Metalwork in the 20th Century

Metalwork in the 20th Century

When curator J. Stewart Johnson of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York decided to mount an exhibition of objects in a single material from the 20^th century, metal was the obvious choice. The museum's collection was extensive and of high quality, and he was intrigued by the range of works in metal over the sweep of the 20^th century. It was this variety that seemed to express the tastes, technological capacities, and the attitudes of our century.

The sheen and suavity of the material was clearly seductive and viewers' eyes were further captured by contrasts in form and type. From silver to steel, from brass to gold, the work took on many materials and forms. Decorative objects, furniture, a few pieces of jewelry, architectural elements, tableware, and at least ten silver tea and coffee services traced the evolution and devolution of styles. Developments in modern design, the show demonstrated, have not followed a straight line or logical curve. They can be plotted, instead, as a series of arcs and intersections.

Along with the historical overview of a long look back, the show also presented how metal could be and was used to greatest effect - employing its malleability, its tensility, its lightness, its remarkable strength, and the variety of ways its surfaces can be highlighted, embellished, tones, modified, and even transformed. Scheduled to be installed for just a few month its run was doubled and it closed after 10 months.

The exhibition started with Art Nouveau, which along with its British and American counterparts were styles developed in service to a cause. In the case of European Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil as it was called in the Scandanavian and German-speaking countries, the cause was an aesthetic one, a desire to create something completely new. The effort did not really succeed - older styles were ransacked and appeared in new lineaments - but the style did free line and composition, and paved the way for other options.

The British Arts and Crafts movement, and to some degree its American counterpart, aspired to social reform. But its program promoting the dignity of simple forms; the rewards of hand labor; the equitable distribution of goods; and the belief that the morality of people could and would be affected in positive ways by the environment that housed them also failed. But the multiple styles of British and American reform movements all contributed to a discarding of unnecessary fuss and an interest in an interrelated and rational environment, thus opening a path to economy of design and the heart of modernism.

This grouping started with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan's architecture, well before the turn of the century, employed steel skeletons which supported commercial buildings that rose above cityscapes from Chicago to Buffalo. To both soften and enliven the overwhelming monumentality of his structures, Sullivan designed decorative metalworks elements for both the public interiors and the facades. These works drew a great deal from the Celtic style, a widespread design vocabulary of the late 19^th century and first cousin to the whiplash curves and organic subjects of French Art Nouveau. The Celtic style, with its tangled and intricate patterns of raised curves and extended, interlaced geometric forms, lent itself particularly well to work in metal.

While Sullivan looked back toward archaic patterning, one of his associates saw nothing but the future. In 1888, Frank Lloyd Wright went to work as a draughtsman for Sullivan, remaining with the firm until 1893. By 1910 he had become an international figure with the publication of his theories and work abroad. A robust patinated copper urn designed in 1898 reflects Wrights interest in the total design concept that he embraced for his houses. This idea of the gesamtkunstwerk - the totally created entity - was a cultural idea in high favor at the turn of the century. This same urn, or its twin, later showed up some thirty block south when the major Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective opened in late winter at the Museum of Modern Art.

In the 1890s the Celtic style was widely popularized by Liberty & Company, a London based decorative furnishing shop, which launched a line of silver called Cymric. So broadly distributed were these Cymric pieces with their swirling ribbons of silver that in Italy the Art Nouveau style was known as stile Liberty. Archibald Knox was one of Liberty's chief designers, and is represented in the Met show with a modest Cymric design on a silver and chrysoprase claret jug (1900-1901).

Charles Robert Ashbee, with whom Frank Lloyd Wright maintained a friendship that lasted almost four decades, was a disciple of William Morris and a leading figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement. He founded the Guild of Handicraft, which came to be known for its metalwork, and he spent years trying to practice what Morris preached, emphasizing handwork as part of the reformist program that underlay the aesthetic productions of the workshop. Ashbee's piece in the Met show represents the considerably scaled-down view of Art Nouveau that the English practiced, an almost unadorned silver porringer (1902-4) with thin looped handles that reach out into the air like tendrils and then return to their base. The style was one on which he made a number of variations, but the extended handles always produce the same feelings of grace, tension, and resolution.

