René Lalique, brooch. Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.René Lalique, sketch for the Peacock brooch. Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.
Art jewelry is one of the names given to jewelry created by studio craftspeople. As the name suggests, art jewelry emphasizes creative expression and design, and is characterized by the use of a variety of materials, often commonplace or of low economic value. In this sense, it forms a counterbalance to the use of "precious materials" (such as gold, silver and gemstones) in conventional or fine jewelry, where the value of the object is tied to the value of the materials from which it is made. Art jewelry is related to studio craft in other media such as glass, wood, plastics and clay; it shares beliefs and values, education and training, circumstances of production, and networks of distribution and publicity with the wider field of studio craft. Art jewelry also has links to fine art and design.
While the history of art jewelry usually begins with modernist jewelry in the United States in the 1940s, followed by the artistic experiments of German goldsmiths in the 1950s, a number of the values and beliefs that inform art jewelry can be found in the arts and crafts movement of the late nineteenth century. Many regions, such as North America, Europe, Australasia and parts of Asia have flourishing art jewelry scenes, while other places such as South America and Africa have been developing the infrastructure of teaching institutions, dealer galleries, writers, collectors and museums that sustain art jewelry.
Terminology
Lalique "Thistle" pendant
Art historian Liesbeth den Besten has identified six different terms to name art jewelry, including contemporary, studio, art, research, design, and author,[1] with the three most common being contemporary, studio, and art. Curator Kelly L'Ecuyer has defined studio jewelry as an offshoot of the studio craft movement, adding that it does not refer to particular artistic styles but rather to the circumstances in which the object is produced. According to her definition, "Studio jewelers are independent artists who handle their chosen materials directly to make one-of-a-kind or limited production jewelry..... The studio jeweler is both the designer and fabricator of each piece (although assistants or apprentices may help with technical tasks), and the work is created in a small, private studio, not a factory."[2] Art historian Monica Gaspar has explored the temporal meaning of the different names given to art jewelry over the past 40 years. She suggests that "avant-garde" jewelry positions itself as radically ahead of mainstream ideas; "modern" or "modernist" jewelry claims to reflect the spirit of the times in which it was made; "studio" jewelry emphasizes the artist studio over the craft workshop; "new" jewelry assumes an ironic stance towards the past; and "contemporary" jewelry claims the present and the "here and now" in contrast with traditional jewelry's eternal nature as an heirloom passing between generations.[3]
The art historian Maribel Koniger argues that the names given to art jewelry are important in order to distinguish this type of jewelry from related objects and practices. The use of the term "conceptual" jewelry is, in her words, an "attempt to detach oneself through terminology from the products of the commercial jewellery industry that reproduce cliches and are oriented towards the tastes of mass consumption on the one hand, and, on the other, the individualistic, subjectively aestheticising designs of pure craft."[4]
Critique of preciousness
Art jewelers often work in a critical or conscious way with the history of jewelry, or to the relationship between jewelry and the body, and they question concepts like "preciousness" or "wearability" that are usually accepted without question by conventional or fine jewelry. This quality is a product of the critique of preciousness, or the challenge of art jewelers in the United States and Europe to the idea that jewelry's value was equivalent to the preciousness of its materials. Initially, art jewelers worked in precious or semi-precious materials, but emphasized artistic expression as the most important quality of their work, linking their jewelry to modernist art movements such as biomorphism, primitivism and tachisme.[5] In the 1960s, art jewelers began to introduce new, alternative materials into their work, such as aluminium and acrylics, breaking with the historical role of jewelry as a sign of status and economic value or portable wealth.[6] As the focus on value gave way, other themes took its place as the subject of jewelry. Writing in 1995, Peter Dormer described the effects of the critique of preciousness as follows: "First, the monetary value of the material becomes irrelevant; second, once the value of jewelry as a status symbol had been deflated, the relation between the ornament and the human body once again assumed a dominant position - jewelry became body-conscious; third, jewelry lost its exclusiveness to one sex or age - it could be worn by men, women and children."[7]
The art jewelry that emerged in the first years of the twentieth century was a reaction to Victorian taste, and the heavy and ornate jewelry, often machine manufactured, that was popular in the nineteenth century. According to Elyse Zorn Karlin, "For most jewelers, art jewelry was a personal artistic quest as well as a search for a new national identity. Based on a combination of historical references, reactions to regional and world events, newly available materials and other factors, art jewelry reflected a country's identity while at the same time being part of a larger international movement of design reform."[8] Initially art jewelry appealed to a select group of clients with artistic taste, but it was quickly picked up by commercial firms, making it widely available.
