The excellent dealer Mark West showed me a vase some years ago that was clearly not Moser but was incredibly reminiscent of Oroplastic / Fipop pieces. He told me it was Val St. Lambert, designed by Len Ledru c. 1905-1908. It is sometimes called in recent catalogues “Cortege de Musiciens”. It seems highly likely it was an inspiration for Leo Moser and the many other companies who took up the oroplastic style in the 20’s and 30’s. By chance I found an identical vase to Mark’s, indeed catalogued as Moser, in a German auction house, so I bought it, but am technically inept so I can’t offer a picture here.
However at the moment there is one on Uwe Wolf’s site so anyone interested can go to glaswolf.de and search (German: “suche” on his menu) under “St. Louis”.
Uwe has it as St. Louis 1930: it’s in an apparently quite pale pink/red colourway (unless it’s the photo), and it looks to me to be, or to be based on, the Ledru VSL design. My version, like Mark’s, is in a brown-purple glass, cut and picked out in yellowy- green, with the figural design in gold on a green background. Though I am almost entirely a Bohemian addict, I find it a better made object than most of the Moser Fipop range.
Some of the other companies who used a similar, but much simplified, technique were Goldberg, Rasche and Walther. And there are some wonderfully “customized” versions of Moser Fipop made by Theodore Bienert, who enhanced the figures and created colourful marbleised backgrounds to imitate the antique- his pieces are signed “Thebi”. The last one of these I bought, with an elephant and lion design based on a Moser Animor vase, is on one of those artnet type sites: you can find it by googling Theodore Bienert.
Topic: Moser Oroplastic decoration? (Read 5544 times)