The earliest of the silver tea sets in the exhibition (1900) was by Josef Hoffmann. Hoffmann was a member of the Vienna secession, a group of artists and architect-designers who took a philosophical and aesthetic stand in the late 19^th century against the academicism and ponderous styles of the prevailing art and architecture in Austria. The Wiener Werkstätte, co-founded by Hoffmann and Koloman Moser was a company in the gesamtkunstwerk tradition and influenced to some degree by design developments in Europe and Great Britain, and especially the work of Charles Rennie MacKintosh in Glasgow. The company's intent was to produce beautiful, elegant, relatively simple objects and furniture for domestic and personal use that were handcrafted by fine artisans. Unlike the socialist thrust of other design reform movements, the targeted consumer was the upper middle class with vanguard tastes.

Metal objects made in silver, gemstones, and other precious materials such as ivory, with touches of gilt or gold, were, along with the furniture, perhaps the outstanding creations of a varied output that included everything from glass and ceramics to leatherwork, graphic arts, and textile designs. The Hoffmann tea service, although set with gemstones, is nonetheless a triumph of modernity. Balanced, economical, and original, the geometric form contrasts strikingly with the sensuality of rich materials. Except for a few discerning admirerers, Hoffmann's strong, almost starting line was ahead of its time. Sadly, before the decade was over, Hoffmann had turned to a style more congenial to the Austrians; plumper, showier, and more gemütlich. Dagobert Peche joined the company in 1915 and contributed his own often busy and fussy silver fantasies to Austrian design.

In France, Art Nouveau with its wild, sinuous curves faded out by the turn of the century. After about a decade of mixed signals that involved some retardataire designs (such charmingly archaic exotica as Armand-Albert Rateau's bronze dressing table), a modern movement began to emerge. Its opulence tied it to the past; but other aspects looked to the future: the balance of its rhythmic surfaces, a certain economy within a pattern of complexity, and stylizations of organic form rather than the intense lyrical interpretations of Art Nouveau.

Edgar Brandt was a post-World War I ferronnier, a master of florid and intricate design in that most brutal of materials: iron. Brandt's fire screens and architectural elements design with stylized, scrolled flowers patinated in silvery and gold tones contributed a motif to the earlier stages of French Art Deco: the semi-abstract flower. His massive door of forged iron (1923) was the object that first attracted Stewart Johnson's attention to the Met's holdings in modern metal.

What came to be known as French Art Deco started in force just after World War I with articles characterized by sensuous curves, precious materials, and rich embellishment though a concern with form was maintained. Other countries followed suit. By the mid-to-late twenties and early thirties, however, Art Deco had undergone a sea change. It became streamlined into an elegant simplicity of balanced form - although, even then, there was no stinting on the silver, gilt, and occasional precious stones.

Jean Puiforcat bracketed the two styles of French Art Deco. Considered by many to be the master French silversmith of the times he was a great collector of silver as well. The exhibition offered a broadly fluted tea and coffee service by Puiforcat that is all shimmering curves punctuated with lapis lazuli and ivory. Within less than ten years, Puiforcat's designs had turned smooth, contained, and geometric. But he never lost his opulent touch, expressed in a concentration on integral form set off with subtlety through well-resolved contrasts in shape, or through the use of materials in counterpoint, such as tinted glass and gilt.

The exquisite craft of many Art Deco objects was one of the major characteristics of the style that spanned the period between the wars. Jean Dunand was an exemplar of this craft. He was a metalsmith and lacquerist whose painstaking workmanship verged on tour-de-force. He perfected a technique of applying precious metals onto copper and brass, and his style combined the strict rationality of repeated geometry with the luxury of often large vessels covered entirely with patterns in silver or gold.

While Art Deco prevailed in France and elsewhere, the International Style flowered out of the German Bauhaus, which ushered in a period of modernism that profoundly affected design for decades to come. Some of its historic roots drew from the more chaste architectural aspects of the Vienna Secession. But no predecessor was more influential than the Deutscher Werkbund. Established in Germany 1907 as an association of designers, architects, and forward-looking manufacturers, the Deustcher Werkbund gathered to advance their ideas of function reflected in form, economy of design, and the place of the machine in improving standards of production.

