wood, plaster, porcelain, mosaic and more. Whelan and photographer Oskar Proctor travelled the breadth of Europe to document well-known and obscure companies, focusing on those that operated in the mode of traditional ateliers: classical techniques, collaborative artisanship and the sometimes centuries-long refining of craft.
What fascinates Whelan about these places, beyond their history and tradition, is a sense that they should be celebrated, in some cases before their craft falls out of favour with contemporary buyers. He was struck by how ‘accidentally beautiful’ and modish many of the interiors were by modern standards, the result, he claims, of ‘prioritising function over style’. Indeed, when he first visited the ateliers in the book, he experienced them as almost sacred. Over lunch (‘when the French artisans were enjoying a steak frites somewhere’), he would occasionally peel off and stand in the empty spaces, ‘much as I tend to do whenever I see a church with an open door,’ he says. ‘I simply wanted to share these sublime, solitary moments, standing in these noble places of work with the feeling that time had stopped, if only for an instant.’
The images in the book make manifest this semi-mystical feeling. There is something otherworldly about the spaces, all but one shot in natural light. The pictures are like a bated breath – as thread catches sunlight at Bevilacqua in Venice, serpentine fronds of glass are illuminated at Moleria Locchi in Florence, and 19th-century death masks emerge from the gloom at Atelier Lorenzi in Arcueil. If not for the odd anachronism – a fire extinguisher below mantelpiece ornaments at Jamb, sticky notes above paintbrushes at Nymphenburg, a hoover between lacquer samples at Ateliers Brugier – the images could have been captured at any point in the firms’ long histories.
The absence of people in the images adds to the sense of the ateliers being frozen in time or existing outside of it – although the reason for omitting the artisans was more prosaic: so as not to interrupt work, photography was planned during lunch breaks. Artistically, Whelan and Proctor wanted to evoke a particular sense of place, highlighting the ‘residue of the process’. ‘Footprints in metal filings, plaster splatters on the wall – I try to give a sense of “smoke left in the air”,’ says Proctor. ‘It allows the imagination to paint in the rest.’
One moment, intentionally missed by the camera, tells the human side of the story: ‘While in Milan we visited Conti Borbone, a bookbinder famous for their marbled papers,’ recalls Proctor. ‘I found myself watching a young apprentice being shown each stage of the process in detail by the older workers in the atelier. It was one of the most tender human interactions I have ever witnessed.’
The corollary of capturing spaces empty of people is that these images could also exist in the future: when the hand-operated machinery stills and the last craftsperson has shut the door, similar scenes might remain – forgotten spaces filled with the dust-covered outcome of craft spanning centuries, but which no one values or remembers how to make. Whether a place is designated sacred or profane is of little importance. Ateliers of Europe reveals that it is the mundane work of human hands working collectively to produce the divine that is most soul-stirring.
A version of this article was published in March 2023.
This love letter to the art of craft takes readers inside Europe’s most illustrious – and in many cases endangered – decorative arts workshops to profile how artisans continue to maintain the highest centuries-old standards of workmanship and creativity.
