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Modern Art of Metalwork International Symposium at the Bröhan-Museum, Berlin

from October 6 to 8, 2001 organized by Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk

Box Mogens Ballin, Copenhagen, design pre-1907, execution 1916 Cast pewter Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 10

22 experts—museum curators, artists, collectors, art dealers—from all over Europe and the United States were invited to submit papers and contribute to the discussion on Modern Art of Metalwork, which to our knowledge has not been subject of a similar international meeting before. The symposium was aimed to · exchange the actual state of research, ideas, questions & problems of the various provenances, arranged

in 15 short papers with the opportunity of extensive discussion · discuss if and how the network of experts in this field can be improved · present the new collection catalogue of the Bröhan-Museum “Modern Art of Metalwork” to

international experts All aims and more have been fulfilled. The symposium had an atmosphere as if everybody had previously been waiting for years for such an opportunity—it was obvious, that many of the most distinguished scholars in this field did not know each other yet and had not even heard about important publications in other countries. Therefore, it was agreed among the participants unanimously, that such a reunion should be held more or less regularly at different places. We apologize for not having been able to invite all experts to the symposium in Berlin in 2001. We intended to keep the number of participants as small as possible to allow an active discussion, and on the other hand as large as necessary to include representatives from most of the relevant countries. It was a trial event in a field not tread much before. To give the chance of some insight in the themes discussed during the event, many participants meritoriously agreed to publish their contributions on the website of the Bröhan-Museum. The rights on the following contributions are kept by their authors. It is not allowed to make commercial use of, to distribute or to alter the following texts. Any questions regarding the symposium should be submitted to [email protected]

Modern Art of Metalwork 1 International Symposium at the Bröhan-Museum, Berlin from October 6 to 8, 2001

The participants of the symposium were: Prof. em. Dr. Tilmann Buddensieg Professor for Art History emeritus in Bonn and Berlin Germany Poul Dedenroth-Schou Museum Director Museet på Koldinghus PO Box 91 6000 Kolding Denmark Lise Funder M.A. Freelance Art Historian Denmark Horst Heeren Technical Director of the Silversmithy Hansen GmbH & Co. Silbermanufaktur zu Bremen KG. Koch & Bergfeld Kirchweg 200 28199 Bremen Germany Dr. Claudia Kanowski Curator Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum Schloß Gottorf 24837 Schleswig Germany Dr. Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk contact via Bröhan-Museum Germany Wilfried Moll Silversmith Bantschowstraße 22 22391 Hamburg Germany Wim Nys Scientific Assistant Provinciaal Museum Sterckshof - Zilvercentrum Hooftvunderlei 160 2100 Deurne Belgium Dr. Elisabeth Schmuttermeier Curator Museum für Angewandte Kunst Stubenring 5 1010 Wien Dr. Reinhard Sänger Curator Badisches Landesmuseum Schloss 76131 Karlsruhe Germany Dr. Klaus Weber Curator Bauhaus-Archiv Klingelhöferstraße 14 10785 Berlin Germany Rolf Walter Collector of Swedish Silver Sweden

Gail S. Davidson Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution2 East 91st Street New York, New York 10128 U.S.A. Dominique Forest Curator, Departement moderne et contemporain Musée des Arts Décoratifs Palais du Louvre 107 rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris France Dr. Widar Halén Chief Curator Oslo Museum of Decorative Arts and Design St. Olavs Gate 1 0165 Oslo Norway Dr. Rüdiger Joppien Curator Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Steintorplatz 1 20099 Hamburg Germany Werner Kittel Archive Werner Kittel Corneliusstraße 5 22607 Hamburg Germany Annelies Krekel-Aalberse Netherlands Sabine Niesen M. A. starting with a phd on the Berlin silversmith Emmy Roth Germany Judy Rudoe Assistant Keeper The British Museum Great Russell Street London WC1B 3DG England Jörg Schwandt M. A. Expert in Danish Silver and Art Dealer Keithstraße 10 10787 Berlin Germany Eric Turner Assistant Curator, Department of Metalwork Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington London SW7 2RL England Dr. Christianne Weber-Stöber Chief Executive Gesellschaft für Goldschmiedekunst Altsädter Markt 6 63450 Hanau Germany


Remarks on Current Research

JUDY RUDOE Assistant Keeper, The British Museum, London To introduce our colloquium I would like to quote the words of the German emigré silversmith Peter Müller-Munk who wrote from his NY studio in 1929 that the machine would not out the silversmith out of business: “I still have the outmodish confidence that there will always remain a sufficient number of people who want the pleasure of owning a centre piece without being forced to share their joy of ownership with a few thousand other beings”. But he was soon to be proved wrong. The demand for silver was hit by the Depression and he turned to industrial design, producing an astonishing piece of domestic metalwork. You all know the Normandie pitcher, so-called because its shape was blatantly derived from the smokestacks of the celebrated French ocean liner launched in 1935. Made of chromium-plated brass, of tear-drop section, the body formed of a single sheet of metal bent to shape, the join concealed beneath a strip which runs round the base, along the edge and round the rim. The handle is formed of a flat strip of metal expanding at the top to blend with the line of the rim. In its economy of parts, its streamlined form and its eminent functionality—the spout pours perfectly—it is perhaps the greatest piece of American Depression age metalwork. It has become what Müller-Munk is known for. For someone who had trained with the renowned German silversmith Waldemar Raemisch at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin, this was a sea change. In these incertain times, I would like to ask Herr Moll if he thinks the market for handmade silver will survive and whether if he found himself in Müller-Munk’s position, he could change direction so totally. There are three areas that I will consider in my opening remarks—the first is social change in the 20th century and its effect on the use of silver, the second asks some questions about the interwar years, and the third looks at issues of the manufacturing industry which have arisen in my work on the British Museum collection, both metalwork and jewellery. I shall ask far more questions than I shall answer and I should stress that I have done far more research on jewellery in recent years than I have on metalwork more generally. The pieces I illustrate are all from BM. Social change It is common knowledge that the decline in the use of silver in the 20th century is a consequence of the decline in servants. Servants continued among the professional classes in Britain at any rate right through the 1930s. It was the Second World War that killed off the tradition of servants. The nanny survived, so did the maid, usually from the third world, but there was no one to clean and polish the silver. With no servants to look after the house at all times of day, burglary became a serious threat and today is the most often cited reason for not buying silver. But the real reason I suspect is that people don’t know what to do—the culture of using silver is gone. The arrival of the washing-up machine in the 1960s was a further death-knell. When my sister-in-law was offered my grandmother’s silver cutlery in1971 she refused it because she wanted stainless steel that would go in the dishwasher. My mother was mortified. Even if you just display silver without actually using it, the pollution now in big cities is such that it tarnishes almost overnight. In a museum context we can barely stop it and in the home it is completely impossible. The second war also killed off the cook. To make life easier for the housewife who now had to do everything, “oven to tableware” was developed—initially I believe in glass and ceramic by Pyrex and Corning, so that immediately other materials usurped the function of metalwork. This had of course already happened in the 19th century with the taste for elaborate centrepieces in glass or ceramic. I can remember my mother asking my father to bring back one of the new Corning casseroles with removable handle on his first trip to the States in 1959. Eventually she went over to Corning ware completely and discarded the aluminium saucepans and cast-iron frying pans with which she had set up home during the War. She still uses her Corning ware today—it’s easy to clean, doesn’t stick, goes in the oven, on the hob and the table. While my generation is obsessed with Le Creuset cookware which does all of this, she finds them too heavy. The other crucial point here is that by the 1960s the kitchen and living room were one—it was perfectly acceptable to entertain in the kitchen, and so cookware had to look good, in which case why bother with a second smart set of dishes or cutlery at all.


No-one is discussing any of these issues in this colloquium—perhaps you all find them too commonplace. But if we wish to encourage the use of silver today we have to look at why people who could afford it are not using it and try to promote not only the material for its unique properties, but also the kind of domestic interiors and lifestyle in which silver has a place. How easy is it to get good silver ? How many commercial galleries are there ? There are none for contemporary silver in London (though there are two for modern designer jewellery). Ironically it is easier in terms of the number of shops to buy antique silver. What kind of modern silver if any can you buy at IKEA for example ? How do the big department stores promote it ? Is it in a separate section or interspersed with other household goods ? How is it displayed ? Can you handle it or is it all under lock and key ? No-one to my knowledge has looked at the history of commercial display of silver, whether in galleries that specialise in silver alone or in department stores—which have a crucial role in that they already have an audience who has come for other reasons. In his article on silver in Germany for the exhibition catalogue Silver of New Era 1880-1940 (Rotterdam, Ghent 1992) Rüdiger Joppien described the shop of Emil Lettré in Berlin’s fashionable Unter den Linden in the 1930s with its decor of red marble and Italian Renaissance furniture. That is one extreme, but I hope there will be some useful comments on this over the next 3 days. The interwar years I began with Muller-Munk who worked in a period of sudden change and is an interesting case of someone raised in the European tradition who adapted to new circumstances in a new country. But I remain deeply unclear as to what the different effects of the Depression were in the US and in Europe ? In the US there was great emphasis on aluminium and chrome (Russel Wright).

Lemonade Jug Russel Wright, New York, ca. 1930 Spun aluminium, lacquered wood Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 495

They were heavily promoted as modern materials for informal entertaining (without servants). There were huge companies who were pushing it— aluminium needs vast supplies of electricity, the costs of producing the metal are enormous, but the machinery for spun aluminium is relatively cheap so it was easy for firms to add a domestic line (domestic metalwork has always been only a small part of the industry as a whole). But in Europe I am not aware that aluminium was ever that popular for table ware—it seems to have remained confined largely to cookware.

Jug with six beakers Harald Buchrucker, Ludwigsburg, ca. 1945–1949 Hammered aluminium Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 97

Likewise chrome never seems to have become widespread for table and ornamental ware, as opposed to bathroom fittings, in the way that it did in America. Is the situation distorted by recent collectors’ interest in America ? Their large-scale production means that they are still widely available and it is actually possible to acquire everything in Revere or Chase catalogues. There is no doubt that the American pieces are good, and, more significantly, that one particular museum exhibition played a key role. The Machine Age in America exhibition at Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1986 was a landmark. But they did something inspired—at the end of the exhibition, instead of the usual “products” in the museum shop, they had


examples of objects that were actually in the exhibition, rows of them—presumably on sale or return from dealers—you could begin your collection then and there. And that is precisely what I did—for it was there that I purchased my first piece of Russel Wright. But to return to the Depression years in Europe. What was the effect in France for example ? When you look through the magazines of the period you see Puiforcat exhibiting throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. It doesn’t seem that the Depression had any effect on him—is this the case ? Perhaps Gail Davidson can expand on this. Eric Turner tells me that Omar Ramsden in London kept going thanks to one particular sponsor. And I hope too that Annelies who has studied this period in detail can give us a broader picture here. Issues of the manufacturing industry There has been a huge improvement in the standard of research in the last decade or so. When I was beginning to work on my catalogue of the British Museum collection in the late 1980s things were very different. I found time and again that the circumstances that gave rise to creation of objects were simply ignored. Many authors had followed secondary sources instead of going back to original documents. I take two pieces by Olbrich as examples though I hasten to add that the problem was not limited to Germany, I found it everywhere. The fork comes form the service designed for the Darmstadt exhibition of 1901. But nobody explained why it was made by Christofle in Paris when the aim of the Darmstadt artists colony was to benefit local industry. At that time Christofle had no archivist and when I walked into the Paris shop I was told they had no information. But I persisted and eventually discovered that Christofle had a marketing subsidiary in Karlsruhe where patterns were distributed exclusively for the German market, and that the service was commissioned by the factiory’s agent in Germany who wanted new flatware pattern in current German taste. A letter in the Christofle archive of 1910 confirmed what I had suspected: that the firm added several items not designed by Olbrich (to this day that letter not mentioned anywhere else but surely this is important evidence that that is what factories do, especially once artist, as in Olbrich’s case, was no longer alive). Now there is an excellent archivist, the archive is superbly arranged at St Denis together with the company museum. (I hope that Dominique Forest will include Christofle dinanderie in her talk and explain the differences if any between Christofle works produced in a factory context and those made by artist-craftsmen such as Dunand and Linossier).