In that same year, the German architect and designer Peter Behrens went to work for A.E.G. (Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellachaft), a large electrical conglomerate for whom Behrens designed everything from electric kettles to factory buildings. It was a little unsettling to discover that he was represented in the Met show by a pewter dressing table mirror, in the Celtic style, dated 1900-1910. While Behrens had worked in that style he had largely abandoned it early in the century. Behrens was important as a modern architect, pioneering industrial designer, and a mentor as well, one of his remarkable pupils, an assistant in his office, was the young architect Walter Gropius. In 1919 Gropius founded the Bauhaus, easily argued to be the training ground that had the single greatest impact on 20^th century design.

The object that Stewart Johnson chose to exemplify the Bauhaus style was a chair. (Rather unexpectedly for a metalwork exhibition, chairs turned up with remarkable pertinacity.)
The chair was Marcel Breuer's famous Wassily Chair of 1925, designed in the same year he became head of the woodworking section of the Bauhaus. It is now an almost iconically familiar design of chromed tubular steel whose curves and right angles are a thesis on function and rational structure. It is engineering, cool and visible. A leap forward in a particular kind of thinking, it can not be thought of an isolation. Stewart Johnson has stated that he meant the Breuer chair to "stand for all the chairs, Le Corbusior, Mies van der Rohe, and so forth." And by extension perhaps, it also stand for all the ways in which metal's strength, flexibility, and sleekness could become the handmaiden to modernism.

In the Scandinavian countries, a clean, rational style that evolved early and kept being refined began to have considerable influence on consumer design. By the fifties, notably in the United States, it had become a synonymous with a generally accepted modernism. Scandinavian design was both less severe and less theoretical, and wood, a warmer material, was the most frequent medium for its furniture. The familiarity of Scandanavian design can be found in Johan Rohde's mid-thirties silver pitcher for Georg Jensen. So sleek and pleasing a balance of asymmetrical curves, and yet so accessible an object, it became something of a hallmark of unpretentious industrial design and eventually it was so widely imitated that it almost became a cliché.

Also included was another Danish piece, date about 25 years later, by Henning Koppell, also for Georg Jensen. This large, covered silver dish could easily have come from the hands of American craftsmen of the period. Koppel's smooth, beautiful vessel is pure line in mass, its quiet reflectivity rescuing it from severity, its only decoration a slightly upward curving lip at both ends of the cover.

The late twenties and thirties saw the rise of American designers as well. Among the pieces in the exhibition were a salt and pepper shaker reduced to absolute essentials - two very small silver cubes, designed by Russel Wright in 1930. Walter von Nessen, a German-born American, was represented by a small, low table (1930) with a Bakelite top, the base of which is simply two intersecting aluminum rectangular frames of different widths. Silversmith Paul Lobel was represented by a silver tea service (1934) consisting of three gleaming hemispheres with sharply angled knobs and handles. Such modern designs brought together the two aspects of geometry that run through the 20^th century - the angle and the curve, and the sphere and the cube - presented in one integrated design. What the Met did not show, and perhaps did not much acquire were the biomorphic forms that started in the thirties and peaked in the fifties, and that look so amusingly dated now.

After World War II the United States produced its share of industrial designers of international stature, Charles Eames and Harry Bertoia among them, and both were represented in the show by metal choirs.

Bertoia's famous shell chair that now bears his name, has as its seat a curving steel mesh basket, supported by a few interlocked metal rods (1952). The open-mesh chair is form-as-function taken about as far as it can go; yet at the same time it is an ingenious, visually satisfying design, especially in its shimmering chrome version (the chair in the Met show was plastic-coated). The design is also a logical response to an interior architecture of open-plan living and transparent walls.

The sixties and into the seventies were a period of consolidation and metal ceased to carry as much of the design burden (especially in furniture) as laminates, plastics, and other new materials. The title of design capital of the world settled firmly on Milan. The field of craft, most particularly in the U.S., expanded and modernized, and in some quarters became a unique and self-expressive form of contemporary design.

A revolt against modernism, driven, perhaps, by its seeming inaptness for changing times, began to dominate the design scene in the seventies. A group of architects and designers, mostly Italian, decided the whole thing was being taken too seriously: design was not a religion, it was a kind of parlor game. Under the Milan architect Ettore Sottsass and others, a design group called Memphis was formed. From its studios came an off-balance, animated cartoon-like style in furnishings and objects, rendered in Crayola® chromatics.