There are many different movements that contributed to the category of art jewelry as we know it today. As part of the English Arts and Crafts movement, flourishing between 1860 and 1920, Charles Robert Ashbee and his Guild and School of Handicraft produced the earliest arts and crafts jewelry in a guild setting. Presenting their work as an antidote to industrial production, the first generation of arts and crafts jewelers believed that an object should be designed and made by the same person, although their lack of specialist training meant that much of this jewelry has an appealing handmade quality.[9] Responding to changes in fashion, as well as the Victorian taste for wearing sets, arts and crafts jewelers made pendants, necklaces, brooches, belt buckles, cloak clasps and hair combs that were worn solo. Arts and crafts jewelry also tended to favor materials with little intrinsic value that could be used for their artistic effects. Base metals, semi-precious stones like opals, moonstones and turquoise, misshapen pearls, glass and shell, and the plentiful use of Vitreous enamel, allowed jewelers to be creative and to produce affordable objects.[10]
Art nouveau jewelry from France and Belgium was also an important contributor to art jewelry. Worn by wealthy and artistically-literate clients, including courtesans of the Paris demimonde, art nouveau jewelry by René Lalique and Alphonse Mucha was inspired by symbolist art, literature and music, and a revival of the curvilinear and dramatic forms of the rococo period. As Elyse Zorn Karlin suggests, "The result was jewels of staggering beauty and imagination, sensual, sexual and beguiling, and at times even frightening. These jewels were a far cry from the symmetrical and somewhat placid designs of Arts and Crafts jewelry, which more closely resembled Renaissance jewels."[11] Lalique and other art nouveau jewelers quite often mixed precious metals and gemstones with inexpensive materials, and favored plique-a-jour and cabochon enamel techniques.
Other important centers of art jewelry production included the Wiener Werkstatte in Vienna, where the architects Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser designed jewelry in silver and semi-precious stones, sometimes to be worn with clothing also created by the workshop. The Danish Skønvirke (aesthetic work) movement, of which Georg Jensen is the most famous example, favored silver and native Scandinavian stones and an aesthetic that falls somewhere between the tenets of art nouveau and arts and crafts. Art jewelry in Finland was characterized by a Viking revival, coinciding with its political freedom on Sweden in 1905, while modernisme in Spain followed the lead of art nouveau jewelers. Art jewelry was also practiced in Italy, Russia and the Netherlands.[12]
In the United States, arts and crafts jewelry was popular with amateurs, since unlike ceramics, furniture or textiles, it required only a modest investment in tools, and could be made in the kitchen.[13] One of the first American arts and crafts jewelers, Madeline Yale Wynne, was self-taught and approached her jewelry as form and composition with the emphasis on aesthetic qualities rather than skill, stating that "I consider each effort by itself as regards color and form much as I would paint a picture."[14] Brainerd Bliss Thresher, another American arts and crafts jeweler, used materials like carved horn and amethyst for their aesthetic qualities, following the example of René Lalique who mixed quotidian and precious materials in his jewelry. As Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf suggest, whereas the British Arts and Crafts movement tried to reunite art and labor, many upper-class Americans like Thresher united art and leisure: "The practice of craft as a recreation could be a relief from the pressure of a difficult job, a demonstration of one's good taste and savor vivre, a polite manifestation of progressive politics, or an expression of the sheer pleasure of satisfying labor."[15]
Art jewelry fell out of style in the 1920s and 30s, overshadowed by art deco, as well as audience response to its functional and aesthetically challenging nature (too fragile and outrageous). However, it marks a significant break with what came before, and laid down many of the values and attitudes for later twentieth century ideals of art or studio jewelry. As Elyse Zorn Karlin writes, "Art jewelry valued the handmade and prized innovative thinking and creative expression. These jewelers were the first to use materials that didn't have the intrinsic value expected in jewelry, and they rejected mainstream jewelry tastes. They thought of their work as an artistic pursuit and made it for a small audience that shared their aesthetic and conceptual values."[16]
Modernist jewelry
"Sparkling Vortex", necklace by Marc Lange, 2007. Made of titanium, zirconium, yellow and white gold, and set with diamonds.
