Félix Aubert

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Félix Albert Anthyme Aubert (May 24, 1866 – 1940) was a French artist who helped shape decorative arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was part of the group Les Cinq with Charpentier, Selmersheim, Dampt and Moreau-Nélaton, which later grew into the Art dans Tout movement. He also helped start the art journal Dessin: Revue d'Art, d'Éducation et d'Enseignement. Besides painting, he designed lace, and later became the supervisor of the decorative painting workshop at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.

Aubert showed his work at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1895, and in 1896 he took part in Les Cinq’s first exhibition. In 1897, Les Cinq contributed furnishings for a bedroom to a show at the SNBA; Aubert designed the wall hangings, curtains, chair covers, a silk screen and carpets.

Some of Aubert’s lace works are kept at the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris and at the Maison des dentelles d'Argentan. He may have been drawn to lace by Langrune-Sur-Mer’s strong lace tradition and often collaborated with the Frères manufacturing company. Together they created colorful polychrome lace that was shown at the Galerie des Artistes Modernes in 1898 and 1901. The art critic Julius Meier-Graefe praised Aubert, and when he opened La Maison Moderne in 1899, Aubert’s lace was featured prominently.

Les Cinq believed art should be for everyone, so they designed works that could be mass-produced to beautify homes across society. Aubert worked with companies such as Pilon for printed velvet and the Sallandrouze Brothers for carpets and tapestries. In 1905 he collaborated with Émile Bliault on a “Maison Ouvrière” (Working Class House) for a social and hygiene exhibition, reflecting this inclusive ideal.

From 1907 to 1935, Aubert supervised the decorative painting workshop at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. He helped introduce a competitive exam where students decorated an entire room to teach harmonious design across wood, ceramics and metals. He also served on the Technical and Administrative Council of the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres in the 1920s.

Aubert’s work appears in major collections. A cotton textile print of water irises is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the design was used by the Groupe des Six for the walls of their 1898 exhibition. Other colorways are in the Textile Museum in Krefeld and the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart. Additional pieces survive in the Musée de la Houille Blanche, in the preserved house of industrialist Aristide Bergès, one of the rare places where Art Nouveau decorative art remains in its original setting.