Pair of Candlesticks Metalworks Eduard Hueck, Lüdenscheid Design by Joseph Maria Olbrich, ca. 1902 Cast pewter Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 157

Olbrich’s zoomorphic candlestick for E. Hueck was another puzzle. The literature available then all said it was designed in 1901-2. But I could find no illustration of it before 1904. I still don’t know the answer. Despite improvement in standards there are still many factory records that have not been looked at. They might answer some of the following questions. The outworker—never written about. Does the outworker survive ? Do they work exclusively for one firm or do they supply many firms ? In the 1930s Cartier for example had some 20 workshops in Paris and London apart from their own in-house ateliers. Some of these outworkers worked exclusively for Cartier, whether mount-making in platinum, enamelling or executing the goldwork for cigarette boxes and vanity cases. The London workshop for boxes was Wright & Davis from the 30s right up to the 1980s. These boxes are part of an extraordinary group of boxes commissioned in the 1960s by Peter Wilding and left to the British Museum in 1969. When I spoke to a former director of the workshop he knew exactly which craftsman had done the engine-turning and indeed invented the system of racks to make the pattern. And he had particular praise for the man who did the polishing of the insides, right into


the corners—no one can do it today he said. Such craftsmen are the unsung heroes of a big firm like Cartier, their names never recorded or acknowledged. Except for one brief period after the Second World War when there was a shortage of materials and so a prohibitive purchase tax was applied to objects in gold and silver. But art works were exempt from this tax and so these boxes were submitted to the appropriate authorities—they got their art status which meant that the craftsmen had to be acknowledged. The designers—many designers worked in different materials so you cannot look at metal in isolation. To take just some of the issues—how did they become involved ? From the 1960s commercial professionalism was widespread, but as late as 1951 it was completely haphazard: with the Cona coffee machine for example, the designer, Abram Games was a graphic artist known for his posters of the Second World War. He had never designed an object in his life. But he happened to be a friend of the owner of the Cona company who wanted to update his coffee machine so he asked Games to do it. It was the only such object Games ever created. Using scrap aluminium from wartime production, Games has created an abstract sculpture: the cantilevered metal frame forms an unbroken line with the plastic handle of the jug. The jug itself floats in space supported only at the neck. Its playfulness is in marked contrast to Gerhard Marcks’ solid functionalist design of 1930. In one of the most extraordinary books on design history, called Design in British Industry. A Mid-Century Survey, written by Michael Farr in 1955, these two coffee machine are illustrated side by side with the question, which is better for the job, the functionalist or the humanist ? This is a question we should perhaps be asking more often. Other ways in which designers become involved depended on enlightened manufacturers inviting them, government sponsorship (I speak of Germany or France here, unheard of in the UK to this day), or approaches from designers themselves. How much control does the designer have ? And then once the product is there, how is it marketed ? Is the designers name a selling point or not ? And how different is a factory made piece from one made by an individual craftsman ? Joppien has rightly noted that in the case of the extraordinary coffee and tea service designed by Fritz Schmoll von Eisenwerth for Bruckmann in 1913, with its richly decorated surface and its ebony handles studded with silver nails, it is hard to believe that it is factory made at all.

Tea Service Silverware factory Bruckmann, Heilbronn Design Fritz Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth 1913 Sterling silver, ebony Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 84

Bruckmann has always used both internal and outside designers—I would like to know why, and whether the products of one have been more successful than the other, both from a commercial and critical punt of view. In the late 1920s Die Form illustrated the designs for Paula Strauss for Bruckmann and noted the importance of a large firm introducing a modern attitude in an area where customers still followed old ideas. So with people like Strauss involved, what was the role of the internal artists ? And what about designers’ signatures ? I believe that Dresser is thought to have insisted that his signature appear. At that time it was exceptional.


Covered Tureen Hukin & Heath, Birmingham/London Design Christopher Dresser 1880 Metal with silver electroplate, ebony Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 421

There are many later examples such as Jan Eisenloeffels’ brass wares where the artist’s monogram, becomes a decorative motif, but again it is completely haphazard and did it make any difference to the rate of sale at the time ? Or has it just become no more than useful aid to collectors and a means for the dealer to ask a higher price ? Yet not all signatures command high prices—they have to be well-known ones. Take these two hot-water urns. One, made in France, presumably in the mid 1930s. It bears the name of the silversmiths’ firm G. Carré and is signed “Executed with the hammer by G. Lecomte”. I know nothing about him as yet. But the craftsmanship and elegance equals anything by more famous French modernist silversmiths such as Puiforcat or Tétard. The faceted body is a triumph of hand raised work and the pouring method is highly original. Instead of the usual tap, a lever at the top releases a sliding flap inside the spout. The other was designed by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen in 1934 for the Cranbook Academy of Art in Michigan and made by the International Silver-Plate Company, Connecticut. The French one is solid silver and made entirely by hand, but because neither the silversmith nor the firm are famous names, it cost us a fifth of the price of Saarinen’s silver-plated urn. Despite its tremendous presence the Saarinen urn was not commercially successful. The construction was intended to be suitable for industrial production—the sphere is spun, while the pierced gallery that hides the burner is stamped—yet it appears to have been made in very small quantities. Ours is one of 4 recorded examples. One suggestion that has been made is that customers for silver or silver-plate wanted more traditional forms. The implication then is that people who wanted modern forms wanted new materials such as aluminium and chrome as well. Is this really the case? Most visitors who come to the museum have no idea what is meant by hand made or industrially made. It is one of the most difficult things to get across to a non-specialist public. Both of these urns function well, but which is more human ?

Pair of Candlesticks Reimann-Schule, Berlin, Heubler class, ca. 1930 Brass Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 262 The candlesticks are examples of factory pieces made entirely by hand

The craftsmen—how often do we know if we are talking about one person, one person with a couple of helpers, or a sizeable workshop ? And if we are talking about more than one person, what does the name of the artist actually mean ? Wendy Ramshaw is Britain’s most famous artist jeweller. She is always regarded as an artist maker (has recently had one-man show in Darmstadt). But she has 2 or 3 helpers. Is Modern Art of Metalwork 7 International Symposium at the Bröhan-Museum, Berlin from October 6 to 8, 2001

this standard ? perhaps Herr Moll can throw some light on this ? If this is standard then where is the borderline between a piece made entirely by the artist, and the artist having someone else make all of it ? To make her pieces more accessible to a wider market, Wendy Ramshaw has another branch of her work—her production pieces made entirely in Birmingham and produced in limited editions in enamelled metal, no precious metal and no gemstones. She vets the castings and enamelling in person but she does not make the pieces. This leads on to other examples where we think we know what we are dealing with. But do we ? What is Puiforcat ? What was his role ? How many craftsmen were there ? Were there any outworkers ? Who made the wooden handles for instance ? Did his own distinguished collection of 18th-century silver play any role ? Was it available in the workshop ? Or Sandoz—all his work made for exhibitions or to commission—did he have assistants ? Who made the silver which he then inlaid with lacquer ? What does Bauhaus manufacturing mean ? Take the Brandt tea-infuser— How can you have a classic of modern design when there are only a handful of them ? And why are there 8 of them (or however many there are, 2 silver, approx 6 in brass) this is neither a unique prototype or a production line. Given the social conscience of the Bauhaus, one might ask why they made silver at all ? The production is totally different from the Wagenfeld lamp, so even under the one Bauhaus heading you have enormous contrasts. Lastly—what of the attitudes of the manufacturers themselves ? What did they really think ? How did manufacturers regard pieces by outside designers compared with the work of the internal designers ? What kind of acknowledgment do internal designers get, if any at all ? Very little is written by the manufacturers themselves. This is a great pity. ---


Coffee and Tea Service Robert Fischer, Schwäbisch Gmünd, ca. 1935 Sterling silver, ivory Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 133

The silversmith—conceiving and making works of silver

WILFRIED MOLL Silversmith, Hamburg The profession of the silversmith has many facets which have evolved over a long period of time; it involves the combination of art and craft to make a living, and both these elements have to be integrated into everyday life. Some aspects, though, have changed in recent times: the changes are primarily concerned with the social status of the craftsman. The modern silversmith has been liberated from the rigorous organisation of the guilds and the pressures of larges factories with industrial working conditions. As a rule he/she is today an independent, self-employed craftsman/woman independent just like his artist colleagues—painters, sculptors or photographers. His/her working modus is comparable to theirs. His ideas are put in concrete form via sketches, drawings and models; he then proceeds to execute his works. They are realized in a direct exchange between his ideas and his expertise. In the course of realization he is always looking for ways to improve his work and to react to coincidence should the occasion arise. His way of producing an object qualifies him for the making of unique objects as well as for the development of a prototype for serial production. The silversmith moves in a variety of milieus: from his workshop to dealing with potential customers—maybe in a country district church—or in the home of a potent collector of traditional and contemporary silver; in the evening he may be attending the lecture of an art historian. The profession of the silversmith requires intense training and much experience. It usually takes more than ten years until a degree of intellectual and technical ability is reached. Intensive training and a time spent at college are very helpful. But there is also the possibility to get an education along secondary paths—like all artists the silversmith learns his trade everywhere he wishes and throughout his life. Commercial ability is a great help indeed and he needs a talent to avoid the traps set by bureaucracy and by the existential needs to survive. There will always be serial products to satisfy the general demand for silver; besides this industrial production there is a niche where small workshops can establish themselves which make unique pieces as small services showing their own distinct style and expression. At present there is a surprising number of young people (mostly women) who try to establish themselves in a creative profession. It is unlikely that the job of a contemporary silversmith will yield great financial return; on the other hand it offers an attractive and relatively independent position in our society. ---


Plate ”round acanthus” Court jeweller H. J. Wilm, Berlin, ca. 1935 Sterling silver Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 310 Ferdinand Richard Wilm (director of H. J. Wilm 1912–1967) established the ”Deutsche Goldschmiedehaus” 1922 in Berlin and 1942 in Hanau

Silver Triennal—An International Exhibition Promoting the Contemporary Art of the Silversmith

CHRISTIANNE WEBER-STÖBER Chief Executive, Gesellschaft fuer Goldschmiedekunst, Hanau Already in 1932, in the year of her foundation, and in the following years, the German Association for Goldsmiths Art in Berlin began to promote the art of silversmithy through competitions and exhibitions. Today we are an international association. The themes of these exhibitions were for example: The silver vessel; 1933: The silver container; 1935/36: Vessel for the Olympian champion; 1942: Silver for the councils of German cities; 1951: A silver municipal plate; 1958/59: The silver coffee pot; 1959: The magic charm of the mirror; 1960: Silver vessel with enamel; 1963: The silver sports award. In the 60ies, the Association opened for the European countries. 1965 the series of exhibition “European Silver, hand made”, which was later on known as Silver Triennial, was started in cooperation with the Handwerksform Hannover. Ulla Stöver, who was at that time manager of the Association, wrote in the first catalogue: “The renewal of the art of silversmithy began with the consequent adjustment of the surface and intensiv work on the pure shape. Through Werkbund and Bauhaus Germany gained a leading position. The dogma of the 20ies, “form without ornament”, and the doctrine of the orthodox functionalism, to make the use to the only pre-condition for shaping, was pointed at the sins of the years of rapid expansion, of historism and misunderstood Art Nouveau. It was defined: Form is shape without ornament. But by omitting ornaments, the good form asked for is not automatically obtained, and mere functionalism leaves little margin for creative phantasie. In the process of creating handicraft, function and material are only the law that limits the task set before the artist. Within these limits, the artist is free to create whatever he wants and must.” From Germany, more than thirty artists showed secular and ecclesiastical silverware. Submissions also came from Great Britain, Scandinavia, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. With the return to a new style distinguished by clear lines and elimination of any decoration whatsoever, the Scandinavians, such as Karl Gustav Hansen, Sigurd Persson and the workshop of Georg Jensen, as well as the British, were at the head of the international competition. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Scandinivians were represented in greater number than the Germans at the second exhibition in 1968, on the theme “European Silver hand-wrought”. As three years earlier, forceful modeling, characterized by convincing simplicity prevailed among the northern artists. Silver works were combined with leather, horn, or transparent enamel. The Swede, Heinz Decker, for example, showed a sauce boat with a removeable handle of elkhorn. The concession to serial production may come as surprise, so the exhibition presented handwrought silver and some objects of serial production. Therefore critical remarks on the exhibited articles were also to be heard. “The perfection is nearly complete; traces of the processing are carefully erased. Silver hollow and flatware which were once usually one-of-a-kind and practically not reproduceable, are now almost exclusively models for the industry”. In 1974, the original concept of the Silver Triennial was enlarged with a further aspect: “it sets out to demonstrate the proximity of the artistically designed one-of-a-kind article to fine art. The framework of the earlier Silver Triennials were expandes intentionally; silver sculpture and objects such as trophies or sport awards were included for the first time.