The history of art jewelry is tied to the emergence of modernist jewelry in urban centers of the United States in the 1940s. According to Toni Greenbaum, "Beginning about 1940, a revolutionary jewelry movement began to emerge in the United States, and this was then spurred on by the devastation of World War II, the trauma of the Holocaust, the fear of the bomb, the politics of prejudice, the sterility of industrialization, and the crassness of commercialism."[17] Modernist jewelry shops and studios sprung up in New York City (Frank Rebajes, Paul Lobel, Bill Tendler, Art Smith, Sam Kramer and Jules Brenner in Greenwich Village; and Ed Wiener, Irena Brynner[18] and Henry Steig in midtown Manhattan) and the Bay Area on the West Coast (Margaret De Patta, Peter Macchiarini, Merry Renk, Irena Brynner, Francis Sperisen and Bob Winston). The audience for modernist jewelry was the liberal, intellectual fringe of the middle class, who also supported modern art. Art historian Blanche Brown describes the appeal of this work: "About 1947 I went to Ed Wiener's shop and bought one of his silver square-spiral pins . . . because it looked great, I could afford it and it identified me with the group of my choice - aesthetically aware, intellectually inclined and politically progressive. That pin (or one of a few others like it) was our badge and we wore it proudly. It celebrated the hand of the artist rather than the market value of the material."[19]
In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized the exhibition Modern Handmade Jewelry, which included the work of studio jewelers like Margaret De Patta and Paul Lobel, along with jewelry by modernist artists such as Alexander Calder, Jacques Lipchitz and Richard Pousette-Dart.[20] This exhibition toured the United States, and was followed by a series of influential exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.[21] Kelly L'Ecuyer suggests that "Calder's jewelry was central to many of the museum and gallery exhibitions of this period, and he continues to be viewed as the seminal figure in American contemporary jewelry."[22] Using cold construction and crude techniques that suggested a spirit of improvisation and creativity, Calder's jewelry shares his sculpture's use of line and movement to depict or imply space, creating jewelry that often moves with the wearer's body. A strong connection with art movements is a characteristic of American art jewelry during this period. While Calder showed a primitivist interest in African and ancient Greek art, Margaret De Patta made jewelry that was constructivist, manipulating light, space and optical perception according to the lessons she learned from László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago.[23] Toni Greenbaum writes that "After his mentor, the painter John Haley, showed him work by Matisse and Picasso, Bob Winston exclaimed: 'That's the kind of crap I'm doing!'."[24] The materials of modernist jewelry - organic and inorganic non-precious substances, as well as found objects - correlate to cubist, futurist and dadaist attitudes, while the styles of modernist jewelry - surrealism, primitivism, biomorphism and constructivism - are fine art movements as well.[25]
The postwar growth of jewelry in the United States was supported by the concept that jewelry-making techniques, believed to strengthen hand and arm muscles and foster eye-hand coordination, played a role in physical therapy programs for veterans of World War II. The War Veterans' Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art, led by Victor D'Amico, the School for American Craftsman, and the workshops run by Margret Craver in New York City, addressed the needs of returning American servicemen, while the GI Bill of Rights offered free college tuition for veterans, many of whom studied craft.[26][clarification needed] As Kelly L'Ecuyer suggests, "In addition to individual creativity, the proliferation of craft-based education and therapy for soldiers and veterans in the United States during and after the war provided a stimulus for all studio crafts, especially jewelry and metalsmithing. Public and private resources devoted to veterans' craft programs planted the seeds for longer-lasting educational structures and engineered broad interest in craft as a creative, fulfilling lifestyle."[27][clarification needed]
By the early 1960s, graduates of these programs were not only challenging the conventional ideas of jewelry, but teaching a new generation of American jewelers in new university programs in jewelry and metalsmithing courses.[28]Architectonic jewellery was being developed around the same time.
In the 1960s—1970s, the German government and commercial jewelry industry fostered and heavily supported modern jewelry designers, thus creating a new marketplace. They combined contemporary design with traditional goldsmithing and jewelry making. Orfevre, the first gallery for art jewelry, opened in Duesseldorf, Germany, in 1965.
