Can Perfumes Be Art? Famous Artists Who Designed Perfume Bottles

The present-day perfume industry is commercialized beyond any measure, presenting scents for every occasion through endless celebrity collaborations. Yet, this industry has a long history and an undeniable artistic component. Smells can transport us back in time, attract or repulse, boost confidence, and evoke aversion. Read on to learn more about perfumes as a form of art and famous artists involved in the industry.

A perfume bottle is both a work of art and an effective marketing strategy that prolongs the experience of using the product, turning it from purely olfactory to visual. Since the beginning of the 20th century, perfumers invited famous artists to create unique visuals for their perfumes, bringing together several art forms at once. Some artists, like Marcel Duchamp, recognized the power of smell and included it in their works.

Rene Lalique was one of the most famous and outstanding artists and designers of the Art Nouveau era, who was largely responsible for the aesthetic of the movement. He started as a jewelry designer working on commissions for major houses like Cartier. Apart from jewelry, he specialized in glass-making, creating vases and home decor. One of the most significant features of Art Nouveau was its preference for skill over material. Instead of expensive metals or precious stones, artists worked with glass, horn, or artificial substances.

Over the years, Rene Lalique designed more than four hundred perfume bottles for mass production and custom orders. In 1922, he opened his own glass factory. More than a hundred years later, the factory in Alsace still functions, producing luxury glass objects and perfume bottles for the brand. The artist’s heirs preserved and expanded the domain of Lalique perfumes, inherent to their family brand. The tradition of artistic collaboration did not vanish either and the brand worked with famous contemporary artists and architects like Zaha Hadid and Damien Hirst.

Salvador Dali’s desire to commercialize every part of his work greatly tarnished his reputation during his later years. His absurd advertisements for chocolate, hard liquor, and digestion pills earned him millions of dollars and hundreds of bitter jokes from his creative peers. Yet, some marketing projects like his series of perfume bottle designs were remarkably successful.

In 1943, he worked with the famous Surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli to design bottles and boxes for her Shocking Radiance perfume series. Schiaparelli and Dali had an extensive history of collaboration. This includes the famous 1937 Lobster Dress which was reinvented in present-day Schiaparelli collections. Their most famous project, however, was the perfume Le Roi Soleil (Sun King). Dedicated to the end of World War II, the 1947 composition was inspired by one of the most remarkable and eccentric French monarchs, Louis XIV. Not much information remains on its olfactory qualities, but the pyramid-shaped bottle rising from the sea with the sun disc on top instantly became an iconic collector’s piece. Moreover, Roi Soleil came in a gilded seashell-shaped case that referenced the Rococo magnificence of the Versailles palace.

Dali’s collaboration with Schiaparelli was among the most famous ones in design history. Less frequently discussed, however, is the fact that Schiaparelli collaborated with another famous Surrealist on her iconic bottle designs. Behind the brand’s signature scent Shocking! was the creative effort of the Argentinian painter Leonor Fini. Fini’s design of a flower-adorned dress mannequin was soon appropriated by other designers, becoming a cult classic.

Unlike Dali, one well-known artist went to great lengths to hide his associations with the perfume industry. Kazimir Malevich, one of the most respectable and outstanding pioneers of abstract art, once created an adorable polar bear vial for the Russian perfume company Brocard.

In 1908, Malevich desperately needed money. He had only recently moved to Moscow and he struggled to get accustomed to the new artistic environment. Rather reluctantly, he started to take commercial design commissions. In the eyes of Malevich’s contemporaries, such work was a waste of talent, so the artist avoided talking too much about this. For Brocard, he created an advertising poster and a bottle for their new perfume Severny (Northern). Based on flowery notes, Severny nonetheless conveyed the fresh feeling of snow flurry on a bright winter day. Malevich shaped the translucent bottle after a crackled iceberg and put a small polar bear figure on top.

Malevich’s creative choice went against most of the traditional design conventions of his time. The bottle was angular, asymmetric, and heavyweight, and consisted of three elements instead of the usual two. The bear on top was not the lid itself but a decorative cover for it, which complicated both the production and the use of the bottle. The crackled surface of the glass vial, retrospectively compared to the cracks on his famous Black Square, was also innovative. Nevertheless, the perfume became a success, not in the least because of its packaging. The production of Severny lasted for almost a century, but unfortunately, the design was altered to cut costs. By the late 1990s, the bear lost its tail and became bulkier, and the vial no longer had its signature angles.

Sure, artists can participate in product design made for the perfume industry, but can scents themselves be called art? Usually, when thinking about perfumes and art, we treat the former as a pleasant yet unnecessary side dish to the latter. Smells are supposed to enhance our visual and sensual experiences; for that reason, they have been used in rituals and performances since the earliest days of humanity’s history. Hilla von Rebay, one of the first museum curators and the driving force behind the Guggenheim Museum, used to burn incense in gallery halls to guide visitors to a spiritually conscious state. Today, museums often use perfume to promote their collections and attract new visitors. In 2019, The Louvre hired the best European perfumers to create scents associated with the most famous artworks from their collection, like Ingres’s Grande Odalisque and the Victory of Samothrace.

Smells are often implied in works of art. Flowery still-lifes or hazy urban cityscapes, paintings of boats at sea, or gory battlefields—all of these scenes have their own smells that we envision while looking at the painted or photographed moment. Moreover, many works of art have their own smells unrelated to their subject matter—smells of oil, turpentine, glue, or any other material used.

Famous Artists Who Used Perfumes in Their Works

Despite the majority of artists sticking to solely visual self-expression, some of them acknowledge the importance of smell as another source of emotional impression. Marcel Duchamp, the pioneer of almost every form of modern art, insisted that an artwork should rely on more than one human sense, possibly exploiting all of them. During the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, Duchamp covered the gallery floor with oak leaves, water lilies, and sacks of coal, and hid a coffee roaster behind a screen. Moving around the exhibition, visitors had to make sense of Surrealist paintings and confusing mixing smells.

The great video artist Bill Viola used olfactory effects such as eucalyptus oil to bridge the gap between himself and the viewer watching him on film. The American installation artist Edward Keinholz used a revolting mix of urine, spoiled beer, and ashes to recreate the smell of crowded and nasty provincial pubs. Moreover, artistic experiments with perfume have no limits and sometimes, they even transgress the boundaries of art and commerce.

Present-day perfume brands sometimes move to the domain of art completely, creating scents not for wearing but for pure emotional impression. Sometimes, this impression is deliberately designed to be unpleasant. For instance, in 2022, a niche Romanian brand Toskovat’ created the now-infamous perfume Inexcusable Evil with notes of blood, gunpowder, dirty bandages, and concrete. The brand’s head perfumer David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi saw it as a reaction to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Jipa-Slivinschi, who has both Russian and Ukrainian roots, put the essence of war into an olfactory pyramid, purposefully repulsive, distressing, and unfit for wearing.