Associations

Paul Cauchie’s designs are always original, and are created for a sole purpose. The style is a blend of different associations; on the one hand the Glasgow School of Art, and on the other hand Japonism.
Throughout the themes of his designs, Paul Cauchie also shows himself to be sensitive to Pre-Raphaelitism and symbolism.

Glasgow School of Art

Cauchie is the only architect-decorator in Belgium to have been influenced by the strictness of the Glasgow School, and particularly by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. At the opposite spectrum of the then fashionable structures based on vegetation, the architectural bases of this building are geometrical. It is an ode to verticalness, straight lines, and symmetry in which the basic shapes of the square and circle are repeated.

Decoratively speaking, the association with the founders of the Glasgow School of Art is still evident. The recurrent presence of the rose design in their creations is just one example. This occurs on various mediums, such as fabric and glass, and for the Glasgow School of Art it symbolises beauty, love, and art. It is omnipresent in Paul Cauchie’s work. It adorns the hairstyle of a female face, decorates a banner, or frames a design.

Paul Cauchie’s sgraffiti are rarely signed. However, the rose and other details which systematically feature in his signed work and in the décor of his house have made it possible to attribute more than 500 examples of sgraffiti found in numerous Belgian towns.

Japonism

The discovery of Japanese art following the collapse of the isolationist regime, gave rise to an artistic movement entitled “Japonism”. It was at the international exhibition in London in 1862, and later at the Paris exhibition in 1867, that the western world discovered Japan’s graphical art, the decorative sobriety of everyday objects, the simplification of the outline of prints, asymmetrical designs, the application of colours in flat tints surrounded by outlines. The increasingly popular Japanese art influenced numerous European artists who were looking for new creative ways and which led Samuel Bing, one of the main Parisian art dealers, to promote Japonism in France. From 1888-1891, Bing published a splendid magazine entitled “Le Japon artistique”.

Ideogram MA,
calligraphed by Seisetsu Nakayama.

The Cauchie House displays evidence of Japonism. The main indicator can be found in the two letters, M and A, which are applied to the balcony of the top window at the front of the building. These interweaving letters are engraved into the flat iron sheet and can be read as the graphical representation of the ideogram “ma”, which is a typically Japanese concept of “space and time”. Time can neither be fixed nor controlled. It is captured when there is movement in space which creates an interval between several successive objects or actions. In architecture, “ma” is translated by the rhythmic alternating between solid and vacuum, in the way in which the decorative items and furniture are placed in relation to one another.
Evidence of Japanese culture is still present on the sgraffiti inside: Nô theatre mask, biwa, kanzashi.

Pre-Raphaelitism and symbolism

Art Nouveau reintroduces the feminine and with it the fundamental principle of life!
Paul Cauchie paints women as languorous, delicate and willowy, along the lines of a particular type of woman pale and red-haired, a look devoid of expression which English painters, well versed in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, had created. This movement, which was influenced by painters preceding Raphael, and particularly by Botticelli and the Florentine renaissance, does not want to return to Renaissance Art but does want to recapture its characteristics of simplicity and authenticity. This movement, albeit short-lived, blends with the symbolism and the work of Fernand Khnopff, who was a friend of the Pre-Raephaelites.