Exhibitions
"Cornucopia": an interior clock by Moiseikin Jewellery House worth $1 million and exhibited internationally in 2000s. It weighs over 65 kg, includes over 2,000 diamonds, other jewels and a kilogram worth of gold.
The acceptance of jewelry as art[30] was fostered in the United States very quickly after World War II by major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, each of which held major shows of art jewelry in the 1940s. The Museum of Arts and Design formerly The American Craft Museum, started their collection in 1958 with pieces dating from the 1940s. Other museums whose collections include work by contemporary (American) jewelry designers include: the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Corning Museum of Glass, the Mint Museum of Craft & Design in Charlotte, NC, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian museum.
Some famous artists who created art jewelry in the past were Calder, Picasso, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, Dalí and Nevelson. Some of which represented at Sculpture to Wear Gallery in New York City which closed in 1977.
Artwear Gallery owned by Robert Lee Morris continued in this endeavor to showcase jewelry as an art form.
Wearable art, also known as Artwear or "art to wear", refers to art pieces in the shape of clothing or jewellery pieces. These pieces are usually handmade, and are produced only once or as a very limited series. Pieces of clothing are often made with fibrous materials and traditional techniques such as crochet, knitting, quilting, but may also include plastic sheeting, metals, paper, and more. While the making of any article of clothing or other wearable object typically involves aesthetic considerations, the term wearable art implies that the work is intended to be accepted as an artistic creation or statement. Wearable art is meant to draw attention while it is being displayed, modeled or used in performances. Pieces may be sold and exhibited.
The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose aim is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. This includes most of the objects for the interiors of buildings, as well as interior design, but typically excludes architecture. Ceramic art, metalwork, furniture, jewellery, fashion, various forms of the textile arts and glassware are major groupings.
Architectonic jewellery is a subset of Constructivist studio jewellery that makes use of architectural forms and ideas in the much smaller-scale format of jewellery. Some of the defining elements of architectonic jewellery are linearity, inclusion of geometric elements, undisguised structural elements, and use of varying depth to convey a sense of design in three dimensions rather than only two. Certain architectonic pieces include moving parts, which enables "extending or reconfiguring" the pieces by the wearer. Architectonic jewellery often incorporates materials more typically used in engineering such as stainless steel and niobium, reinforcing the association with architecture.
Linda MacNeil is an American abstract artist, sculptor, and jeweler. She works with glass and metal specializing in contemporary jewelry that combines metalwork with glass to create wearable sculpture. Her focus since 1975 has been sculptural objets d’art and jewelry, and she works in series. MacNeil’s jewelry is considered wearable sculpture and has been her main focus since 1996.
Lisa Gralnick is an American contemporary metalsmith, studio jeweler and academic. She works in the field of craft and art jewelry. Gralnick says: "I have chosen to make jewelry, which is traditionally considered 'craft', and I do enjoy the processes and techniques that allow me to execute my work without technical faults. But 'craft' is only a means to an end for me, as it is for many artists. My desire to push the limits of jewelry and expand on them, to comment on its traditions and associations, is more the concern of any artist."
Eleanor Moty, is an American metalsmith and jewelry artist. Her experimentation with industrial processes, such as photoetching and electroforming, was revolutionary in the field of American art jewelry in the 1960s and 1970s.
Catherine Elizabeth Cooke is an American designer whose career has lasted more than 73 years. She is principally known for her jewelry. She has been called "an icon within the tradition of modernist jewelry" and "a seminal figure in American Modernist studio jewelry". Her pieces have been shown nationally and internationally and are included in a number of museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. She is regarded as an important role model for other artists and craftspeople.
Ramona Solberg (1921–2005) created eccentric yet familiar jewelry using found objects; she was an influential teacher at the University of Washington School of Art and is often referred to as the "grandmother of Northwest found-art jewelry". Additionally, she served as an art instructor and a prolific jewelry artist in and around Seattle for three decades.
Jamie Bennett is an American artist and educator known for his enamel jewelry. Over his forty-year career, Bennett has experimented with the centuries-old process of enameling, discovered new techniques of setting, and created new colors of enamel and a matte surfaces. This has led him to be referred to as “one of the most innovative and accomplished enamellers of our time” by Ursula Ilse-Neuman, historian and former curator at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. Bennett is closely associated with the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he studied himself as a student, and taught in the Metal department for many years. Bennett retired from teaching in 2014, after thirty years at SUNY New Paltz.
