The subtle playfulness of Line Vautrin’s designs combine a delightful melding of delicate forms and varied mediums. An artist, business woman, and innovator, she charted her own path and left a lasting impression on the jewelry and decorative arts worlds.
Born in 1913, Line Vautrin, learned at a very young age the techniques of metalworking in her families’ foundry. She mastered the techniques of casting, gilding and chasing bronze, which became her metal of choice; her works in bronze featuring a tactile and hand-worked quality. She was curious by nature and fascinated by ancient cultures. A trip to Egypt allowed her to study ancient techniques of metalsmithing. She also became interested in hieroglyphics and pictograms, incorporating symbolic representations and rebus puzzles in a whimsical way into her objet d'art and jewelry.
Line Vautrin was very much ahead of her time, and a self-made woman. As she became more established and recognized in her medium, Vautrin began to experiment with a synthetic resin that came onto the market just towards the end of World War II. She dubbed the material Talosel — an acronym fused between “acetate de cellulose elaboré” — a very clever adaptation that she patented in the 1960s. The tactile quality, lightness and malleable property of the substance allowed varied outcomes so that the final product could appear similar to slate, bone, wood, or have a shimmering effect. With artistic prowess, Line Vautrin used talosel on lamp bases, furniture, boxes, mirrors and jewelry, each piece assembled by hand and decorated using various techniques of abrasion, heating, scoring, fragmentation, to create unique and stunning pieces of wearable art and functional design.
Beloved to family and friends, as well as the Chicago art and design community, Fern Moss Kalai—also known as Fern Simon—passed away on February 16, 2024. Yet her legacy as a passionate collector and a knowledgeable dealer lives on through the many people she touched plus the enduring influence of her longstanding retail boutique, Arts 220.
In many ways, Fern was born into her eventual vocation. Along with her twin brother, the acclaimed design expert, Murray Moss, and her late sister, Jean Moss, an award-winning Esquire portrait photographer, Fern was raised in an aesthetically focused atmosphere by her mother and father. “My parents had remarkable and prescient visual acumen,” Fern told Chicago Tribune Magazine in 2009, “and passed it on to us, so there must be a genetic component involved.” Her father was Merton Moss, an engineer who invented and manufactured X-ray machines. His “hard-core, ultra-modern industrial ideals” contrasted in a stimulating manner with the playful outlook of Fern's mother, Ann, in which the lively unruliness of art often prevailed over logical design imperatives.
If someone were to ask me did I know my twin sister Fern well, given we lived our adult lives in different cities, I would have to say I didn’t know, but I, like most everybody who knew her, suspected so, hoped so.
Certainly I knew her the longest. We grew up comfortably together in my mother’s womb and yet she was the one who left first, diving into the world headfirst, leaving me alone on March 29, 1949, for six minutes until I had to come looking for her, I’m sure inspired by a pre-natal excitement she triggered even then—as well as a curiosity and her faith that there was a world out there rich with the complimentary contradictions she so loved.
It was the first time and I believe the only time I lost her even for a moment. Until now.
But in following her for 75 years, I early on found evidence of her looking almost everywhere, in every direction, determined to find a signpost that one would find at a junction in the road, with a hundred different arrows pointing to “Modernism, German Expressionism, Brutalism, Abstraction, Giuseppe Napoli, Picasso, Maarten Baas, Portanier.”
Fern delighted in the richness of human artistry—Fern was looking for the best way to get lost, to wander further and further into unknown, or known but overlooked, ideas expressed in art and design by famous and unfamous creators.
Please understand: Fern Moss was not a Collector. She was a Guide, with an ever-blooming passion for art, a visceral connection to historic and diverse ways of thinking and to the unique ways artists expressed that thinking. Fern led the way for many of us into the human heart that she was able to unearth in art.
Line Vautrin 1913–1997
Known for her exquisite creations in the field of decorative arts, particularly in jewelry and objets d'art, French artist and designer Line Vautrin was born in Paris in 1913. Her family owned a bronze foundry, where Vautrin began to teach herself gilding and metalwork techniques; she had designed her first pieces by the age of 21 and by the 1940s had been dubbed the “poetess of metal” by Vogue.
Vautrin worked briefly for designer Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1930s. In 1937, she showed her own buttons and jewelry at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, introducing her works to an international audience. She soon opened her own studio near the Champs-Élyséees, offering her own works that embraced fantasy and play, and often included riddles. Her creations became highly sought-after, and Vautrin quickly gained a reputation as one of the most innovative and imaginative designers of her time. Devoted to experimentation, Vautrin perfected her own formula for cellulose acetate resin in 1955, trademarking it as Talosel.
In 1969, Vautrin and her daughter founded the Association for the Development of the Manual Arts, a craft school where she taught metalworking and jewelry making. The school also offered some of the raw materials Vautrin employed in her own practice, such as mirrors and sheets of Talosel.
Vautrin's designs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She also won numerous awards, including the Légion d'honneur and the Grand Prix des Arts Décoratifs, and her works continue to be highly sought-after by collectors today.
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_1720727584.png "Fern with her husband, Ehud, at Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram")
_1720727700.png "Fern at home. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram")
