René Lalique primarily used glass in his Art Deco creations.
Lalique began as a jeweller, but he became celebrated for transforming glass into luxurious artistic objects. In the 1920s, he increasingly worked in the geometric, streamlined Art Deco style, producing vases, perfume bottles, lighting, automobile mascots and architectural decorations.
His glass was not ordinary plain glass. He experimented with moulding, frosted surfaces, opalescence and pâte-de-verre, a technique that formed intricate objects from ground glass. These effects allowed him to suggest flowers, animals and figures while preserving the clean forms associated with Art Deco.
A common mix-up is to identify Lalique mainly with gold, silver or enamel because those materials appeared in his earlier jewellery. They were important, but glass became the defining material of his mature decorative work. His son Marc later shifted the firm toward crystal production in the 1950s.