The Enamels of Annemarie Davidson

Active as an enamelist since 1957, Annemarie Davidson has made functional objects - from plates and boxes to ashtrays, trivets, desk sets and bookends - for over fifty years. The artist works in a studio in her home in Sierra Madre, California, a small residential community east of Pasadena. Throughout her long and richly productive career, Davidson has created forms intended for everyday use which she decorates with either spare abstract patterns or representational subjects. Davidson's "jewels," her most highly regarded enamel designs, are largely abstract, evoking simplified natural forms, without specific reference to any particular subject in nature.

Born in Berlin in 1920, Annemarie Behrendt Davidson moved with her family to New York in 1936. She studied economics at New York University where she received her B.A. in 1941 and at Columbia University where she was awarded her M.A. in 1942. In 1942, she married Norman Davidson, a prominent chemist and molecular biologist, and moved to Southern California in 1946 when he was appointed to the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

In 1957, while her husband was on a sabbatical leave at Harvard University, Davidson studied briefly with the prominent American enamelist Doris Hall. Hall (1907-2000), a noted pioneer in the field, was teaching a class in enameling at a local, community arts center in Cambridge. Hall, herself, had moved to Boston from Cleveland, Ohio, which was in the 1930s and 1940s the most important center in this country for the enamel arts. When Hall and her husband, the artist Kalman Kubinyi (1906-1973) moved to New England in 1950, they spread the influence of the enamel arts movement east and established an informal center for contemporary enamels in Boston and Gloucester, where they had a summer home. While Hall worked in a broad range of styles from non-representational to figurative, it was her brilliantly colored abstract work which most deeply influenced Davidson. Davidson's earliest work done between 1957 and 1959 reflects that influence in its sparkling color and vivid decoration.

Upon her return to Southern California in 1958, Davidson continued her studies with the noted African-American enamelist Curtis Tann (1910-1991). Davidson was also a friend of the Los Angeles-based enamelist Mary Sharp. The two artists' more pictorial approach to enameling had little direct influence on Davidson. However, their commitment to enameling as a legitimate form of contemporary art provided support for the artist as she continued her lifelong exploration of the medium.

While Doris Hall's vibrant designs undoubtedly exerted a strong influence on her student's earliest enamels, over time Davidson's work became more simplified, her colors more subdued and serene. In this sense, her spare designs were closely aligned with the work of her contemporaries in California including ceramists Laura Andreson, Harrison McIntosh, and Rupert Deese and enamelist Elizabeth Madley. According to Davidson, she was not aware of these artists at the time. However, the overall simplicity of her shapes, the combination of geometric and organic form in her designs, and the subtlety of her color palette all ally her work to the California 'modernist' aesthetic. While Davidson began her training in Boston, her sensibilities were definitely those of a Californian.

In the early 1960s, Davidson's work was featured in several of the pioneering California Design exhibitions organized by Eudora Moore for the Pasadena Art Museum. The catalogue for California Design: 6 in 1960 reproduced several of the artist's works, emphasizing the unique characteristics of enamels produced by an artist-craftsman such as Annemarie Davidson. A group of three pieces - an ashtray, a cigarette box and a lighter - are tied, together visually by the use of enameled copper in an abstract pattern. Designed and made by Annemarie Davidson these pieces reveal a concern for craft which could well be mistaken by both large and small manufacturers, alike. Each piece is an original work of art inasmuch as the same pattern cannot be exactly duplicated. Through this brief description, the catalogue asserts a fundamental distinction between art and design, between the work of the artist-craftsman and that of the designer.

In 1958 Davidson was also included in the nationally prominent Decorative Arts and Ceramics Exhibition at the Wichita Center for the Arts in Kansas. Being juried into this prestigious annual exhibition, popularly known as 'The Wichita,' was considered a great honor for any artist working in the contemporary crafts field. Her inclusion underscores Davidson's emergence into a national arena as a leading figure in contemporary enameling.

In 1965 the artist's work was featured in Craftsmen of the Southwest, a directory published by the American Craft Council of 151 artists working in the southwestern United States. The fact that the directory listed only eight enamelists including Fred Ball, Margaret Montgomery Barlow, Nik Krevitsky, June Schwarcz, Kay Whitcomb and Elllamarie and Jackson Woolley, with Davidson among them, underscores, once again, her emergence to a national arena and the high regard in which her work was held.

In her work Davidson frequently uses pieces of glass of varying sizes to create irregular organic shapes which she calls "jewels." These raised forms appear to float on the liquid surface of the vessel or plaque. For many of her abstract compositions, she also uses a sgraffito technique, incising straight lines with the sharp point of a dart. These hand-drawn lines, which fan out from a central focal point, present a linear counterpoint to the more fluid, organic and sculptural form of the jewels.

Annemarie Davidson has frequently collaborated with fellow artist Blaine Rath since 1959. Rath makes beautifully-crafted boxes in a wide variety of woods, especially walnut, maple and rosewood, in which Davidson mounts her elegantly proportioned enamels. Over her immensely productive career, Annemarie Davidson has developed a consistent but constantly varied body of work - work characterized by continuous innovation in form and content.

We hope that this article sheds new light on the work of this extraordinary Los Angeles-based artist and that through it, and others like it, we may bring heightened visibility to the remarkable achievements of artists working in the field of contemporary enameling.

By Bernard N. Jazzar and Harold B. Nelson [Volume 27, Number 5, December, 2008]

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