Magazine Rack in Brass Faux-Bamboo with Tinted Glass Panels, Maison Baguès, French, circa 1940

Among the multiple variants of the faux-bamboo magazine rack produced by Maison Baguès during the Art Déco decades, the brass version with tinted glass panels occupies a particularly distinctive position. Where the fully gilt version achieves its effect through the opulence of a single continuous material, this example introduces a dialogue between the opaque and the translucent : the warm brass of the knotted faux-bamboo frame playing against glass panels that filter and colour the light passing through them. Glass, in the vocabulary of French Art Déco interiors, carried a specific charge — it was the material of Lalique, of the grands paquebots, of the kind of luminous modernity the style sought to project. To incorporate tinted glass into a utilitarian object like a magazine rack was to import something of that chromatic ambition into the most quotidian of domestic functions.

The piece measures 45.5 cm in width, 21 cm in depth, and 48.5 cm in height — proportions that allow it to sit on a floor or low surface with equal confidence. The faux-bamboo brass framework, with its knotted internodes and bundled uprights characteristic of Baguès production, provides the structural logic, while the tinted glass panels on each side close the composition and introduce a play of colour that shifts with the light conditions of the room. Whether positioned near a window, where the glass glows with transmitted light, or in an interior setting where it catches reflected illumination, the piece behaves differently throughout the day — a quality that sets it apart from its purely metallic counterparts and rewards attentive placement.

Maison Baguès, founded in the nineteenth century and operating at the height of its prestige in the 1930s and 1940s, supplied the most distinguished Parisian interiors and ocean liner commissions of the period. The house’s faux-bamboo production in brass represents a particularly sought-after segment of its output, combining the technical mastery of its metalworkers with the decorative intelligence of its designers. The addition of tinted glass to this variant reaches furthest into the full vocabulary of Art Déco materials, combining the warmth of brass with the chromatic sophistication of coloured glass in an object of genuine compositional beauty. A rare and refined piece of Baguès production at its most complete.