Three years later, in 1977, the Swedish silversmiths played a prominent role, which can be traced to a great degree to the founding of a work-group of ten silversmiths in Stockholm. Among their most important objectives were the cooperative promotion of individual discoveries and goals, international contacts, and an international prize for a publication in gold and silversmiths’ art. When the Silver Triennial was organized for the sixth time in 1980, an extremely unfavorable situation dominated the silver market; the price of silver had risen from $ 5 to $ 50 per ounce. This time also, the Scandinavians captured a special spot in the Silver Triennial. In Denmark, leading silversmiths had also joined together in a group, called the “Danske Solvsmede”. They wanted to demonstrate to the public that in spite of the difficult conditions for subsistance, there were more and more Danish silversmiths making hand-wrought silver hollow and flatware according to their own form conceptions in their workshops. “All works should be executed by the silversmith himself, from the idea to the finished piece”, is stated in the charter. The “Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths” made available the British silversmiths’ masterpieces from their collection. This 800-year-old guild provides an important start-assistance for young gold and silversmiths through the granting of commissions. The purchased works are either included in the collection or donated to churches and universities, for example. At the Silver Triennial in 1986, nearly twice as much artists participated as in the years past. The use of silver-plated bronze for the first time at the Silver Triennial was rated as an absolute innovation. The large participation unfortunately did not bring with it an equally high quality in the work. The Silver Triennial of 1989 was a “remake” of the form dogmas of the Bauhaus: frequently the bodies of the pots were based on the sphere, triangle, or cone; the geometric forms were dissected and rejoined again arbitrarily. Until this triennial, the 9th performance, the organizers – the Deutsche Goldschmiedehaus Hanau and the Association for Goldsmiths Art – chose the pieces for the exhibition. On the occasion of the anniversary of the 10th Silver Triennial 1992, an international competition was announced, a jury chose the prize winners and the participants of the exhibition. 166 artists from 12 countries responded by submitting hollow and flatware or objects in silver to this competition. This triennial went back to the true purpose of furthering the art of silversmithy. Silver plated objects were not accepted. This ruling stands until today, the submission of silver-plated objects is only permitted for students and apprentices. In 1998 we received more than 300 works. The palette of the submitted silver works has been expanded by a number of pieces. In addition to the classic silverware such as beverage pots, tea and coffee services, place settings, vases, boxes, carafes, trays, warmers, and drinking vessels, many new ideas were realized in silver. Everything from cases for eye glasses, a rice wine bottle, an ensemble for breakfast cereal, a lobster set, a champagne cooler, a picnic set, a cocktail shaker, to a CD box Air Cooled, a secret hiding-place for chewing gum Incognito, or furniture fittings could be found. This year we organized the 13th Silver Triennial exhibition: Far more than 500 works were submitted by 217 artists from 24 different countries. This year, the Triennial is creating a new highlight: Ulla and Martin Kaufmann of Hildesheim offered a 5000 “Deutsch marks” prize to promote the next generation of silver artisans. Especially among the younger generation, a completely new starting point in the art of the silversmithy is demonstrated by one or the other of the works.The tasks are approached on an intellectual level; the result presents itself as a statement, as a comprehensive artistic endeavor which extends far beyond hand-created silver objects. A notably high number of participants came from Belgium, where an interesting environment for young silversmiths is developing. Christophe De Ranter of Belgium has been awarded the promotional prize for younger artisans for his “Dinner”: The work is enlivened by its conceptual idea and demonstrates the meeting point between fine art and applied art. The conceptual work by Christophe De Ranter cannot and should not fundamentally replace or dispute the classic art of the silversmith. In addition to the Silver Triennial in Hanau, many other events were established in the 90ies, which draw the attention to the international development of the scene of silversmithy. In1990, the silversmith Jan van Nouhuys from the Netherlands called into life the exhibition “Zilver in Beweging”. Two years ago, in Schoonhoven (site of the Vakschool Schoonhoven, the most important school in the country and a museum for the art of silversmithy) a gallery for contemporary art of silversmithy was opened. Next year, an international exhibition for silversmithy will be announced there.


1992 the Foundation for Gold- and silversmithy at Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, (Stiftung Gold- und Silberschmiedekunst, Dr. Angelika Ehmer, Franziskanergasse 6, D-73525 Schwäbisch Gmünd) announced a competition titled “Dinner for Two”. The Vlaams Institut voor het Zelfstanding ondernemen VIZO in Brüssel organized 1993 in Antwerpen an international exhibition titled “A Sparkling Party”, which caused furore with its extravagant staging. (VIZO Crafts Department, Johan Valcke, Kandelarijstraat 19, B- 1000 Brüssel). In Belgium, The Zilverzentrum Antwerpen, joined to the Provinciaal Museum Sterckshof, gained increasing importance in the last years. (Provinciaal Museum Sterckshof, -Zilvercentrum, Hoftvunderlei 160, B-2100 Deurne) In cooperation with the Provinciaal Diamond Museum a design competition for young silversmiths and jewellery designers aged between 20 and 29 was announced in 2000, titled “Twen in 2000 – Diamond and Silver Creations for the Twenty-First Century”. The silversmithy workshop titled “Silver for the table—vessels and utensils” organized 1999 by Gerda and Wilfried Moll in the Center for Culture at Salzau near Kiel, Germany must be also mentioned. An important promotor for the art of silversmithy since many years is the yearly art fair organized by the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Besides the activities already mentioned above, the Worshipful Company also organized in 1999 an important retrospective of the English art of silversmithy titled “Metalmorphosis - Tradition and Innovation in British Silver and Metalwork from 1880 to 1998”, an exhibition that was also shown in Germany, here in the Bröhan-Museum. (Worshipful Company, Goldsmiths’ Hall, Foster Lane London EC2V 6BN) Finally I want to finish my statement with some remarks on the Australian and American scene of silversmithy: The establishment of a gold- and silversmithing workshop at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in 1948, laid the foundation for an independent Australian development. In 1981, the Canberra School of Art opened a gold and silversmithing workshop. An international symposium in 1988 to coincide with the World Craft Council Conference in Australia was organised by the Canberra School of Art. A meeting of silversmiths under titled “Concepts and Realisation in Hollow-ware” was included in the symposium. In the United States, the contemporary art of silversmithy has also an outstanding position. There exists a “Society of American Silversmiths” which edits an own publication titled “American Silversmith”. (Society of American Silversmiths, PO Box 3599, Cranston, Rhode Island 0210, USA) ---


The Way to the Art Nouveau-silver—Stylistic preferences between Second Empire and Fin de Siècle by the example of Paris orders of table silver

CLAUDIA KANOWSKI Curator, Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig French metal art of the Art Nouveau stands out for a certain kind of formal criterions: elegant curves of the lines, organic forms and vegetable ornaments, decorations with female figures inspired by the symbolism. Here in the Bröhan-Museum, we can see examples for this (Emmanuel Orazi, Paul Follot, Maurice Dufrène, Georges de Feure). Artists from the English- and German speaking areas such as Christopher Dresser, Josef Hofmann and Bruno Paul produced completely different designs.

Chocolate Pot Maison Cardeilhac, Paris Design probably Lucien Bonvallet, ca. 1895 Silver (950/1000), ivory, painted green Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 348

I am especially interested in the roots of these special characteristics of the French Art Nouveau, the way, which leads from the Historicism- movement of the Second Empire and the early Troisième République to the forms of style of the Fin de Siècle. In my mind, researches and exhibitions should still more emphasize the links between both epochs—Historicism and Art Nouveau. I also believe that it is insufficient to understand the decorative art of the 19th century only by a descriptive analysis of styles: Neo-Classicism, Neo Gothic, Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque, Neo-Rococo and finally Art Nouveau. The study of this epoch only becomes interesting and convincing when the stylistic observations are related to the cultural-historical context. Only then we can find historical reasons for the development of styles, which never appear by chance. In the following I want to present some aspects of my doctoral thesis, which I finished in 1997 “Table silver for the bourgeoisie—production and customers of the Paris gold-smith companies Christofle and Odiot between Second Empire and Fin de Siècle”, which appeared last year (in 2000) in the Gebr. Mann Verlag Berlin. Both companies—Christofle and Odiot—still exist today in Paris and have extensive archive material, which I have evaluated for the research. In the 19th century extensive table decoration consisting of figured Surtouts de table, candelabras, Jardinières, dishes and plates, cutlery and coffee- and tea-services was of great importance for the private and the public representation. Unlike in former centuries, now the customers were not principally princes and aristocrats, but above all bankers and industrialists: table silver became a phenomenon of the bourgeoisie. The profound industrial and social changes also had an effect on the rather conservative sector of the art of the gold-smith. Modern techniques like the galvanic (electro-chemical) silver-plating gave the companies completely new possibilities. Charles Christofle, who founded his company in 1831, quickly recognised the chance to produce by means of the new industrial procedures table silver for a wider civil public as well. Christofle was the first company on the European continent that made use of the galvanic techniques for the serial production of table silver. The company’s printed catalogues in which since the 1850’s all the models and prices of the current production were listed, were part of the modern marketing concept of Christofle.


During the Second Empire, Christofle advanced to the position of a purveyor to the imperial court. Industrially silver-plated table decoration corresponded to the imperial ideology of progress formed by the Saintsimonismus. The tables in the Tuileries, the ministries and in the Paris city hall were decorated with tableware out of non precious metal, which was covered by an electrochemical procedure with a very thin film of silver and gold—the official France presented itself as well economical as modern. On the other hand, the rich Paris bankers preferred for the decoration of their tables silver from a traditional house like Odiot, which was one of the few French goldsmith-companies, which survived the French Revolution. During the 19th century, Odiot maintained the traditional techniques of handicraft. Hardly a name from the financial world is missing in the order books: André, Camondo, Fould-Furtado, Goldschmidt, Koechlin, Rothschild. It would appear that especially the upstarts from the new-bourgeois society searched for “remaining” in the sense of material values. Therefore they preferred to order their table silver at Odiot, often in an execution in solid silver. After the downfall of the Second Empire in 1870, the Company Christofle considered itself to be forced to change its image. The imperial house disappeared as a lucrative client. In the field of the decorative art, the initial enthusiasm for industrial techniques changed more and more to a consciousness on traditional craft values. Now the company Christofle stressed in its advertisements that they also produced solid silver products following drafts of artists—tendencies that led to the Art Nouveau (to mentioning just some key words: demand of honesty when using the material, vocation of well known artists by the companies, handicraft point of view by the martelé technique). Much more often than in the starting years, we can find now illustred names from the Paris society in the archives from Christofle (Manzanedo-Santoòa, Pereire, Marquise de Païva, Earl Henckel von Donnersmarck...). Even if the companies Christofle and Odiot were different in many aspects, particularly considering technical production and marketing strategies, we can nevertheless see from their products the same characteristics of design. The styles “from Versailles”—Louis XV and Louis XVI—were exemplary, but they were not copied in a slavish way. Two elementary tendencies can be noticed. At the time of the Second Empire the table silver in the Neo-Louis-XVI style or also (more seldom) in the Neo-Louis-XIV-style was particularly popular. By the end of the century, about 1880, people preferred silver in the Neo-Louis-XV-style with curved ornaments of the rococo. During the Second Empire the preference for the Louis-XVI-style had a prominent representative: Empress Eugénie. In a personal admiration for Marie-Antoinette, she let the castles in Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, Compiègne and of course in Paris be furnished with Louis-XVI-furniture. And typically for that period of Historicism, originals of the 18th century were mixed with new interpretations of the historical styles. The imperial preference of Louis-XVI, which already at that time led to the ironical description “style Louis-XVI-Impératrice”, has importantly influenced the bourgeoisie’s taste. The private orders of silver show that as well as the furnishing of the rich villas in Paris: Louis XVI was en vogue. The change of taste between the Second Empire and the Fin de Siècle can be seen clearly in two orders by the government for Christofle: Two Jardinières in plated silver from a table decoration ordered by Emperor Napoléon III at Christofle in 1866, and on the other hand a Jardinière Style Régence, plated silver, executed in 1889 by Christofle for the Elysée Palace in Paris. While the iconography of the jardinières remains unchanged (allegories of the four continents), the ornamentation is changing. The model from 1866 is orientated with its classicistic decoration on the style of Louis-XVI- and also on the style Empire. On the other hand the model from 1889 shows a moving, vegetable decoration in the style about 1740 (style Régence). Nevertheless, regarding this type of object, we will search in vain for a concrete example of the 18th century. The so-called corbeilles with a figurative decoration were new creations of the Historicism. They were often used as jardinières to present flowers and, at that time, had to be on every richly decorated table. Christofle’s and Odiot’s models were free and very imaginative interpretations of historical examples.


