Simple form soaring to delicate compositions shapes the work of the Italian artist Giampaolo Babetto. Moderate in his use of proportion, he links cube and square, cylinder and circle, pyramid and triangle to achieve configurations of extraordinary beauty.

His jewellery is celebrated - like all his work. His pieces clearly indicate that he belongs to the "Paduan School". There are echoes of Minimalism, Neo-Plasticism, Neo-Constructivism and arte programmata/cinetica.

A wealth of colour illustrations shows the most beautiful pieces by Giampaolo Babetto and his immediate environment - the Euganean Hills south of Padua. Ellen Maurer Zilioli introduces his work, placing it in its art historical context.

(ACC)

A key, a safety pin, a balloon, a propeller, a voltmeter – these unexpected objects in art jewellery rewrite the world of the Norwegian “jewellery engineer” Sigurd Bronger. He carries over his fascination for machines and instruments in humorously constructed jewellery pieces, and transforms natural materials and everyday objects into meticulously executed, complex and ingenious constructions. In his Oslo “Laboratorium Mechanum” Bronger works on his witty “carrying devices” – brooches, pendants, and rings with balloons, sponges, eggs, even his mother’s gallstones, or with medical equipment.
An established feature of his work which symbolically marks the entrance into Bronger’s world is the key. This current publication offers such a key; a review of over thirty years of his creative work: from Bronger’s experiments with materials and constructions in the struggle with the avant-garde Dutch art jewellery to his attempts in fathoming out states of expansion and emptiness in jewellery. He revolutionised contemporary creative jewellery work in such a way and not just in Norway, where to this day he still finds new forms of expression at the interface of jewellery, art, design and engineering.
With works from the 1980s to the present day, the book will carry you off into the humorous world of the decorative engineering art of Sigurd Bronger, one of the most significant Norwegian jewellery artists today.

 

Deanna Farneti Cera first glimpsed the jewels of Coppola e Toppo in 1987 at an auction house in Milan. Instantly fascinated by their diversity, the evocative power of the colours, the wealth of shapes and motifs and the multitude of materials used, she soon developed an overwhelming passion for the stunning creations.

This book, researched over the last twenty years, is the culmination of that passion and a reconstruction of the creative path of Coppola e Toppo, charting their inspiring partnership from their first appearance in VOGUE in 1948, through to Lyda's death in 1986.

Sorry, the summary hasn't been translated in english. Unfortunately this summary is not available. We are sorry we can’t give you more information on this title. Please come back and check up in a while.

The jewellery firm Süddeutsche Gold und Haar-Bijourterie, founded in 1907 by Heinrich Henkel and Florentin Grosse, experienced after World War I its first successes with costume jewellery made of bronze, aluminium, wood, bakelite and galalite. In the mid 1920s their first business contacts to the US were established. A decade later they were working together with the fashion labels Lanvin and Schiaparelli in Paris as well as with Harrods in London and Saks in New York. The company was awarded the diplome d'honneur for their designs in 1937 at the 'Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne' in Paris. In 1955 Henkel & Grosse started its cooperation with Christian Dior (1905-57) in Paris and were licensed as the sole producers and distributors of Dior jewellery.

In connection with its own designs, however, the company always maintained its independence. As of the 1960s they expanded their portfolio to include Grosse Bijoux, Grosse Sterling and Grosse Gold, with fashion always dictating the design. Brooches, necklaces and ear clips in colourful, fanciful blossom forms to match the petticoat dresses of the time were produced in sets in various price classes for a wide customer base.

The enterprise, led by four generations of the Grosse family, had at its zenith over 600 employees and a worldwide distribution. Their products were designed and produced in Pforzheim and in the US, later also in Asia. The Dior and Grosse trademark, which every piece carries, stands for modern design and technical innovation. In 2006 the family withdrew from the business and the firm became part of the Dior group.

 

Since the beginning of his creative work in 1980, Georg Dobler, the jewellery artist and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts and Science in Hildesheim, has engaged in working with geometrical forms. Also in the mid1980s, when he first drew on naturalistic elements, provoking an outcry in the jewellery world, his work was still bound by geometrical forms. It was exactly because naturalism was viewed as outmoded, however, that Dobler was viewed as a pioneer by the next generation of studio jewellery designers.
The artist complements his casts from nature (exotic plants and beetles) – Dobler sees himself as a collector of structures and forms – with large, facetted stones as an artistic addition. Yellow to orange-glowing lemon citrine and tender lilac amethysts combine with the metal surfaces to create a shimmering play of colours. Pure silver shine is seldom found in Dobler’s work; his trademark is rather black chromium or oxidized silver surfaces that shine in iridescent black. Georg Dobler is not only a pioneer, he also finds inspiration among the great artists of early modern art. Thus in the mid1990s he drew on the abstract paintings of a Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky or Kazimir Malevich, who ignited his fantasy and inspired his compositions.
“Georg Dobler: Jewellery 1980–2010” spans the œuvre of the Berlin jewellery artist from the early 1980s to the present. A breath-taking journey from geometrical forms to casts from nature, works with stones to his current work, which unite the entire creative work of the artist in a grand symbiosis.
Authors: Cornelie Holzach | Rüdiger Joppien | Christianne Weber | Hildegard Wiewelhove | Barbara Maas | Helen Drutt
Exhibition in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, November/December 2010 and further venues in Pforzheim, Hanau, Bielefeld and Berlin, 2011.
 