Florence Lisa Resnikoff was an American artist and educator in the fields of metals and jewelry.
Byron August Wilson (1918–1992) was an American mid-20th century artist and educator, known for his jewelry design.
Margaret De Patta was an American jewelry designer and educator, active in the mid-century jewelry movement.
Marjorie Schick was an innovative American jewelry artist and academic who taught art for 50 years. Approaching sculptural creations, her avant-garde pieces have been widely collected. Her works form part of the permanent collections of many of the world's leading art museums, including the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania; and the Victoria and Albert Museum of London.
Jan Yager is an American artist who makes mixed media jewelry. She draws inspiration from both the natural world and the lived-in human environment of her neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, emphasizing that art is a reflection of both time and place. She has incorporated rocks, bullet casings, and crack cocaine vials into her works, and finds beauty in the resilience of urban plants that some would consider weeds.
Merle Newport Boyer was an American modernist studio art jeweler and sculptor, as well as inventor, machinist, teacher and mentor.
Adda "Andy" Thyra Elise Louise Husted-Andersen was a Danish-born American Modernist jeweler, silversmith, metalsmith, and educator. She was a co-founder and the president of the New York Society of Craftsmen from 1941 to 1944. She was a master of working with enamel, silver and gold. She was active in New York City and Copenhagen.
Merry Renk, also known as Merry Renk-Curtis, was an American jewelry designer, metalsmith, sculptor and painter. In 1951, she helped to found the Metal Arts Guild (MAG), and served as its president in 1954.
Sharon Church was an American studio jeweler, metalsmith, and educator. She is a professor emerita of the University of the Arts (Philadelphia) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2012, Church was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council (ACC). In 2018, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of North American Goldsmiths.
Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco (MAG), is an American non-profit, arts educational organization founded in 1951. The organization has supported the creation of Modernist jewelry in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as contemporary, and sculptural works.
Charles Robert Winston (1915–2003) was an American jeweler, sculptor, and educator. He was known for his organic forms and sculptural jewelry in 1950s and 1960s. Winston was a co-founder of the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco, a non-profit, arts educational organization. In 1997, he was honored as a Fellow of the American Craft Council.
References
↑ Den Besten, Liesbeth, On Jewellery: A Compendium of International Contemporary Art Jewellery, Arnoldsche, 2011, pp 9-10 ISBN978-3897903494
↑ L'Ecuyer, Kelly, "Introduction: Defining the field", in L'Ecuyer, Kelly (ed.), Jewelry By Artists in the Studio, MFA Publications, 2010, p 17 ISBN978-0878467501
↑ Gaspar, Monica, "Contemporary jewellery in post-historical times", in Maria Cristina Borgesio (ed.), Time Tales, Preziosa, 2007, pp 12-14
↑ Maribel Koniger, "A class of its own", in Florian Hufnagl (ed.), The Fat Booty of Madness, Arnoldsche, 2008, p 32 ISBN978-3897902817
↑ Greenbaum, Toni, "The studio jewelry movement: 1940-80 - Roots and results", in Susan Grant Lewin (ed.), One of a Kind: American Art Jewelry Today, Abrams, 1994, pp 34-37 ISBN978-0810931985
↑ Dormer, Peter, and Turner, Ralph, The New Jewelry: Trends + Traditions, Thames & Hudson, 1985, p 11
↑ Dormer, Peter, "The new movement", in Drutt English, Helen W, and Dormer, Peter, Jewelry of Our Time: Art, Ornament and Obsession, Thames & Hudson, 1995, p 24
↑ Karlin, Elyse Zorn, "Early twentieth-century art jewelry", in Skinner, Damian (ed.), Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective, Lark Books, 2013, p 86 ISBN978-1-4547-0277-1
↑ Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf, Makers: A History of American Studio Craft, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, p 63 ISBN978-0-8078-3413-8
↑ W. Scott Braznell, "Madeline Yale Wynne", in Wendy Kaplan (ed.), "The Art That Is Life": The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, Little, Brown, 1987, p 65 ISBN978-0821225547
↑ Strauss, Cindi, "A brief history of contemporary jewelry, 1960-2006", in Cindi Strauss (ed.), Ornament As Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry From the Helen William Drutt Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007, p 17 ISBN3897902737
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