In the 1880-years, favouring the style of Louis-XV was accompanied by a tendency of a vegetable ornamentation. It is known that Japan’s art gave decisive ideas for the intensive treatment of the botany. But in this connection it should also be considered that the French artists and art-critics tried very much to connect inspirations from the far-east with the national art traditions. They did not ask for a revolution, but for a rejuvenation of the French style (“un rajeunissement des styles français”, quotation to be read in the report from the Paris World Exhibition in 1889 by Lucien Falize, himself goldsmith). It was the style from Louis-XV, which counted as originally “French” under the historical styles, especially because it had created an individual, vegetable ornamentation, which did not refer to classical examples. Therefore it offered the possibility to unite national and reformist arguments. Two examples from the Christofle’s production can show clearly that supposed “modern” models were created directly out of the Historicism- treasure of forms. In 1901 the President’s wife Madame Emile Loubet received a solid silver Surtout de table of several parts as a present of the Department Oise, made by Christofle. In its way of creating it was considered to be modern. The motto “La Forêt” determines the decoration: Female fauns and oak leaves on the central jardinière and the bowls, on the plates fruits which are typical for the seasons (strawberries, cherries, grapes and nuts)—no allegories any more, no concrete quotations of a historical style. Nevertheless, the comparison with the jardinières “Model Louis XV” out of the Christofle-sales catalogue from 1882 shows the narrow formal relationship: Here as there vegetable decorations, curved sides of the bowl, moving figures. In his report from the Paris World Exhibition in 1889, Lucien Falize praised the contemporary interpretations of the Louis-XV-style, like the models presented by Christofle. The following quotation from his report reflects that indeed Neo-Louis-XV was the favourite style at that time: “Nos orfèvres français sont tous au Rococo. (…) Ce que j’affirme, c’est qu’on a copié par toute l’Europe notre orfèvrerie du dix-huitième siècle et qu’on a jamais su la faire qu’à Paris.” (“Our French gold-smiths all adhere to the Rococo. (…) I want to emphasize that the whole of Europe has copied our art of orfèvrerie of the 18th century, however only in Paris you will find the capability of producing it.”) It is interesting that Falize lays stress on a Japanese inspired vase of glass by Emile Gallé with a bronze mounting in the Louis-XV-style from Froment-Meurice. Today one copy is in the Berlin Museum for arts and crafts. Falize described this vase as “peut-être l’œuvre la plus parfaite que nous ayons vue parmi les reminiscences du dix-huitième siècle” (the “perhaps most perfect work that we have seen under the reminiscences to the 18th century”). The author saw in this model the successful attempt to revitalize the French style tradition. If you think about the furniture design of Emile Gallé, Louis Majorelle or Eugène Gaillard, to be seen here in the Bröhan-Museum, it becomes clear that the Neo-Rococo-ornamentation was not replaced, but continued by the Art Nouveau. The stylistic observations, which I have presented here with a few examples, can be transmitted to other examples of the private inside furnishings in Paris. In my work I not only examined the table silver, but, if it was possible, also the architecture and the furnishings of the Hôtels particuliers, in which the clients lived. Especially compared to Germany I noticed how much the French Haute Bourgeoisie identified itself with the cultural heritage of the 18th century, the Ancien Régime. The governmental clients followed the ”Model of Versailles” as well as the companies, continuing an epoch during which the “French taste” was leading in Europe. In France there did not exist, contrary to the German Empire after 1871, the search for an own “civil style” (Bürgerstil). The courtly aristocratic example remained determining—even after the definite downfall of the monarchy and also when the Art Nouveau gained total acceptance.


Lidded Jug ”Oxalis” Christofle & Cie., Paris Design probably Henri Godin between 1901 and 1909 Pewter alloy (Gallia metal), cast, silverplate Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 349

I do not at all want to deny the innovation of the Art Nouveau. When searching for modern principles of furnishing, great impulses came from France. I only want to show the continuities that integrate the Art Nouveau firmly into the 19th century. Probably in nearly no other country the requirement for reconciliation of tradition and modern age was so strong as it was in France. Maybe, just the radical political revolutions and the rapid industrialization led to this strong re-insurance in the common cultural patrimony. ---


Thorvald Bindesbøll —an Innovator of Danish Silver

POUL DEDENROTH-SCHOU Director, Museet på Koldinghus, Kolding

”Artichoke Bowl” A. Michelsen, Copenhagen Design Thorvald Bindesbøll 1898 Sterling silver Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 57

The man Thorvald Bindesbøll was a key figure in Danish design, a man who created his own unique style on the basis of contemporary artistic trends and an extensive knowledge of the art of previous epochs and other cultures. Bindesbøll is Denmark’s most original designer to date, the Danish artist who has done most to open up new avenues of possibilities in the fields of ceramics and silver. Bindesbøll set new standards for work in crafts and design, and he was a leading figure in the developments that took place in the field of design at around the beginning of the twentieth century. His work still serves as a source of inspiration to this very day. Thorvald Bindesbøll was born on 21 July 1846 as son of Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll, the architect of Thorvaldsen’s Museum in Copenhagen. Thorvald was only ten years old at the time of his father’s death, but he inherited his father’s love and interest for art and architecture. He was born into a circle of contemporary aesthetes and beaux-esprits, including some of his father’s students, who eventually became his teachers at the Academy. He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1861 to 1876. And while studying here, Bindesbøll received his first independent architectural commission in 1874. In 1882 he managed to win the small gold medal, and in the same year he successfully applied for a travel scholarship to Northern Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Italy. Disappointment awaited him on his return home, however, because there were no architect assignments to be had. As a result, Bindesbøll had to seek other outlets for his creative talents. In fact, his entire life was to reflect the fact that working solely as an architect was by no means able to occupy his time nor to satisfy his need to express himself. As a result, Bindesbøll threw himself into all the many facets of working with crafts and design. From the early 1880’s Bindesbøll became seriously engaged in working with ceramics. Initially, Bindesbøll remained closely tied to Italian patterns decorated in the Classical style. Gradually, however, he was able to shed this influence and replace it by Far Eastern sources, and he then moved on to develop his own personal form of non-figurative art. In so doing, he placed himself apart from all others working with contemporary decorative art, both in Denmark and abroad. As time went on, Bindesbøll was to try out all aspects of the decorative arts, and all materials used. While studying at the Academy, he tried his hand at designing embroidery patterns for his sisters. From 1887 he designed bookbindings. From the 1890s he designed furniture and artistic metalwork. From 1898, he designed silverware for A. Michelsen, later for A. Dragsted and P. Hertz, all of Copenhagen, and last, but not least, for Holger Kyster in Kolding. Silverware gradually replaced pottery within the range of work Bindesbøll produced. However, it is a distinctive feature of all his work that he paid scant regard to the actual nature of the material he was working with at the time. As a result, the same characteristic decorative elements are to be seen on a cushion cover and the binding of a book, on a table leg and on a bronze candlestick, or on an item of silverware. For Bindesbøll it was the form that mastered the material, not vice versa. “There is no shape and no motif linked to any definite material”, Bindesbøll once said.


1900 was a year of triumph for Bindesbøll. This year he received full, official recognition in Denmark, when he was given responsibility for the preparation of the Danish section for craft and design at the World Exhibition in Paris, where he also displayed ceramics and silver of his own design. It was in his capacity as commissioner for the exhibition, however, that he was awarded a gold medal. His contemporaries were not yet ready to observe and recognise the genius that lay in his artistic work. In 1909, on the occasion of a small memorial exhibition for Bindesbøll, Mario Krohn wrote: “Bindesbøll himself was absolutely convinced that in the areas in which he was best, he was not new in the most profound sense of the word”. For posterity, Bindesbøll stands out as an artist who was able to release Danish art from the clutches of the styles of the previous centuries, and who was the first “modern” artist in Denmark. The style In Denmark, the break with previous historical traditions and the Classical styles has been designated the Skønvirke period, and is generally considered to stretch from 1880 to 1920. It corresponds to the English Arts & Crafts Movement, the German Jugendstil and the French Art Nouveau. Just as was the case outside Denmark, Skønvirke was a reaction to the growing supply of cheap and poorly worked mass produced-goods that industrialisation had made possible. Assessments of Bindesbøll’s significance have varied over the years, but his talent and impact has always been recognised. From his contemporaries he experienced rather negative reactions. In 1900 a critic wrote: “Thorvald Bindesbøll occupies a unique position among Danish architects. Regardless of whether this is justified or not, he is perhaps the most renowned of them all, and certainly the one most talked about. He has created a field for himself within crafts and design, a field that is his domain alone, and his excremental ornamental work has set root in people’s general awareness. To what extent he is really called to serve as the person to be the salt in Danish decorative art must remain unresolved, but the honour of having provided fresh fertiliser for its growth cannot be taken from him. He has a powerful, original talent”. In a similar tone, another critic warned visitors to the World Fair in Paris against believing that the fact that the Danish section of the exhibition had been set up by Bindesbøll, with the “doodles” that were so characteristic for him and his work, in any way made him representative of contemporary Danish art. “Bindesbøll’s artistic honour lies in his absolute personal integrity and in his rich decorative bilities, which on this particular occasion have made a favourable impression on so many people. But precisely because of his special artistic status, he cannot and should not be considered as a representative of the school of thought currently prevalent in Denmark”. As architects, both critics were among those used to working in a more traditional direction, so it is hardly surprising that they partly dissociated themselves from Bindesbøll in his break with historicism, though they were unable to deprive him of his significance. The general attitude at the time, however, seemed to be a preference for the well known and perhaps also for the new naturalism and its sense of the romantic, as expressed in the works of N. G. Henriksen and Harald Slott-Møller, both of A. Michelsen’s workshop. Bindesbøll was apparently too radical in his powerful new shapes and his rough-hewn ornamentation. In 1941, the director of the Danish Museum of Decorative Art, Vilhelm Slomann, characterised Bindesbøll’s efforts in a more unreservedly positive manner: “In the revival of design and crafts that followed the writing of Ruskin and the work of Morris, and which broke out from England into the major countries on the Continent and which formed the backdrop to what happened in the world of porcelain, books and silverware in Denmark, the work of Thorvald Bindesbøll figures as Denmark’s greatest artistic effort. He was the man who most strongly and most artistically fully understood what it was all about, and who brought the greatest talent to bear on dealing with the new assignments. He achieved less recognition abroad, on an international scale, than others among his contemporaries, but his impact within Denmark was greater than anyone else’s, and many will perhaps consider it too great. The fact that the Skønvirke style acquired a largely ornamental character in Denmark is due to the gifts displayed by Thorvald Bindesbøll”.


Posterity has fully backed Vilhelm Slomann’s assessment. Professor Nikolaus Pevsner calls Bindesbøll “the most original ceramic artist of his generation”. It has been said of Bindesbøll that if his efforts had been applied in the field of painting, his abstract imagery would have made him famous in the world at large at a much earlier point. His artistic abilities came to be applied in the world of the decorative arts, however, while it was only some years after his death that functionalism in Scandinavia developed “the smooth style”. Bindesbøll’s ornamented surfaces on ceramics, silver and bronze as well as in architecture were left to stand as an isolated rock rising above the surface of the river that rushed past and onwards with the undecorated as the main artistic idiom. “More than anyone else, he represented the watershed between the stucco exoticism of the previous period and the pragmatic classicism of our time, standing in the doorway between the carnival architecture of the nineteenth century and the smooth, white style of the twentieth century”. Bindesbøll drew his inspirations from a number of sources. His father and his artist friends had brought an awareness of the decorative arts of Antiquity back home from Rome. The wall-paintings from Pompeii provided motifs in their decorative works, while the black-and-white mosaic floors did not win a place in their art. It was Thorvald Bindesbøll instead who took up this source of inspiration in his black-and-white style, and his earliest ceramic works feature classical ornamentation. He had an intimate knowledge of later European art and the tracery of leaves from the Renaissance and the powerful relief effects and characteristic types of ornament from the late Baroque are all recognisable in many of Bindesbøll’s pieces of silverware and on his furniture. Other writers have focused on unfurling fern buds as the source of inspiration for one of Bindesbøll’s favourite motifs. The curled and rolled-up leaves that have a distinct resemblance to an ornament featured on an old Japanese sword decoration now in the Danish Museum of Decorative Art. Bindesbøll transformed this motif into the cloud ornaments so characteristic of his work. It was in fact at the very end of the nineteenth century that Oriental art became a significant source of renewal in European decorative art. The almost over-exaggerated naturalism of the Art Nouveau artists was clearly inspired by Japanese art and, although Bindesbøll only seldom employed naturalism as a form of expression, this Japanese inspiration is clear in works such as the vase with the large, foaming wave in Museet på Koldinghus. This was probably inspired by woodcuts by Hokusai (1760-1849) showing the Fuji-san volcano and the Great Wave. There are other examples, too, including a number of pieces of silverware, where individual cloud ornaments have been carefully and meticulously placed on smooth silver surfaces, such as a tea caddy in Koldinghus. A drawing from 1899 in A. Michelsen’s archives shows a similar use of individual ornamental features on an earthenware vase mounted with silver. Bindesbøll also made use of inspiration from Persian art, particularly as regards ways to fill out a base, a trend that moved in a different direction from the Japanese. Regardless of the sources of his inspiration, Bindesbøll was not an artist who merely copied the original source. He distilled the essence from what he had seen, and used it to create his own particular style that was in on sense a distillation of the basic principles of nature. “After having acquired a schooling in the decorative arts, the like of which probably no other Dane has ever had, he shrugged off everything he had learned and then produced a form of ornamental art that is both new and without equal in the Europe of his contemporaries or in the past. It is an art that is abstract, but yet is not built up of straight geometrical lines and circular forms. It is an art that has drawn on the forms of plant life that lie behind it to find a life-like, even life-filled, sense of movement that is carefully held in equilibrium within a clear, strong sense of the whole”. Bindesbøll and the silversmiths Just as was the case throughout most of Europe, Danish silverware design in the latter half of the nineteenth century was locked rigidly into the artistic idioms of times now past. The historical approach resulted in the re-use of Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and Empire styles in quick succession. In search of new inspiration, people began to seek as far back as the prehistoric. For silverware, the ornamentation of the Bronze Age and the Viking Age was to provide the new impulse. In Norway, ornamentation derived from the Viking Age in particular played a role in the Norwegian national regeneration that followed centuries of foreign rule by Denmark. In Denmark itself, however, Prehistory proved a dead end as a source of inspiration for the silversmiths.


