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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).
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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.
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Jug with six beakers
Harald Buchrucker, Ludwigsburg, ca. 1945–1949
Hammered aluminium
Bröhan-Museum, Berlin
Cat. Modern Art of Metalwork nr. 97
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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 |
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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?
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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 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.
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© 2008 Bröhan-Museum | Bronze-Figur: Agathon Léonard, Danseuse au
bracelet (Tänzerin mit Armband), um 1900, Bronze, goldpatiniert,
Susse Frères, Paris | Abb.: Kaffee- und Teeservice, Maison Cardeilhac,
Paris, um 1890 | Webdesign unicom-berlin.de |
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