At the same time a historicist approach under the well known noncommittal rubric of post-modernism began revisiting everything from the Roman Empire to Art Deco to create often amusing and cleverly wrought but ultimately trivial amalgams in architecture and design - perhaps the whole point: Each style is famous for 15 minutes, and is then junked or re-cycled.

Ettore Sottsass managed to bite into the past and still keep his tongue in his cheek. One of his pieces in the Met show took on the aspect of the "modern" style that was all sharp angles and zigzag lines, meant in its time to evoke the glamour and speed of snazzy cars, flashing chrome, and streamlined trains. (The style in itself was a transliterated inheritance from the early 20^th century Italian Futurists.) Sottsass's recollection of the twenties and thirties idiom was a silver fruit platter (1982) resting on a base of positively frenetic zig-zagging logs.

Post-modernism in the exhibition was represented through works mostly by architects. Mario Bellini, a second-generation Milan-based architect was represented by a silverplated coffee server set down amidst a circle of small rose quartz columns (1980). Michael Graves, the American architect, had a coffee set (1980-83) that incorporates many of the stylistic characteristics of the twenties - pronounced fluting and comma-shaped handles, and embellishments that include ivory (mock), Bakelite (real), and blue lacquer instead of lapis lazuli. It is reminiscent of Puiforcat at his earliest, fanciest stage.

In this writer's opinion Post-modernism will probably end up as a blip on the screen of the future, a sorting-out of the past before the real work - or play - begins. What will probably evolve (in fact is already evolving) comes out of an interest in keeping the less-is-more economy of design (the old modernism) but combining it with a new sense of individuality. Signs suggest that we will be seeing design shaped by non-linear thinking, design involving expressivism and a telling use of materials influenced both by sculpture and modern studio craft.

In the last part of the show, four chairs along with pieces by a silversmith and an ironworker-sculptor, foretold much of the upcoming story. These works use lyrical, perceptual, or gestural compressions of the way the world is seen and felt, as well as the way energy is translated into form.

Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata captured an ephemeral quality through a mundane object, a club chair, How High the Moon, 1986. If it had been wood frame and upholstery the piece would have been an ordinary bulky armchair. Instead, from tip to toe in airy and shimmering steel mesh, the full-size chair seems to float above the floor, the essence of moonlight.

Implied narrative, or even poetry, is suggested by Terence Main's bronze "frond" chair (1991), one of nine variations (although furniture in bronze does seem to call up the Roman Empire just before it fell).

James Cole's Susquehanna Bend, 1991 is a patinated brass armchair that is an abstract riverscape - more felt than seen - at the same moment that it is a real chair.

Israel-born architect and designer Ron Arad, now living in London, was represented by Big Easy, Volume 2, 1989, an armchair of mild steel with an easy slouch that is pure body language, Its "decoration" is in its lines emphasized by the very visible welding flux at the seams. This large steel object is like a drawing in the way it suggests gesture and how it would feel to sit in a squooshy armchair that embraces the body and makes the sitter feel protected, relaxed, and a little off-center. Arad's chair so attracted viewers during the show that every time the guards' backs were turned someone was running their hands over the sensual surface. This seems an especially understandable response as the chair is so strongly gestural in its visual nature.

The Korean-American silversmith Chunghi Choo was represented by a small centerpiece in plated silver and Plexiglas® (1979). The swooping, thrusting handle is, for all its symmetry, like free-hand calligraphy. A brush and a gesture of the wrist could easily produce this sweeping flowing line frozen in space. It is interesting to compare this piece with the Ashbee porringer: the initial daring impetus seems the same in both, but where Ashbee's handles return to the base and come to rest, this contemporary work seems to move forever outward into space.

Equally gestural is a large brass push plate (for the door of a restaurant) by ironsmith and sculptor Albert Paley. The large, curving bronze piece (1981) seems the closest thing to French or Belgian Art Nouveau in the show. Yet it really belongs to the present. The nature of the abstract composition dictated partly by its function as well as its implication of swinging movement, is not turn-of-the-century. The direction and relation of the lines and spaces - the rhythm of the work - belongs to our time.

Finally there was also one very unusual collaboration in the show in which the spirit if not the letter of what is to come seemed predicted.