The Nordic Exhibition in 1888 revealed that silverware had remained essentially static since 1872. The cultural historian R. F. Mejborg (1845-98) had already, in 1885, written (after mentioning Japanese art and after a reference to the collection of conches in the Zoological Museum as being suitable for decoration on silverware): “Moreover, I would like to take the liberty of suggesting to these gentlemen and craftsmen that there may well be good and distinctive motifs at hand around our own coastline, and that the delicate shades of colour in many types of seaweed might well be admirably suited to attractive new works of multi-coloured silverware”. However, more than a decade was to pass before any serious sense of renewal began to take effect. It is a remarkable fact that although William Morris had started his movement many years previously, and that furniture and ceramics had undergone their period of change in the 1880s, the renewal in working with silver only arrived towards the turn of the century, in Denmark as well as in the rest of Europe. It is also remarkable that the renewal within the silversmith’s craft in Denmark - the basis for Danish silverware’s internationally recognised position in the twentieth century - did not come from within the profession itself. It actually came from people with a completely different background altogether - Harald Slott-Møller (1864-1937), Mogens Ballin (1871-1914) and Johan Rohde (1856-1935) were painters, while N. G. Henriksen (1855-1922) and Georg Jensen (1866-1935) were sculptors, although the latter was also a trained silversmith, and Bindesbøll was an architect. This process of revival began in the A. Michelsen workshops, the largest and the leading silversmithy in Denmark. However, the real “modern breakthrough” came from the new workshops of Mogens Ballin, Georg Jensen and Holger Kyster. The growing body of criticism of poor quality, cheap silverware led to several of the manufacturers of silverware beginning to work with some of the leading contemporary artists in order to find designs that were suitable for industrial production, but which at the same time also maintained a certain level of artistic quality. The proprietor of the A. Michelsen workshops at that time, Carl Michelsen (1853-1921), was in the vanguard of the move towards renewal in the silversmith’s profession and he opened the doors of his workshops for new artists such as Harald Slott-Møller and Thorvald Bindesbøll. In the Paris Exhibition in 1900 a very large stand from the A. Michelsen workshops presented works of both historical and modern nature. However, it was the works of a historical nature and the more naturalistic works depicting motifs borrowed from nature that received most attention. The real modern renewal that lay in the work of Bindesbøll attracted less attention. At the time when Bindesbøll began design work for A. Michelsen, he was at the culmination of a career in ceramics, and his silverware proved strongly influenced by his work with clay. Bindesbøll’s dilemma was that he was able to implement his own intentions when working in clay, but when it came to silverware he was always dependent on the craftsmanship skills of the silversmith as a mediator between his sketches and the finished product. As one critic wrote about Slott-Møller and Bindesbøll: “One has to ignore the craftsmanship aspects and look solely at the artistic result, as these artists soon reveal their lack of technical knowledge about the material for which they produce designs”. In an obituary for Bindesbøll, professor Vilhelm Wanscher wrote: ”His ideal was that the craftsmen should themselves be in possession of so much culture that they could work independently. He himself put this ideal into practice in architecture and in his drawings and in his ceramics, whereas he can hardly be said to have achieved this freedom as a silversmith, because he was dependent on craftsmen who were not in tune with his methods and because he perhaps was tied”. Wanscher also felt that Bindesbøll made a mistake in transferring his botanical ornamentation to silverware, when it was really intended to work within the medium of drawing. Another critic, Pietro Krohn, director of the Museum of Decorative Art in Copenhagen, wrote: “His work in silver, executed at Michelsen’s, has powerful and categorical main shapes, and ornaments that correspond to these shapes and which were created as if to be implemented in metal. In his work, silver becomes solid and alive. The ornaments do not mean anything in particular, they tell no story, they merely serve to provide good decoration”. Slightly later, Frederik Kastor Hansen, himself a silversmith, wrote; “His designs for silverware are so incredibly alive and so impulsive that not even the most embarrassingly detailed examination can make the items completely boring and lifeless, as can be seen from those of his works that were produced in the larger workshops and factories”.


Today, despite everything said about Bindesbøll’s work, it must be said that his silverware, with its many different sources of inspiration, created a style that had a profound effect on the silverware of the Skønvirke period. In terms of both form and decoration, Bindesbøll provided a radical break with everything that had been seen earlier. His work had great influence on the decorative art in Denmark, and most decorative artists working in this period were directly influenced by his style - a style that with its powerful plasticity and intense textural effect left its mark on Danish silverware up until the 1920s, and which rapidly became sought-after by the silversmiths of the period. Bindesbøll began his collaboration with the A. Michelsen workshop in Copenhagen at the end of 1897 or early 1898, with the first drawings and designs dated February 1898. For Michelsen he designed hollowware, cutlery and jewellery. Shortly afterwards, he was also, but on a smaller scale, engaged in designing hollowware, cutlery and jewellery for the workshops of P. Hertz and A. Dragsted, both also in Copenhagen. From 1904 he worked solely with Holger Kyster in Kolding (hollowware, cutlery and jewellery) with the exception that from 1907 he also had cutlery and jewellery made by Rasmus Jensen in Horsens at Kyster’s suggestion. On 27 August 1908, Thorvald Bindesbøll died, almost literally with his designer’s pencil in his hand. From his sickbed a few days previously, he had send his last drawings for Holger Kyster. ---


From art deco to art nouveau dinanderie. When technical evolution go with stylistic evolution (see french original version below)

DOMINIQUE FOREST Conservator, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris During art nouveau and art deco period there was a great revival in french dinanderie. In 1902 Lucien Bonvallet, who is well known as the main reformer of art nouveau dinanderie, displayed for the first time many objects in copper repoussé work in the Salon of Society of Fine Arts. In 1913 Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris devoted a one man exhibition to him. If Lucien Bonvallet was a very influential pioneer at this period he was very quickly followed by others majors artists such as Henri Husson or Jean Dunand. He was also the one who introduced a type of objects: vases always constructed with a hammer and with naturalistic décoration. He was the first to use pure copper alone worked with a hammer. After having constructed the vase with a hammer he beats the metal from inside, so the decoration appeared in relief outside. This technique was used by many art nouveau dinandiers: Lucien Bonvallet but also Capon brothers, Mathieu Gallerey or Jean Dunand. If Bonvallet is hailed as the father of modern dinanderie, Henri Husson, the other important dinandier of the period was inspired by symbolist aesthetic; Saint John the Baptist plate in1909, bat vase in 1909, bat plate in 1905. Also in hammered copper his pieces were made in different ways: in repoussé, in pouring or inlaying copper in silver. If Husson shares his contemporaries the love of nature he was the only one to realise Des Esseintes passion for sickly plants. He worked copper and silver like a skin and his techniques were less simple than those of Bonvallet or Scheidecker. If Bonvallet was a virtuoso in copper repoussé work, Scheidecker was a virtuoso in the cutting of copper. The craftsman who bridged the two periods and the two styles was Jean Dunand. His lacquered dinanderies of twenties, thirties have usually been valued more highly than his work of the art deco period. Yet Dunand began work in 1905 and he created repoussé works which are very close of those of Bonvallet. Like his contemporaries he created flowers, animals and so on only by hammering the metal. His ability to work many kind of metals and his invention around 1907-1908 of incrustations coulées and new patina have made him the great master in art nouveau and art deco dinanderie. Few before the war, the number of dinandiers increased during next period. Jean Dunand changed this craft, traditionnaly associated with base metal into a great decorative art thanks to the size of his pieces and their somptuous decoration. The simple naked copper of the beginning of the centuty used by Bonvallet was dead, replaced by red, black and gold.. At the beginning of the century with the renewal of french dinanderie objects appeared with decoration in relief. Art deco dinanderie make a great change. Forms are flatened and a new type of décoration, usually geometrical, came hand with hand with incrustation and patina, sometimes also with lacquer or enamel. Around 1907-1908 Jean Dunand invented the technic of incrustations coulées which could be said to have “ennobled” anoblir in a way base metal with new colours totally unknown in traditionnal dinanderie. An artist like Claudius Linossier used the red patina as a signature. With their geometrical décoration, strong colors and lack of relief art deco dinanderie is quite different from pieces of 1900-1910. For dinanderie it’s really technical changes which is doing stylistical changes. Jean Serrière is really unique in that he goes on using simple copper without inlay and patina. In 1925 an art critic noted about dinanderie that “The only change is, except beautiful material, the one of frank and bright tones which brushes away pale harmonies of long ago”. Let us now return to the inlay technic which brought a complete change in dinanderie from 1910-1920. There are in fact two inlay techniques: l’incrustation au filet and l’incrustation coulée. L’incrustation au filet consists in inlaying the metal with a burin to put in the groove a metal thread which goes into the groove. The metal thread gives the pattern which can be either left in relief or levelled. Jean Dunand used this technique at the beginning of his carreer. Around 1907, 1908 he perfected the technique of incrustations coulées. Most dinandiers will use this technique of incrustation coulée. Most of dinandiers would use this new technique.This technique involves fixing one metal on another metal melting it at the lower temperature. When the metals are fully mixed, the dinandier adds the patina with a blowlamp and acid. These two processes (inlay and patina) gave dinanderie totally new colors.


The explosion of colors made possible by inlay and patina will increase further with the use of another pechnique: lacquer. Dunand earned this technique in 1912 and it became the foundation of his work after 1918. His most impressive work will derived from that; vases with wings like attachments, vases incrusted with eggshell. The discovery of these two techniques ( lacquer and mainly inlay coulées ) by french dinandiers brought a golden age of dinanderie in 1920-1930. The use of dinanderie diversified. For example it was used for furniture with Dunand; Above all many artists became interested in this “art of the past” as one art critic described dinanderie at the beginning of the century. Among art deco dinandiers we can name Jean Dunand, Claudius Linossier but also Laurent Llaurensou, Paul Louis Mergier. The famous goldsmith Christofle created a dinanderie collection designed by Luc Lanel.

Vase ”Ecailles” (Scales) Christofle & Cie., Paris Design Luc Lanel before 1926 Copper, partially silverplate Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 353

This interest of a great goldsmith in dinanderie reveals the extent to which it had won over a large public; Dinanderies by Christofle were not however unique pieces constructed with the hammer like the artisanal pieces They were made by using mechanical procedures and consequently in considerable number. One can thus say that within a matter of a few years the technical evolution of dinanderie was accompanied by a truly spectacular stylistic development and at the same time by an unprecedented enthusiasm for the technique.

