Jewelry

Show tracks womens emergence as jewelry makers and muses in the early 20th century - Gainesville Sun

Women have been wearing jewelry for as long as it’s existed. But they didn’t make it professionally until the rise of the art jewelry movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Women’s roles as creators of and inspirations for jewelry is the subject of "Maker & Muse: Women and Early Twentieth Century Art Jewelry" at the Flagler Museum.

Essentially, art jewelry was a beautiful protest against the prevailing tastes of the time.

“If you were a wealthy woman at the end of the 19th century, what would you be wearing?” said Tracy Kamerer, the Flagler Museum’s chief curator. “Scads of pearls and diamonds.”

Art jewelry designers regarded such pieces as ostentatious. They favored semiprecious stones and other unusual materials, artful design and consummate craftsmanship.

RELATED: More Palm Beach Daily News arts coverage.

Art jewelry emerged in Great Britain as part of the arts and crafts movement, which condemned factories as dehumanizing to workers and dismissed mass-produced objects as substandard. Like the rest of the movement's followers, jewelry designers aspired to make beautiful objects that were affordable. (The French version of art jewelry was called art nouveau and the German Jugendstil.)

“I love that they chose to reject manufactured goods and wanted to create something new and different with inexpensive materials,” said exhibition curator Elyse Zorn Karlin. “They didn’t care about the value. They cared about the art.”

The exhibition, which was organized by The Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago, features more than 200 handcrafted pieces of jewelry drawn from the collection of Richard H. Driehaus and other public and private collections.

The show focuses on five regions: Great Britain, France, Austria and Germany, New York and Chicago.

In Great Britain, the arts and crafts movement was closely allied with women’s suffrage and other social reform causes.

The first independent female professional jeweler was Charlotte Newman, who opened her studio in 1885 in London. Her pieces include a necklace featuring a gold chain decorated with a loose triangle of aquamarines rimmed with pearls.

Another pioneer was Ella Naper, who partnered with her teacher Fred Partridge to open a shop in 1906. She was known for her work in horn, such as a pair of combs flecked with moonstone raindrops.

The reasons why women began making jewelry for a living have to do with the rise of the middle class and changing social mores. Women were beginning to attend universities and imagine lives outside of marriage.

Also “crafts were considered appropriate for upper-middle-class women who had the time to pursue them,” Kamerer said.

The works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters influenced British jewelry design. Art jewelry designers created buckles, clasps and long necklaces to complement the new, loose fashions inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

In France, the impetus behind art jewelry was more practical than idealistic. After losing the Franco-Prussian War and falling behind as an industrial power, France sought to revive its stagnant economy by producing luxury goods.

French art jewelry was sinuous, flamboyant and daring. It also was made almost exclusively by men, most notably Rene Lalique.

Once depicted only in cameos, women now were portrayed in all kinds of jewelry, usually as objects of desire or fear as French male designers grappled with social change.

Examples include a bare-breasted woman on a cigarette case designed by Alphonse Mucha and a curvy belt buckle by an unknown designer featuring a woman with long tresses. (Proper women kept their hair under control.)

In Germany and Austria, members of the Wiener Werkstatte, a collective of architects, artists and designers in Vienna, pared down the style to more geometric motifs. The group designed entire environments, down to the pins worn by hostesses at a cabaret designed by collective founder architect Josef Hoffmann.

A mermaid brooch by German Karl Rothmuller is more in line with work being produced elsewhere. It features a gold mermaid seated on a coral branch with an imperfect pearl dangling below.

In New York, progressive thinker Louis Comfort Tiffany hired women to manage his jewelry workshop. Like his glass vases, lamps and leaded windows, his jewelry designs were inspired by nature and his travels. Masterfully crafted, they featured unusual stones, luminous enamel work and imaginative designs.

Chicago was a hotbed of female jewelry designers, owing to the greater freedom women enjoyed in the United States and the availability of training programs.

One of the city’s many female role models was Elinor Klapp, whose winged brooch anchored by a narrow moonstone is in the show. She didn’t start making jewelry until she was 40. She continued working almost up to the time she died.

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jsjostrom@pbdailynews.com