Paul Flato: Jeweler to the Stars celebrates the work of Hollywood's first celebrity jeweller. This lavishly illustrated book shows Flato's exquisite pieces in all their glory, sparkling on the page alongside the stars, socialites and heiresses who wore them. At the height of Flato's career, he was more famous than Tiffany & Co. or Harry Winston.

Branching into Motion Pictures at the pinnacle of Hollywood's Golden Era, Flato designed jewellery for a total of six films, including Holiday (1938) with Katherine Hepburn and the disastrous flop, Two Faced Woman (1941), the last film Greta Garbo ever made. But, in 1943 at the peak of his celebrity, Flato found himself facing financial ruin and heading "up the river" to the infamous Sing Sing Prison as his career and reputation plummeted. Now, more than a half-century later, Flato's distinctive jewellery, still fresh and chic, has reemerged to captivate a new audience.

As well as images of the jewellery itself, sourced from auction houses and private collections, Paul Flato: Jeweler to the Stars includes previously unpublished photographs from the Flato family archives, images of glamarous New York and Hollywood clients wearing Flato's designs, fascinating film stills, and studio portraits, as well as many original design sketches.

This tribute to one of America's greatest jewellers with enchant jewellery connoisseurs, collectors and Hollywood film buffs alike.

A sterling new study of the exquisite designs of Danish silversmith Georg Jensen (1866-1935) and company. Nearly one thousand photographs illustrate much of the stunning jewelry, hollowware, and flatware designed and produced from 1904 to the present. One of the most talented, original, and influential silversmiths of the twentieth century, Jensen's life and the company he founded are thoroughly researched. This book explores his place within the late nineteenth century arts scene, his training as a sculptor and silversmith, the establishment of his own workshop, and its expansion into an international company. The contributions of many gifted designers who worked for the company are discussed in detail. Interpretation of the marks used on Jensen silver is provided. This is a major revision of a very important book, with over 200 new photos and new information. It is an invaluable reference work for owners of Jensen silver, artists, silversmiths, designers, curators, and art dealers.

Antique glasses from the Louvre Museum.

Helfried Kodré is a pioneering Austrian exponent of contemporary art jewellery. He learnt goldsmithing in the 1960s while studying art history and worked at first with Elisabeth Defner, to whom he was married at the time. From the mid-1970s Kodré abandoned goldsmithing for a while but after a rather lengthy break, in which he taught at university, he re-emerged in the early 1990s as a jewellery artist. At the outset of his career, his formal bent was towards natural symbolism and organic allusions. Since the early 1990s an entirely different aesthetic informs his work: articulation that is anything but ambivalent, precision of design and formal language. In the work Kodré has produced in the past fifteen years, on which this publication focuses, the play of volumes and their exciting relationships predominates in a rhythm of expansion, opening and overlapping. A new publication in our art jewellery series, the book centres on the second phase of Kodré’s career from 1990. It also traces his development as an artist from the 1960s. Featuring numerous colour illustrations and essays written by experts in the field.

Gerd Rothmann's work is known worldwide and pieces of his are owned by the most important collections in Germany and abroad. This lavishly illustrated catalogue of works (1967-2008) is the first complete retrospective of the artist's work
As an artist, Gerd Rothmann is concerned with the human body. He has been investigating it and experimenting with it for more than thirty years: the fruits of his labours are finger and foot casts.
Jewellery must, if it is actually to be worn, observe specific conventions. Here the possibilities of creating something very particular, personal, incomparable are, therefore, limited to a certain extent. Rothmann introduced body casts in the medium of jewellery early on in his career by clothing finger casts in objectively abstract smooth forms or recasting moulds of some parts of the body as small sculptures. In doing so, Rothmann creates objects that, on the one hand, are the most intimate adornment of a particular body, that is, jewellery in its most beautiful, direct form, and, on the other, can be viewed as free-standing sculptural figurations. The upshot is artworks that are entirely individualised.
What might be taken for granted (for example, fingerprints) is defamiliarised and reproduced as abstract and ornamental. Cold precious metals seem to have been bent into human shapes because they have been "touched" by body heat. The contrast is stirring to see. Rothmann represents a stringently radical interpretation of jewellery, which is always commensurate with wearability and the highest quality.
Sorry, the summary hasn't been translated in english. Unfortunately this summary is not available. We are sorry we can’t give you more information on this title. Please come back and check up in a while.

(ACC)

The depiction of animals in art goes back to prehistoric cave paintings, and the early history of jewelry, from ancient Egyptian scarabs to Renaissance pendants, shows many examples of animal imagery.

Among early civilizations, likenesses of animals were worn for a variety of mystical reasons but it was not until the Celtic era and then the great flowering of the Renaissance that the taste for jewelry bearing the forms of animals in enamels or pearls became widespread.