De la dinanderie art deco à la dinanderie nouveau. Quand l'évolution technique accompagne l'évolution stylistique

La dinanderie française va connaître dans la période art nouveau art déco un très grand renouveau. En 1902 Lucien Bonvallet, que tous saluent comme le rénovateur de la dinanderie art nouveau, expose pour la première fois de nombreux cuivres repoussés au Salon de la Société des Beaux Arts et en 1913 le musée des arts décoratifs de Paris lui consacre une exposition personnelle. Si Lucien Bonvallet fut dans cette période un pionnier très vite suivi par deux autres artistes majeurs: Henri Husson et Jean Dunand, il fut aussi celui qui imposa un certain type de pièces: des vases toujours montés au marteau au décor naturaliste repoussé. Le premier il fait la part belle au cuivre nu simplement travaillé au marteau. Après avoir monté la pièce au marteau, sa technique consiste à repousser le métal par l’intérieur de manière à ce que le motif apparaisse en saillie à l’extérieur. Cette technique va être utilisée par de nombreux dinandiers art nouveau: Lucien Bonvallet mais aussi les frères Capon, Mathieu Gallerey ou Jean Dunand. Si Bonvallet est salué comme le père de la dinanderie moderne Henri Husson, l’autre très grand dinandier de cette période, va ancre son œuvre dans l’esthétique symboliste: plat Tête de Saint Jean Baptiste de 1909, vase chauve souris de 1909, assiette chauve souris vers 1905. Egalement en cuivre martelé les décors de ses pièces sont obtenus de plusieurs manières: au repoussé, en coulant ou en incrustant de l’argent. Si Husson partage avec ses contemporains le goût de de la nature lui seul a su donner vie à la passion de Des Esseintes, le héros de Huysmans, pour les plantes délétères. Il traite le cuivre et l'argent comme un épiderme et ses techniques sont moins simples que celles d’un Bonvallet ou d’un Scheidecker. Si Bonvallet est un virtuose du cuivre repoussé, Scheidecker est un virtuose du cuivre découpé.


Celui qui va faire la transition entre deux époques et entre deux styles est Jean Dunand. Ses dinanderies laquées des années 20 –30 ont souvent éclipsées son travail d’avant la guerre, pourtant Dunand est actif dès 1905 et il réalise alors des œuvres au repoussé très proches de celles de Bonvallet. Comme ses contemporains il fait naître fleurs et animaux du seul martelage du métal. Sa capacité à travailler toutes sortes de métaux et son invention vers 1907-1908 des incrustations coulées et de nouvelles patines en font le grand maître de la dinanderie art nouveau et art déco. Peu élevé avant la guerre le nombre des dinandiers s'acrroit dans la période suivante. Jean Dunand transforme cet art, qui est théoriquement un artisanat des métaux pauvres, en un art d'apparat par la taille des pièces mais surtout par la richesse des décors. Fini le cuivre nu du début du siècle comme pouvait l'utiliser Bonvallet. Vive le rouge, le noir et l'or! Comme nous l’avons vu le renouveau de la dinanderie au début du siècle avait vu l'apparition d'œuvres repoussées et ciselées, cette technique permettant d’obtenir des motifs en relief qui dispensaient de tout autre ajout. La dinanderie art déco opére un changement radical. Les formes s’aplanissent et les décors, généralement géométriques, sont obtenus par incrustations et patines, parfois aussi par laque ou émail. Vers 1907-1908 Jean Dunand inaugure la technique des incrustations coulées qui permet d’ »annoblir » en quelque sorte les métaux pauvres grâce à des couleurs totalement inconnnues dans la dinanderie traditionnelle. Un artiste comme Claudius Linossier fera du rouge sa véritable Signature. Par leur décor géométrique, leurs couleurs franches et l’absence de tout relief la dinanderie art déco tranche singulièrement avec toutes les pièces des années 1900-1910. On peut dire que dans le cas de la dinanderie c’est vraiment un changement de technique qui a accompagné un changement stylistique. Si un artiste comme Jean Serrière continue à préférer le cuivre nu et brut sans incrustations et patines, c’est un cas unique. En 1925 un critique note à propos de la dinanderie que « Le seul divertissement admis est, outre le jeu des belles matières celui des tons francs et vifs qui ont chassés les pâles harmonies d’autrefois ». Peut être faut-il revenir sur la technique des incrustations à l’origine d’une complète métamorphose de la dinanderie à partir des années 1910-1920. Il existe en fait deux techniques d’incrustation: l’incrustation au filet et l’incrustation coulée. L’incrustation au filet consiste à entailler le métal à l’aide d’un burin puis à mettre dans le sillon ainsi creusé un fil métallique qui, frappé, entre dans l’entaille. Le fil donne alors un motif que l’on peut soit laisser en relief soit aplanir au même niveau. Jean Dunand utilise cette technique au début de sa carrière. Surtout vers 1907-1908 il met au point la technique des incrustations coulées. Et la plupart des dinandiers uriliseront ensuite cette technique qui va véritablement révolutionner la dinanderie. Il s’agit de fixer sur le métal un autre métal en le fondant à une température moindre. Quand les métaux sont fondus le dinandier va ensuite patiner au chalumeau et à l’acide la pièce. Ce sont ces deux procédés (incrustation et patine) qui donnent à la dinanderie des couleurs aussi variées et tout à fait inconnues jusque là. L’irruption de la couleur rendue possible dans la dinanderie par les incrustations et les patines va aller grandissant avec l’utilisation d’une autre technique: la laque. Dunand s’initie à cette technique dès 1912 mais celle-ci ne devient la base de son travail qu’après 1918. Ses réalisations les plus spectaculaires naîtront de là; vases à ailettes, vases incrustés de coquilles d’œuf.


La découverte de ces deux techniques, la laque et surtout les incrustations coulées, par les dinandiers français va donc permettre un véritable âge d’or de la dinanderie dans ces années 1920-1930. D’une part les applications de la dinanderie se diversifient. Elle est par exemple utilisée pour du mobilier en particulier avec Jean Dunand. Surtout de très nombreux artiste s’intéressent à cet « art d’autrefois » comme la critique qualifiait la dinanderie au début du siècle. Parmi les grands dinandiers art déco nous pouvons citer Dunand et Linossier mais aussi Laurent Llaurensou, Paul Louis Mergier. Surtout une maison d’orfevrerie comme Christofle va créer une ligne dinanderie dessinée par Luc Lanel. Cet intérêt d’une grande maison d’orfèvrerie pour la dinanderie montre bien à quel point cet art a su conquérir un vaste public. Les dinanderies de Christofle ne sont pas des pièces uniques montées au marteau comme dans le cas des productions artisanales que nous avons vues jusque là mais des pièces ayant recours à des procédés mécaniques pour pouvoir être produit en plus grand nombre. On peut donc dire qu’en quelques années seulement l’évolution technique de la dinanderie s’est accompagné d’une évolution stylistique tout à fait spectaculaire et du même coup d’un engouement sans précédent pour cette technique. ---


Jean E. Puiforcat: New Discoveries GAIL S. DAVIDSON Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York The French silversmith, Jean E. Puiforcat (1897-1945), ranks among the greatest twentieth-century designers of silver tabletop objects. This paper discusses a recent gift to Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution of more than one hundred Jean E. Puiforcat drawings, as weIl as archival documents and photographs, and how this material adds to our knowledge of this great master of modern silver. Puiforcat began his professional career following World War I, at a critical time for French decorative arts industries. Stung by the successful 1910 showing in Paris of modern German design, critics challenged French designers to create new forms expressive of contemporary life that would restore to France the leadership position it had always held in decorative arts and design. Jean E. Puiforcat was one of several French silversmiths who experimented with the “new” hollowware designs and flatware. Working in a reductivist process between 1921 and 1923, he pared-down any applied historicist or art nouveau vegetal ornament on his silver models and adopted simple, classical fluting that emphasized the swelling volumes and curving contours of his vessels. Before the 1925 Paris Exposition International des Ans Décoratifs et Modernes, Puiforcat invented dramatic cubist-inspired centerpieces and tea services with stepped bases and angular bodies augmented with wood or semiprecious stones. When these objects were exhibited at the 1925 Paris Exposition, Puiforcat was hailed as the major French silver designer of his time. But his greatest achievements were to come. While drawn to geometric forms in mid-1920s, it was only in the late 1920s that Puiforcat became more knowledgeable about using mathematics to achieve perfect, precisely calculated, spare, geometric volumes. Mathematics and science had been common interests among French avant-garde painters, architects, and designers since the late teens. Puiforcat must have become interested in mathematics through conversations with his designer friends and colleagues including Pierre Chareau, René Herbst. He also would have read or heard about Le Corbusier’s interest in the golden section and its application to architecture. He could weIl have known Matila Ghyka’s discussion of design and the golden section in his 1927 book Esthétique des Proportions dans La Nature et dans Les Arts (Paris, Gallimard). The golden section (described as the division of a line so that the smaller section is to the larger section as the larger section is to the length of the whole line) is also known as “divine proportion” since this ratio, according to the Greeks, was found in every living object, induding the movements of the planets. The impact on Puiforcat of the current vogue for matbematics appears in his silver pieces of 1927–1929 when he created his sparest and purest objects, such as a 1929 Silver Vase (collection Torsten Bröhan) in the form of a cylinder intersected by a three-dimensional parallelogram. By late 1929 and certainly by 1930, just at the moment when he became a founding member of the avant-garde design group Union des Artistes Modernes, Puiforcat began to incorporate the golden section and other mathematical ratios in the design process. His more sophisticated application of mathematical proportions is documented in the drawings now owned by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. A Design for a Silver Box, 1934 (1995-164-43), for example, shows the mathematical tracing lines, that Puiforcat called “traces harmoniques”, underlying the composition of the box. Furthermore, in the drawing’s lower right corner, the draftsman included the Greek letter phi symbolizing the golden section. The creator of this drawing would have been one of the employees at Puiforcat Orfèvre, who the designer presumably trained in making the necessary mathematical calculations to prepare such a drawing. The silversmith was living and working most of the time in St. Jean-de-Luz where in 1929 he had built a house for his family. He probably sent bis rough design sketches to Paris where assistants prepared drawings to “correct” the proportions of the designs so they conformed to the required mathematical ratios. Mathematics and the golden section appealed to Puiforcat’s own aesthetic and strong religious beliefs. In addition, he discovered that he could market himself and the uniqueness of his silver creations by stressing the mathematical purity of his designs as compared with those of contemporary French silver firms.


The Art of Adaptation—Aspects of 20th Century Danish Silver JÖRG SCHWANDT Expert in Danish Silver and Art Dealer, Berlin Danish silver would never have attained its prominent role in the 20th century if it had not been for the great success of the Georg Jensen Silversmithy. Like an enormous flagship the Jensen Silversmithy has been ploughing the waves, allowing a number of other silversmithies to follow in its wake. But it is often forgotten that there existed a much smaller piloting vessel that consequently went ahead to show the new way. And it is just as often overseen that at certain times the flagship fell back and had to leave the leading role to one or another of the smaller ships. Be it piloting ship, flagship or those taking the lead in between, Danish silver has a common trait. That is the ability to recognize an important artistical or technical change, often occuring in another country, even in another material, and, instead of copying a style slavishly, adapting it to the given artistic and technical possibilities and thus transferring the very idea of it. Adaptation not in the sense of imitating a successful style but in the sense of transporting an idea to keep it alive on a new feeding ground.

Vase Mogens Ballin, Copenhagen, design pre-1907, execution 1915 Cast pewter Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 12

The piloting ship was the metal workshop of the symbolistic painter Mogens Ballin. When he in 1899 transferred the revolutionary “arts and crafts” principle to Danish metalwork, his way of adaptation was both a stylistical and a sociological renewal. The stylistical change towards symbolism, much influenced by japonism, is not so bold and can be found in Bindesbøll’s, later Jensen’s works and certainly in the Viennese school. Much more important, and already at that time showing one of the significant lines of development in Danish 20th century silver, was the sociological change. Simple materials like pewter or silver and cabochon-finished gem stones, and a mildly rationalized way of handicrafting opened the way to a broad bourgeois clientele. A way, which Georg Jensen, who from 1901 until 1904 was head of Ballin’s workshop, continued when he opened his own workshop in 1904. Building upon Ballin’s special ability to show the material character of silver, Jensen introduced his very special floral naturalism. A naturalism, baroque at times, very controlled and stylized at other times, but always of an enormous technical solidity. Most of the Jensen Silversmithy’s success can be attributed to this specific Jensen-style, which kept echoeing through Europe until long after the art nouveau period’s end. However, nearly one hundred years of successful survival of a vulnerable thing like a silversmithy would never have been possible without considerable organisational adaptations which Jensen willingly undertook or was forced to do.


