Perfume : Is it Art, Design or Craft?

Warning! May contain philosophy...

As well as being a master perfumer, Edmond Roudnitska was a writer and thinker who argued that perfumery should have an equal status to arts like poetry and painting. To this end he drew up a fine arts wheel, which he adapted from the one devised by a French philosopher known as Alain. The two are identical except Roudnitska included perfumery in his scheme.

His wheel is divided into segments with each representing one of the ways that an artistic impulse can be channelled. They progress in a logical order round the wheel and each segment is divided into two parts: pure form at the center (e.g. dance) and an applied form at the edge, in this case pantomime. (Strangely for one who speaks the language of Molière, Roudnitska doesn’t include theatre in his deliberations.)

It’s also possible to place craft disciplines adjacent to the wheel, which for example could put cabinet making in relation to sculpture and architecture while leaving it outside the charmed circle of the arts.

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Looking at the top of the wheel, the first segment deals with line. According to Roudnitska, the pure form of line is the arabesque, a linear and rhythmic pattern based on foliage. In Muslim culture the arabesque is associated with the divine.

An arabesque

In its applied form, line becomes design, which could be anything from blueprints to bill boards; all industrial products involve an element of design.

Roudnitska’s Fine Arts Wheel :

After line comes volume, which is divided into the pure form – architecture, and the applied form – sculpture (or should that be ‘pure’ sculpture and its applied form architecture?) and then there is painting, luminosity, movement, vocal sounds, music and odours.

Roudnitska thought perfume has an affinity to both music and the arabesque and he placed it between the two. He wrote that perfume is related to music because it shares the verbal tropes of notes, chords and harmonies. As well as that they both change over time. We could speculate that by using the term arabesque Roudnitska implied that perfume may reflect an element of the divine, having as it does -like music- the power to influence us in ways that cannot be understood by the rational mind. This view that would have been shared by Henri Bergson – a philosopher who wrote elegantly about the role of the intuitive, and who Roudnitska cites in his writings. The Catholic church and other religions around the world also take this view, with the use of incense being almost universal.

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Perfume as an Arabesque

Roudnitska described Diorissimo as being an arabesque on the theme of muguet, by which he meant it's an abstraction based on muguet. The arabesque is a practical way of evoking the smell of a flower without resorting to a life-like copy. Those who create naturalistic perfumes were criticised by Roudnitska as merely aiming to reproduce natural odours, the sort of thing pre-modern perfumers did in the late 19^th century. At that time, perfumers only had natural oils to work with. Without synthetic odorants they were limited to an all natural palette, and perhaps as a consequence of that their inspiration tended to be limited to natural subjects too. This combination of nature derived materials and nature derived ideas led to a situation where perfumers often produced works that were more figurative than fantasy based, something that can be seen in the prevalence of flower based names that were given to perfumes around the turn of the 20^th century.

White Lilac (1895)

In contrast to the naturalistic perfumes of the Pre-Modern era, Roudnitska cites some of the great classics of the 1920’s : Chanel N°5, Arpège, Mitsouko and Shalimar, which are marked by abstract elements that go beyond natural smells.

Where Pre-Modern perfumes often smell like a re-creation of something in nature, Modernist perfumes like N°5 constitute artistic fantasies based on something derived from nature, in this case an abstract floral bouquet and the icy cold of the Arctic.

Seeing that Roudnitska puts his own works Femme, Eau Sauvage and Diorella in the same rank as these abstract classics, he may well have taken what that Baudelaire wrote in 1860 as his credo – ‘who would dare to assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?’

Primary and Secondary Forms

Roudnitska designated the artistic fantasy on the one hand, and the recreation of nature on the other as ‘primary and secondary olfactory forms’. He writes: the primary form of pure perfumery neither represents nor evokes anything in the real world.

This primary form represents what he calls pure olfactory arabesques. He goes on to state that the majority of perfumes of the 1980’s are ‘pure inventions’, which take no inspiration from nature but can in certain cases -by their technique- work like nature, and they can also ‘have the spirit … and give a type of pleasure’ which is comparable to that produced by nature.

In contrast, perfumes which express secondary olfactory forms are representative or evocative perfumes that ‘utilize floral, vegetative or animalic accords which evoke leather, tobacco, “exotic countries” etc’. Roudnitska considered this type of work to be artistically inferior for the reason that he thought it to be more or less imitative, and thus a less creative mode of composition.

He does admit however that Diorissimo is an ‘evocation’ of the odour of a sprig of muguet (Lily of the Valley). But he also says it is a work of pure perfumery. This is because as well as the odour of the flower, it includes the flower’s undergrowth, and what he calls rosy and ‘rustic’ aspects. Roudnitska was a keen gardener and he spent a lot of time on his hands and knees sniffing hic Convallaria, plants he would have known well. As well as not wanting to harm the plants by picking their flowers, it seems he was also aiming to represent the ambience of their surroundings in a sort of olfactory framework.

He supports the claim that Diorissimo is a work of pure perfumery by saying that ‘the form of muguet is just a pretext for the creation of complex accords, which give to the floral bouquet green and fresh counterpoints, which allow it to evoke ‘nature, springtime and youth’ - qualities which are abstract fantasms which are not inherent to the odor of muguet itself but brought to it by the imagination of the perfumer. Even though Diorissimo evokes muguet, it is a fantastical evocation that goes beyond the odor of the plant itself into a fantasy realm.

In brief, according to Roudnitska, a perfume with a well developed fantasy element can be a work of the first order, but without it the work will be of secondary merit only.

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Perfume as an Idea

When composing a perfume Roudnitska would work from memory. (This is now standard practice).