The Brilliance of an Era - Art Nouveau Jewelry from Europe

The Brilliance of an Era
Art Nouveau Jewelry from Europe

Date: Feb 25 to Jul 25
Venue: LEOPOLD MUSEUM

With this exhibition the LEOPOLD MUSEUM is mounting Austria\'s most comprehensive exhibition to date on the topic of Art Nouveau jewellery. This exhibition is to present exquisite objects from the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt as well as from private collections. The holdings of the Hessian State Museum are based on the Arts-and-Crafts collection of the Dutch court jeweller Karel A. Citroen (*1922). Citroen began collecting in 1952, at a point in time when it was not at all fashionable to collect artisan craftwork from the Art Nouveau. By 1959, the Amsterdam-based jeweller had succeeded in bringing together several hundred objects from all over Europe, with the main focus being on jewellery.

The 220 jewellery objects from Citroen\'s collection number among the highlights of the Hessian State Museum\'s holdings. Works on display will also include those of the renowned Parisian jewellers, goldsmiths and enamellers René Lalique (1860-1945) and Georges Fouquet (1862-1957), as well as creations by André-Fernand Thesmar (1843-1912) and Lucien Gaillard (1861-1933). At the close of the 19th century, René Lalique touched off a revolution in the field of jewellery design.

The peculiarity of Viennese Jugendstil art and the differences between it and the Art Nouveau style elsewhere in Europe are made clear with objects on loan from private collections, some of which have never or only seldom been shown publicly.
1903 saw the establishment of the production community known as the \"Wiener Werkstätte\" with its designers, above all Kolo Moser, Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) and Bertold Löffler (1874-1960).

Germany is represented by Hans Christiansen (1866-1945) and by examples of jewellery from the jewellery-making centres of Hanau and Pforzheim. Jewellery from Denmark is also present in the form of works by Georg Arthur Jensen (1866-1935). Furthermore, the exhibition includes Dutch jewellery by Bert Nienhuis (1873-1960) and Jan Eisenlöffel (1876-1957), as well as pieces by the legendary Russian goldsmith Carl Peter Fabergé (1846-1920). Belgian Art Nouveau is represented by works of the jewellery producer and designer Philippe Wolfers (1858-1929). Jewellery from Great Britain by William Hair Haseler (1864-1949) will also be shown, as well as pieces of jewellery and works in gold by the British architects and designers Henry Wilson (1864-1934) and Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942), and further objects produced by Liberty & Co.


www.leopoldmuseum.org