Footed Bowl Georg Jensen sølvsmede, Copenhagen Design Georg Jensen 1912 Silver Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 37

The technical and economical part of the smithy’s reorganisation begins with a reasonable rationalization of production, where handicraft is tedious and inefficient. Further steps towards a manufactural enlargement, taken by Jensen already after a few years, are serial production, a widening of the capital basis by issueing stocks, and a market expansion throughout Europe’s leading capitals. Perhaps the most important adaptation, securing the survival of the Jensen Silversmithy, has been a graduate but constant change of style, which early breaks away from art nouveau’s ample decorations. Johan Rohde, painter and furniture designer, introduced an architectural strictness, which eventually confined the decorative elements to few technically or statically important places. Preparing the smithy for the art déco and functionalist periods, when the classical decorative style of Jensen himself was full alive. Such diversity of style was consequently developed by working with silversmiths and designers of differing expressions. Paired with great technical solidity as sign of corporate identity, artistical diversity proved to be the best guarantee for a constant adaptation process. Up to the middle of the century Denmark was a small country with a population mostly orientated on agriculture. So, in 1925, there was no considerable mundane upperclass to spend a lot of money on luxuries, like for example in France. That is why there was no chance for the demonstratively luxurious type of art déco silver to develop in Denmark. In spite, there was a clear tendency towards a sober functionalism, showing in Kay Fisker’s jug of 1927 for A. Michelsen Silversmithy, which is spun in one piece. And there was an enormous interest for the Bauhaus ideal of rationalized production with its new aesthetics.

Wine Jug A. Michelsen, Copenhagen Design Kay Fisker, ca. 1927 Sterling silver Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 60

Again, from 1928 onwards, at the Frantz Hingelberg Silversmithy in Århus, a Danish silversmith, Svend Weihrauch, grasped a revolutional idea, the Bauhaus idea, and adapted it to the daily production of the typical little craftsman workshop.


Tea Pot Hingelberg silversmithy, Aarhus Design Svend Weihrauch, 1938 Sterling silver, ebonite Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 33

The consequent use of rationalizing techniques like spinning, of rationalizing work organisation (division of labour) and of the synthetic material ebonite to rationalize the making of isolated handles, and at the same time refraining from a possible serial production, brought about surprising aesthetic results. What was experimental and sporadic at the Bauhaus metal workshop, developed consequently in the hands of Weihrauch and became a new kind of craftsman-culture. A craftsman-culture which Weihrauch carried on from the stereometrical forms of the 1930’ies to the organical forms of the 40’ies and 50’ies. Probably not the last example of successful adaptation in Danish silver, but certainly one we Germans must be thankful for. By keeping the Bauhaus ideals alive, Weihrauch gave us the chance to pick up a thread of aesthetic culture, which we so brutally have cut off. Selected publications by Jörg Schwandt: · WMF Glas - Keramik - Metall 1925-1950. Versuche künstlerischer Gestaltung, exhib. cat. Berlin

(Kunstgewerbemuseum) e. a. 1980/81 · Dänisches Silber des 20. Jahrhunderts. Teil I: Der Weg zum Jensen-Stil. Teil II: Funktionalismus,

dreißiger und vierziger Jahre. Teil III: Fünfziger und sechziger Jahre, in: Weltkunst 57 (1987) Nr. 22-24, pp. 3412-3415, 3590-3593 and 3686-3689

· Svend Weihrauch 1928-1956. Silber. Ein dänischer Funktionalist (Skrifter fra Museet på Koldinghus 4), exhib. cat. Kolding (Museet på Koldinghus) - Leipzig (Grassimuseum) - Köln (Museum für Angewandte Kunst) 1998, Kolding 1998

· together with Poul Dedenroth-Schou and Bent Gabrielsen: Karl Gustav Hansen. Silber 1930-1994, exhib. cat. Kolding 1994

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The Provinciaal Museum Sterckshof is one of the very few institutions in Europe providing a department exclusively devoted to silver. It thereby emphasizes and helps to revive the rank that silver always had in the representation of a houshold.

Teapot ”Mireille” Wolfers Frères, Brussels Design Philippe Wolfers (?), ca. 1926 Silver (833/1000), palisander Bröhan-Museum, Berlin Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 8

List of Publications on Metalware WIM NYS scientific assistant, Provinciaal Museum Sterckshof-Zilvercentrum, Deurne · M. Ceuterick & W. Nys, Augsburgs zilver in België = L'orfèvrerie d'Augsbourg en Belgique =

Augsburger Goldschmiedekunst in Belgien = Augsburg Silver in Belgium, Antwerpen, 1994. · R. Steel & W. Nys, Art-decozilver: Antwerpen - Brussel - Gent = Art Deco Silver: Antwerp - Brussels -

Ghent, (Sterckshof Studies ; 3), Antwerpen, 1996. Bevat: W. Nys, Tentoonstellingen tijdens het interbellum en hun invloed op de ontwikkeling van de Belgische art-deco-edelsmeedkunst = Exhibitions during the interwar period and their influence on the development of Belgium's art deco silver production, p. 47-61.

· W. Nys, Het edelsmeedwerk, in: A. Demey, D. De Smet, K. Goethals & W. Nys, De Sint-Antoniuskerk te Sint-Niklaas : drie eeuwen sobere barok,(Kleine cultuurgidsen), Gent, 1996, p. 59-64.

· W. Nys, Zilver uit de 18de, de 19de en de 20ste eeuw, in: N. Van Campenhout & R. Van Daele (red.), Van academie tot museum : een bundel studies n.a.v. het eeuwfeest van het Stedelijk Museum van Lokeren, Brugge, 1996, p. 93-97.

· W. Nys, 18de-eeuws Bevers zilver ? : enkele bedenkingen omtrent de ‘zilversmid’ Joannes Wilhelmus Heck en de horlogemaker Petrus Franciscus de Dobbelaer te Beveren, in: Het Land van Beveren, jg. 40 (1997) nr. 1, p. 23-28.

· W. Nys, Twee werken van Nicolas Joseph Rosart (ca. 1713-1750) in de Sint-Laurentiuskerk te Lokeren ?, in: De Souvereinen, jg. 28 (1997) nr. 1, p. 1-10.

· W. Nys, De Brusselse meester met vis : Dieudonné Robert, subaltern zilversmid voor Temse vanaf 1750, in: Jaarboek Gemeentemuseum van Temse. Jaarboek 1996, Temse, 1997, p. 41-61.

· W. Nys, De Wase edelsmeden in de 18de eeuw : een status quaestionis, in: Annalen van de Koninklijke Oudheidkundige Kring van het Land van Waas, dl. 100 (1997), p. 105-177.

· L. De Ren, A.-M. Claessens-Peré & W. Nys, De Zilvercollectie = The Silver Collection, (Sterckshof Studies ; 9), Antwerpen, 1997.

· W. Nys, Van belle époque tot art nouveau = De la Belle époque à l'Art Nouveau = Von der Belle époque zum Jugendstil = From Belle époque to Art Nouveau. Belgisch zilver 1868-1914 = L'orfèvrerie belge 1868-1914 = Belgisches Silber 1868-1914 =Belgian silver 1868-1914, (Sterckshof Studies 10), Antwerpen, 1998.

· W. Meuris & W. Nys, Merkwaardige kerkschatten van de Sint-Jacobuskerk van Haasdonk, in: A. De Witte & W. Van Dam, Catalogus bij de tentoonstelling Herinneringen aan de Boerenkrijg en merkwaardige kerkschatten te Haasdonk. 12, 13, 19, 20 september 1998 Sint-Jacobuskerk, Haasdonk, Haasdonk, 1998.

· W. Nys, Fleurons de l'orfèvrerie belge de la Belle Epoque, in: L'objet d'art, nr. 328, oktober 1998, p. 10-11.

· W. Nys, “Eenen silveren cop ofte ciborie” bij testament aan de Sint-Martinuskerk van Beveren geschonken (1768), in: Het Land van Beveren, jg. 41 (1998) nr. 4, p. 153-155.

· W. Nys (m.m.v. F. Buys & P. Verheyen), Petrus Nijs (1798-1849) zilversmid te Beveren, in: Het Land van Beveren, jg. 42 (1999) nr. 1, p. 30-34.


· W. Nys, Edelsmeedwerk Abdij Keizersberg, in: Wandelcataloog bij de tentoonstelling “100 jaar Abdij Keizersberg. 1899-1999, Leuven, 1999, p. 22-26, nrs 115-132.

· W. Nys, Koninklijk zilver voor volk en vorst. 1830-2000, in: Bulletin VPMA, 15 (2000) 3, p. 5. · W. Nys, Technische tekeningen uit het atelier Simonet en Vansteeger (Brussel) naar schenkkannen van

Petrus Gabriël Germain en Joseph Germain Dutalis (Brussel), in: J.-P. Van Rijen (red.), De Stavelij in zilver. 25 jaar zilverclub, s.l., 2000, p. 301-304.

· W. Nys, Aanwinsten Provinciaal Museum Sterckshof-Zilvercentrum, in: Newsletter, 15, p. 28-31. · W. Nys, Koninklijk zilver voor volk en vorst = Orfèvrerie royale pour le peuple et le roi = Königliches

Silber für Volk und König = Royal Silver for People and King, (Sterckshof Studies ; 17), Antwerpen-Deurne, 2001.

· W. Nys, Koninklijk zilver uit de prijzenkast van het 11e linieregiment. De ‘Coupe du Roi Albert’ en de ‘Coupe Prince Léopold’, (Kunst in de kijker 103), Hasselt, 2001.

· W. Nys, Ontwerpen voor zilver = Designs for silver, (Sterckshof Studies 18), Antwerpen-Deurne, 2001. · W. Nys, Een koninklijk geschenk voor de Abdij Keizersberg te Leuven. Edelsmeedwerk van Dom

Martin (1889-1965) door koningin Elisabeth (1876-1965) aan de Abdij Keizersberg te Leuven geschonken, in: Bulletin VPMA, 15 (2000) 4, p. 3-4.

· W. Nys, Edelsmeedwerk voor de Lokerse Sint-Laurentiuskerk, in: N. Van Campenhout, De Sint-Laurentiuskerk te Lokeren in woord en beeld, Lokeren, 2001, p. 116-134.

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Functionalism? Formalism? Questioning Marianne Brandt’s Tea-infuser

KLAUS WEBER Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin My intention is to give a closer look at and some short reflections about one of the icons of 20th century design, an object synonymous with the so called Bauhaus style: Marianne Brandt’s famous tea infuser, designed in 1924 and made in the Bauhaus metal workshop as model number MT 49. An icon—there is a quite inflationary use of this word nowadays—, generally is an object not only highly estimated and admired, but first of all an object of worship or veneration. In the case of our teapot this admiration and—in a way—even veneration is manifest in the fascination of our visitors by this small object, and in the numberless quotations or illustrations in books on modern design. It appears—for example—most prominently on the cover of the British Museum catalogue on Modern Decorative Arts, and of course on the cover of Marianne Brandt's biography published last year. And the poster the Bauhaus-Archiv produced for the metalwork exhibition of 1992, using a blow up of the infuser, was among our best sold posters ever. No question that it had to be placed on our own catalogue cover, too. In Sotheby's Concise Encyclopedia of Silver it is used as a frontispice and combined with Giulio Romano's mannerist painting of a mythological festivity (The Banquet of Psyche) gathered around a fantastic treasure of gold and silver. Finally in 1998 the image of Marianne Brandt's infuser reached the top of its popularity and its maximum of circulation as well being used on a postage stamp of the German mail. And of course this high estimation is reflected by high prices: The last version on the market (in silver) has been sold by Lempertz, Cologne, for no less than DM 340 000 in 1997, another silver version for about a quarter of a million Dutch Guilders at Christie's Amsterdam in 1989: both belonging to the highest prices ever paid for single objects from the Bauhaus workshops. And finally there are fakes. Not yet false marianne Brandt teapots, as far as I can see. But at least we have been confronted with a most doubtful drawing representing some very peculiar tea infusers and pretending to be made by Marianne Brandt in 1924. The Bauhaus-Archiv keeps one version of the small teapot made of brass, further versions in non-precious metals are treasured in the collections of the Bauhaus Museum Weimar and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, both made of bronze for the body and nickel silver for foot and spout. The British Museum keeps a fine silver version. Finally there has been another slightly different version, documented only in photographs from 1925. So we know at least seven versions in all today, possibly there have been a few more: a small number, indeed, according to the intention of industrial mass production so often declared as a program at the Bauhaus. But it is much in relation to other products coming from the metal workshop: many of these things were made as unique prototypes only. The purpose of the small teapot is to keep a strong infusion of tea, to be thinned down with hot water. Its size is that of a teacup, the total height from the base to the upper tip of the handle being about 7,5 cm (measure is taken from our piece, the different versions are varying in size only up to a few millimeters). The hand raised body, standing on a cross-shaped base, has a hemispherical shape with a flat top, the diameter is 10 cm (H 5 cm). The opening framed by a low cylindrical rim is placed excentrically near the handle, and closed by a flat inserted lid with a cylindrical knob in our version. A pierced silver strainer is inside.The short tubular spout is slightly narrowing towards the horizontal mouth. The ebony handle is mounted tangentially in a rectangular position. In our copy it doesn’t show the exact semicircular form of the other versions: here the curved outline is slightly irregular. 1st question: Is it functionalistic design? Perhaps we should start with a definition of the term functionalism. Last year the Bauhaus Archive presented the work of the famous Japanese graphic designer Ikko Tanaka. He found a very simple definition for what he tried to do in designing elements of corporate identity for his customers: “Easy to


