A PAIR OF AMBER LUCITE LAMPS 

A very unusual pair of French mid 1960's lucite block lamps by Marie Claude de Fouquieres.

Fouquieres was one of the few Parisian pioneers who created furniture and decorative objects in resin and lucite, often purposely fracturing the lucite to create an abstract composition as seen on the base of these lamps.

Marie-Claude de Fouquières is a French furniture maker who specializes in items made from cracked Lucite, a type of polyester resin. Her technique would involve fracturing the resin purposely in order to give it its distinctive abstract composition. She had a short but fruitful career, starting production in 1969, and ending in 1977, with the death of her husband. During this period, she made a wide variety of pieces including tables, screens lamps and desks. She also created a few purely artistic pieces of sculpture. The reason that her career was so short lived is because when her husband died in 1977 working with plastics reminded her to much of him. Her inspiration was simply that she couldn’t find any thing on the market that suited her taste; so, to stop her complaining, her husband, who owned a plastics factory, told her to make what she wanted. Her entourage of artistic friends urged her to utilize elements such as grass, candy and corks among other things, creating whimsical designs in the resin slabs. During one of her experiments she tried promotional product placement, as she had planned to embed Dior make-up in a specially designed table. The exposure from the La Cloche Gallery gave her the opportunity to work with other known designers and architects such as Lionel Morgaine, David Hicks, Albert Pinto (an interior designer who specialized in geometric design), and Maison Jansen (a Paris based design house) for whom she created exclusive models. Not only did she have the chance to work with well renowned designers but was also commissioned by a few notable patrons including the Emirate of Qatar and the Rothschild family.

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