In the nineteenth century there was a revival of Egyptian and Etruscan styles, in which animals of all sorts were incorporated: birds, mammals, insects, reptiles and fish. The discovery of Japanese crafts also had an effect on the design of jewelry. Prominent houses such as Fouquet, Fontenay, Falize, Fabergé and Tiffany & Co. all produced a spectacular array of animal jewels, which are much prized today.

Design developments from Art Nouveau, Art Deco and onwards contributed impressive animal jewelry – from Lalique’s intricate insects to Cartier’s panthers, from Boucheron and Van Cleef & Arpels to the sophisticated imagery of Verdura.

Lovers of jewelry will be intrigued by these examples of a demanding art; and the book will also appeal to today’s designers and all dealers in fine jewelry.

Sorry, the summary hasn't been translated in english. Unfortunately this summary is not available. We are sorry we can’t give you more information on this title. Please come back and check up in a while.

This book represents the first retrospective in print on the fascinat-ing work of the English artist in jewellery David Watkins, who -started out as a jazz pianist and sculptor but has been designing jewellery since the 1960s. At the outset of his career, he designed miniature works of sculpture. Later he began producing outsize wearable objects. Watkins is increasingly preoccupied with the interrelationship of the body and jewellery; his pieces of jewellery are becoming autonomous art objects in their own right. David Watkins’s versatility as a jewellery-designer is astonishing: the diverse materials he uses range from paper to acrylic, Neoprene and Colorcore to gold as well as a profusion of plastics. His aesthetic “idiom” encompasses stringent structuring as well as monochrome Minimalism and compositions improvised in stunning forms and vibrant colours. Watkins is equally comfortable working with traditional jewellery-making techniques and computer-aided design as used throughout the manufacturing sector. Drawing on a wealth of photographs, drawings and statements made by the artist himself, the book provides invaluable insights into the way David Watkins works. For years David Watkins has been a primal force to be reckoned with in contemporary jewellery design, a mover and shaker in this new international medium. Just the retrospective aficionados of art jewellery have been waiting for

“To me jewellery often seems an ‘indecent medium’.” The creations of Norman Weber contain all those hidden and obvious qualities which make contemporary studio jewellery so fascinating: brilliance and glamour, humour and mysteriousness, pomp and spectacle. His works embody sophisticated, interdisciplinary concepts between fashion, design and artistic extravagance, goldsmith tradition, perfection and provocation. They are jewellery pieces that – like a demanding work of art – require connoisseurship. After his training in Kaufbeuren-Neugablonz the young Norman Weber was drawn to the artists’ city of Munich, to the Academy of Fine Arts, to Hermann Jünger, Otto Künzli and Horst Sauerbruch. Here is where the then twenty-five year old began his search for innovative paths in contemporary jewellery. Today he is passing on this experience and knowledge at educational institutions in Stockholm, Göteborg, Amsterdam, Wismar and Halle. His jewellery quickly develops a completely autonomous, unusual aesthetic and complexity. Every one of his unique inventions is developed and prepared with élan, commitment and extreme subtlety. Odd structures, lavish constructions, entertaining objects are joined together in cycles, for example, “Private Myths”, “House & Garden”, “Portraits” and “Display Pieces”. Observations and reflections, family photos and childhood memories play a central role and are often embedded in adventurous compositions in an enigmatic form. With tongue in cheek the goldsmith has convinced us: jewellery can be intelligent and cunningly imaginative, and can conform to another form of beauty. At least his does. A first survey of the oeuvre – a compendium of the last 20 years – of this talented jewellery master. Norman Weber invites the reader on a journey through his surreal, fantastic world of jewellery.

Petra Zimmermann occupies a unique position among the emerging contemporary jewellery artists: she shares their exciting approach to the subject of jewellery and the quotable adoption of the (Pop) culture label for defining the auteur jewellery concept; in which she succeeds, this time through historical reference. The artist draws on past encounters with costume jewellery from the previous century for her rings, bracelets and brooches. Comprised of bright, colourful synthetic forms these objects receive a framework, in which their artificial appearance contrasts to the dusty splendour of the historic costume jewellery. Thus beguiling pieces of jewellery emerge, which combine the present fascination for glamour with an element of progression, thus referencing the costume jewellery as an essential component in the production and construction of glamour in the portrait photography of the Hollywood diva.
In her latest series of works the artist uses mass media images of models, floral motifs, architecture and design objects, which broaden her scope of cultural and social interpretations. Thus behind the visual opulence of her work she succeeds in handling relevant aesthetic and social themes in her pieces – relevant for a generation that no longer struggles against traditional conventions, but that negotiates much more in an increasingly complex environment, in the search for personal and historical coherence.
Petra Zimmermann is one of the most ambitious artists in contemporary jewellery. The book provides the first overview of her fascinating and exciting creative jewellery works with sumptuous images and scholarly articles.
Exhibition at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna in spring 2012
 

Sorry, the summary hasn't been translated in english. Unfortunately this summary is not available. We are sorry we can’t give you more information on this title. Please come back and check up in a while.