draw and easy to use”. Adapted to our subject this would mean: easy to make and easy to use. This certainly cannot be said, for example, about a teapot by Theodor Wende, made in the same period as our tea infuser, but nevertheless labelled “functionalistic” in a recent publication. It certainly is not easy to make, nor easy to use. If we apply usability as a criterion of functionalism to our teapot, than there is, perhaps contrary to some expectations, a quite acceptable result. It pours out the liquid without dripping (to be true, I dared to try some years ago, and very carefully, indeed). Marianne Brandt herself once reported that no vessel left the metal workshop without a pouring test. Perhaps the shape of the small handle to be held between thumb and first finger is not an ideal solution from the using point of view. And maybe the centre of gravity is not in the ideal place, but I think that all this can be neglected in view of the very small amount of liquid in the pot. There has been given a functional reason, too, for the excentric position of the opening: In an essay written by Wagenfeld in 1924 he told, that this should prevent dripping when holding the pot too steep. But in fact this hardly seems necessary if the lid is stucked in the opening, thus hermetically closed. If we take a simple production process, also compatible to machine production, as criterion of functionalism, than our teapot can hardly be called functional. It does look very simple at the first sight, but in fact there are too many components shaped too complicated. All these components have to be assembled with a lot of handwork and very precisely: the foot, for example, is made of three separate parts, which have to be cut out one by one to fit to the profile of the body, then arranged to form the cross shape and finally soldered to the bottom. A simple ring certainly would do it better and easier as well. The exactly formed halfsphere of the body had to be hand-raised, because there were no machines for spinning in the metal workshop at this time. There always has been a fundamental error at the Bauhaus workshops in believing that simple—and this meant geometric—forms could also be simply made and, in consequence, produced industrially. The infuser definitely is a work of handcraft, to be done by a trained silversmith, requiring a considerable amount of time. In fact there has never been, as far as we know, any interest by an industrial manufacturer to produce this model. This scepticism continues even in our days: Alberto Alessi, making the choice from our metal objects for a reedition of Bauhaus metalwork, really loved the infuser, but he told us: even with modern technologies the making would be far to complicated to sell it at a reasonnable price. In fact Alessi had to solve a lot of technical problems to produce some other apparently simple designs from the Bauhaus, as for example Marianne Brandt’s ashtray, also based on a hemisphere, or Przyrembels purely cylindric tea container. And anyway “nobody needs a tea infuser today”, he said. In fact there has been a striking fascination with tea utensils, tea machines and samovars at the Bauhaus. We know at least five types of these machines from the metal workshop designed by Jukker, Wagenfeld, Josef Knau, Gyula Pap and by Marianne Brandt, too. Normally the Samovar includes a small teapot for the infusion. Brandt's model is an extract teapot to be used independently, without samovar. Hardly anybody will prepare his tea this way today. 2nd question: Is it formalistic? Reduction to a vocabulary of elementary forms is a basic feature of Bauhaus products. It has two preconditions: Johannes Ittens studies of primary form in his famous basic course were continued in the workshops. One of the standard exercises there was constructing a vessel out of cylinder, sphere or conus, like these three vessels made by an unknown student about 1921. Itten's courses were continued in Summer 1923 by the Hungarian constructivist painter László Moholy-Nagy. And Marianne Brandt was among his first students. Moholy-Nagy also became artistic director—or master of form—of the metal workshop, together with the silversmith Christian Dell, technical director or master of craft, as he and his colleagues in the other workshops were called. Without any doubt there was a formal influence of master Moholy's own artistic works on his students. His linocut compositions from the same year 1924 for example include elements as crosses and circle segments arranged and balanced on a plane. Here we meet all the formal components of our tea infuser, still limited to two dimensions. This must have been the starting point for Marianne Brandt: to create a three dimensional object—it


happened to be a tea infuser—strictly using these components being propagated as a sort of formal dogma inside the Bauhaus. ”Form and function always have to be designed clearly, one being the result of the other”, her colleague Wilhelm Wagenfeld wrote in 1924, “And the formal reduction to primary elements was the necessary counterpart.” (“Immer müssen Form und Funktion eine eindeutige Gestaltung erlangen, in der eines das andere ergibt. Die Reduzierung der Form auf ihre einfachsten Elemente—Kugel, Zylinder, Konus, Kegel—war eine notwendige Parallele”) Marianne Brandt herself has reported another reason: she later wrote that “we were crazy about simple forms, because we were so much closer to the kitsch of historism then” (“auf einfache Formen versessen [...] weil uns der Kitsch der Gründerzeit [...] noch viel näher war.”). Probably there has been a short evolutionary development leading to the final result of our infuser. The Weimar Museum keeps another small teapot by Marianne Brandt in exactly the same dimensions: here the starting point is a spherical shape of the same diameter, equally mounted on a cruciform base. The wooden handle is similar, but provided with a deep oval hollow cut out for a better grip, thus strangely reminding the shape a human ear. The asymetrical opening here has been cut off diagonally from the upper part of the globe, the lid being fixed with a hinge. The result looks extremly disharmonic, badly balanced, and apparently difficult to use: filled with tea this pot would simply be to heavy to hold it comfortable between two fingers. Consequently the globe has been cut in half horizontally, thus reducing volume and weight—and there we are. Perhaps her teacher Moholy-Nagy had an eye on Marianne Brandt's work in this crucial stage of the formal experiment? Finally we have the photographic document of a second spherical version, now provided with a simple tubular handle, thereby adding a much more conventional aspect. This version, indeed, is reminding Christopher Dresser's spherical teapots, but it can be taken for sure that Marianne Brandt didn't know them at this time. Perhaps Marianne Brandt had in mind to use the geometrical elements consequently as a sort of construction kit, as her colleagues in the Bauhaus pottery did: just leave away the functional components of the teapot, and you get an ashtray. In fact she designed two versions of a hemispherical ashtray, in a slightly different proportion. But: the ashtray doesn't have the cross-shaped foot of the infuser, instead there are only three bars arranged radially like a Mercedes Benz star. Perhaps it has been made this way to correspond with the triangular opening on top. Anyway: the result is a loss of stability. This certainly can be called formalism. The formal evolution we have seen may be described by this very free variation of a famous sentence (attributed to Louis Sullivan): At first there was form, then followed function. Marianne Brandt started with an artistic idea, and finally succeded to create a fascinating and usable design, combining a certain naïvity with utmost radicality. When we look at this small infuser and some other early works by Marianne Brandt—like her famous silver tea set including a closely related teapot—we always have to keep in mind one important and really amazing fact: they were created by a first year apprentice without any specific experience. Working as an expressionist painter before at the Weimar art school, she didn't have the slightest training in doing metalwork or even in designing threedimensional objects. That’s why some of her works done by herself in this period are—it can't be denied—of low technical quality to the critical eye of an expert. But is there another apprentice in the silversmith craft who succeeded in getting a top place in art history with his very first trial works? Our small teapot with it’s striking simplicity: Is it functionalistic or formalistic? Perhaps we can say: It is a piece of formalistic design that works, as we have seen. But that's not enough to make it so famous. Maybe there are further reasons. It just seems to focus the ideas of the early Bauhaus years: Bauhaus in a Nutshell. A concise symbolic object definitely meaning: Bauhaus. Moreover there is no doubt that it owns the charming attitude of a miniature, able to attract emotions, in fact an object for a collector's showcase more than for the table. In a way there also is a parallel to the miniature versions of modern classic furniture, the cute little Wassily chairs, offered in many museum shops. A contemporary admirator once wrote about Brandt’s teapot: “How elegant this “prosaic” functionality


can be, how refined, how pleasing, even how playful!” (“Wie elegant, wie raffiniert, wie gefällig, ja spielerisch doch die ‘nüchterne’ Sachlichkeit eigentlich sein kann!”). Indeed: elegant, pleasing and playful, these are characteristics usually not applied to the design of functionalism. Finally: a recent poster advertising the “International Marianne Brandt Contest” for designers even combined the image of her infuser with the title “The Poetry of the Functional”. Poetry? This reminds Puiforcats sentence we heard yesterday in Gail Davidson's lecture: that a teapot should not only be a useful object, but also a work of art “to elevate your soul by its beauty”. So perhaps we should try to see our little teapot simply as a work of art, beyond stylistic categories like formalism or functionalism? It appears to be a perfect materialisation of an artistic idea, done in a moment of inspiration. Unfortunately Marianne Brandt didn't live long enough to see the tremendous success of her early masterpiece. But she once asked herself looking back to her work in a very sceptical way: “Did I ever think about art?” (“Habe ich je an Kunst gedacht?”), probably meaning: “No, I did not”. At least one object from the Bauhaus-metal workshop recently has been declared by a German courtyard as a work of art: Jucker's and Wagenfeld's famous Bauhaus lamp—another icon. But here we better leave the most unsecure terrain of trying to make a clear distinction between art and craft: I can't. There is a good deal of legend in the reception of many Bauhaus products. They are not always able to meet all the high expectations when looked at closely and analyzed critically. But this they have in common with other legendary things. Benvenuto Cellini's manneristic salt cellar never was a salt cellar alone, from a functional point of view. And who wants to discuss the technical or artistic qualities of a miraculous icon painting? ---


A conversation with a teapot WILFRIED MOLL Silversmith, Hamburg

Participants of the symposium visiting the Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin

During the visit to the “Bauhaus Archiv”, the silversmith Wilfried Moll was suddenly addressed to by Marianne Brandt’s tea infuser: “Mister! Mister!” “Who is it?” “It’s me.” “Oh!” “Is it true that Ms. Brandt died as a very poor lady?” “I just heard of it. The report was authentical.” “They spent a lot of $$ to purchase me. Did Ms. Brandt get some of it?” “I don’t think so. But Amadeus and Vincent also died very poor.” “It is a thousand times pityful.” – – – “Mister—what are you doing?” “Me? I am a teapot maker.” “A teapot maker? Like Ms. Brandt?” “So it is.” – – – “Mr. teapot maker, have a look at my proportions. Are they well done?” “Your proportions are very well done!” “Thank you—some people measure my proportions by means of golden scales. Sullivan has written: First came the functions, and other means; but most important is beauty. What about my function and beauty?” “Also Frank Lloyd Wright has written important things, and Walter Gropius too. All this is stimulating for thought. But by thinking alone you get no experience, not even to make teapots.” “I do not agree. Gropius’ writings are highly intelligent and important for life.” – – – “The small button on your lid seems to me much better than the one on your bigger coppersister. Your crossbase is exceptional.” “It is not easy to stand all the time on a crossbase.” “You look a little bit like a roman oil lamp. If I’d put cotton in your spout and oil into your body...” “Pouring oil into my body!! Don’t you dare—you are crazy!” “Excuse me—excuse me. I am so sorry.” – – – “Mr. teapot maker? I feel lonely without the beautiful paintings by Klee, Feininger and Kandinsky— Teapot maker? I have a problem: People lift me up into the sky while I like to stand on a table. In my presence they speak about the high ethics of Bauhaus design. On the other hand, they buy and sell all the design nonsense they believe to be necessary.” – – – “Dear little teapot, you are very critical about buyers and sellers. In one way you can be very happy. You are standing in the bright light of success and appreciation. In contrast, the teapots from my teacher, a


very good silversmith, are condemned to the darkness of a museum depot.” “What a pity!” “You wish to stand on a table, have warm tea inside and feel to be required.” “Oh yes!” – – – “Mr. teapot maker? Do not forget me.” “Whenever I sit on the beach, the red disk falling into the sea without any splish splash, I shall look into the sky and remember you.” “Auf Wiedersehen.”


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