A stainless steel vase (1986) by Alessandro Mendini, a Milan-based designer and writer, and Sinya Okayama, a Japanese designer, is the ultimate in the gestural. The piece, so complex and exacting in its multiple surfaces that it had to be handmade, changes in appearance from every angle. From one perspective it appears to be a cylindrical vase with a sweeping backplate to which three graduated, torpedo-shaped fins are attached. When turned 180 degrees, the entire vase is one long sweep of mirror-finish stainless steel.

The piece is a tour-de-force of cooperative design. As a kind of game, Mendini suggested that he and Okayama design six functional objects. Mendini would draw one-half of the each piece and send the drawings to the Japanese designer in Osaka who would complete it in any way he wished. Amusingly, Mendini apparently drew only the disembodied fins of the vase; the body of the piece was then up to Okayama.

Mendini's proposal for this collaboration suggests an interesting future for metalwork and design:

"Our work as European and Oriental designers who design neo-modern furniture is, I believe, a very difficult kind of work… full of responsibilities toward the public, towards architects and towards ourselves…. Shall we, for once, treat our design as a game?… Do you agree then, if I send you the sketches for half a stool, half a vase, half a coffee-table, half a coat-hanger, and half a storage unit? It's up to you to 'complete' them… perhaps they are actually 'serious' games?… why don't we try making the six pieces only and entirely, in polished stainless steel, as if they were virtual, as if their existence were the fruit of their surroundings, the simple reflection of other things, furniture, people…. Are you willing?"

Lisa Hamel is a critic and writer on jewelry and metals who lives in New York.

Notes

1. Jewelry, except for two or three token pieces, was not included in this exhibition for several reasons. Among them was the fact that the development of modernism in jewelry follows a rather different path and time line that that of the rest of metalwork. There were curatorial reasons as well: in an exhibition that includes furniture and architectural elements, as well as decorative objects and serving ware, jewelry proves especially difficult to exhibit.

2. As the modernism in metalwork exhibition was meant to be illustrative rather than catergorical, inevitably some notable designers and craftsmen were not included. For example, while the British Arts and Crafts movement was represented, there were no Americans, like Dirk Van Erp and Elizabeth Eaton Burton, both of whom worked in copper in the first decades of the century (no Arts and Crafts movement Americans, that is unless Frank Lloyd Wright can be considered an illustrious first cousin). But then, the British movement had international ramifications; the somewhat later American one was regional and local. The German designer Peter Behrens is represented in the show, but there is nothing of Richard Riemerschmid who is often mentioned in the same breath - the two are characterized as the first mass production industrial designers. There is also nothing from Christopher Dresser, often called the very first industrial designer. However, that may be because the 19 th century British writer, collector, and botanist was too far ahead of his time for the show's starting date of the early eighteen-nineties. And while there was a piece from the French ironworker Edgar Brandt there was nothing from Marianne Brandt, who taught at the Bauhaus in the nineteen-twenties and made metal objects that were pure geometry.

3. Just after World War II, summer workshops which spread knowledge of modern Scandanavian styles and techniques were organized by the American silversmith Margret Craver, who had trained abroad. Many of these workshop participants became both university metalwork teachers and some of the countries leading studio silversmiths.

4. The Bauhaus in Germany as well as other centers and countries made a special contribution to the United States in the twenties and thirties in the form of talented emigrés who were fleeing from an increasingly troubled Europe. The work of a number of these designers was displayed among the silver tea services and other decorative objects. These included Peter Müller-Monk and Walter von Nessen from Germany, and Hungarian born Marcel Breuer and Ilonka Karasz.

5. Stewart Johnson noted that "like the Finns earlier in this century, the Japanese weren't really encumbered with a decorative arts design tradition in this area. So in the one case, when Alvar Aalto came along, there was that freedom. The Japanese have freedom in metal furniture; they can play rather than imitate the West."

   Craig Miller, speaking of the Japanese in Modern Design in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1890 - 1990, (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry N. Abrams), wrote: "During the nineteen-eighties Milan was challenged by an emerging generation of Japanese designers, many of whom had worked at one time in Milan. These designers have continued the minimal aesthetic of later Modernism is a refined fusion of Eastern and Western motifs, most notably in the treatment of the Western chair as an abstract sculptural form."

By Lisa Hamel

Metalsmith Magazine – 1994 Fall

In association with SNAG‘s

Metalsmith magazine, founded in 1980, is an award winning publication and the only magazine in America devoted to the metal arts.