Art Nouveau Jewelry

Jewelry was one of the purest and most successful expressions of the Art Nouveau movement. Fresh designs and motifs created intense excitement as organic forms surged with new life, and the female form struggled towards freedom, suggesting a long-hidden eroticism. The artists and goldsmiths who created this jewelry were trained in the nineteenth-century disciplines; their technical mastery allowed them to experiment with new materials and enameling processes to indulge their fantasies. This combination - an atmosphere of ideas for a new art and the unrivaled technical skill of the makers - produced some of the most evocative jewelry of modern times. The book deals with major makers in France, and follows the parallel modern movement that spread through Europe and the United States, acquiring different decorative characteristics, from Great Britain, Germany and Austria, to Belgium, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Comprehensive biographies of over 300 designers are included, as well as a Guide to Identification, with over 200 makers' marks and signatures.

Over 300 spectacular pendants, combs, buckles, rings, bracelets, brooches, umbrella handles, penknives, buttons, clasps, and scissors in detailed photographs reprinted from rare, turn-of-the-century folios.

Jewellery.

Meticulous reproduction of rare portfolio (1925-30) contains over 700 dazzling designs and motifs for buckles, clips, belts, mirrors, pendants, cigarette cases, rings, chains, necklaces, watchbands, brooches, studs, and charms.

Work of Bing, Lalique, Desbois -- great Continental and British masters -- is displayed in this catalog of the finest jewelry of the period. 118 plates, 8 in color.

This volume presents almost 800 illustrations with text celebrating the achievements of Art Decon jewelry. The author's text covers the creations of the Haute Joaillererie and the avant-garde designers. There is also a range of accessories such as vanity cases, cigarette cases and clocks.

Around 1900 the Pforzheim jewellery-making industry, which had been established since 1767, underwent an upturn to flourish as never before. The participation of Pforzheim businesses in the 1900 Paris World Exhibition and the thorough assimilation of a variety of influences from abroad - including the figurative French Art Nouveau style - ensured that Pforzheim Art Nouveau jewellery developed confidently towards aesthetic autonomy. Collaboration between the jewellery industry and professors at the Pforzheim School for the Applied Arts as well as sharp eyes for new developments outside the jewellery capital shaped Pforzheim jewellery creations around 1900. Other fecund sources of collaboration were the Darmstadt Mathildenhöhe artists and Wiener Werkstätte. The author has discovered hitherto unpublished contemporary source material and has been able to draw on hundreds of extant original pieces of jewellery - brooches, pendants, collars, hatpins and hair combs that are now in museums, private collections and on the art market - to make a choice selection for this book. Thus a living picture emerges of the diverse formal and technical possibilities that gave rise to the design, craftsmanship and industrial manufacture characteristic of Pforzheim Art Nouveau jewellery. Text in English and German.