Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry

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Description

“A new, imperishable beauty,” was once how the artist and architect Henry van de Velde described it. European Art Nouveau jewelry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embraced a new aesthetic characterized by sensuous forms, dramatic imagery and vivid symbolism. The various designers associated with the movement sought their inspiration not in traditional jewelry, but within the work of the pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists and within the arts of Japan. Rejecting the rigid naturalism typical of European decorative arts, designers such as René Lalique and Henry van de Velde, and the artists of the German Jugenstil and Austrian Wiener Sezession movements, created ornaments that expressed the spirit and freedom of the era. These artists and designers adopted a free-flowing line and asymmetrical format that invigorated their work and set it apart, at the same time as their use of natural motifs and of the feminine form imbued their creations with energy, sensuality and dreamy mysticism. But underlying the undeniable exuberance of these works was once a fin-de-sicle edginess that endows this era with inexhaustible fascination. With nearly 120 ornaments from a single private collection–the finest of its type in The us–Imperishable Beauty features all the major designers and jewelers from this groundbreaking era. Paintings, prints, posters and textiles fill out the presentation, making this book as wealthy and intoxicating as the cultured it portrays.

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