Gold jewelry by Jensen

Shortly after Georg Jensen opened his silversmithing shop in Copenhagen in 1904, he received an invitation to participate in an exhibition to be held at the Danske Kunstindustrimuseum (Danish Museum of Art and Design), not far from his tiny shop. The exhibition was devoted to the latest in modern Danish design, and Jensen's display of ninety-one pieces of jewelry and nineteen pieces of flatware and hollowware was well reviewed. Over the course of the next century the firm's emphasis vacillated between jewelry and silverwares, but both were in continuous production. Today among the rarest of the firm's jewelry are objects fashioned in gold. An exhibition entitled Georg Jensen Gold Jewelry, which includes about fifty pieces, has been organized by Alastair Crawford and is on view in his eponymous New York City gallery from November 2 to 18.

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Jensen was apprenticed to the goldsmith A. R. Andersen in Copenhagen in 1881. He completed his training at the age of twenty and subsequently found work with a silversmith named Holm. However, sculpture was his first love, so he left Holm to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Having little success selling his pieces, he took a job at the Bing and Grondahl porcelain factory in order to support his wife and two children, then moved on to various other jobs in the ceramics industry, even making art pottery in his own studio. In 1901 he became foreman of a metal workshop owned by Mogens Ballin, a proponent of making affordable objects in base metals such as bronze, pewter, and polished copper. Jensen began to exhibit pieces of his metalwork, which met with critical acclaim and emboldened him to establish Georg Jensen Silversmithy. His first products were jewelry, no doubt because making small-scale objects kept his expenses for raw materials low.

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Starting in the 1920s the gold jewelry from Jensen's shop was almost exclusively of eighteen karats. For the most part, pieces designed by Jensen reflect his fascination with nature, particularly elements of plants and flowers. Just as with his silver jewelry, many of his examples in gold incorporate semiprecious stones and some demonstrate that he and the designers who worked at the firm sometimes reused a decorative motif. Pieces in the art deco style are angular and pared down and those associated with the modern era are biomorphic and abstract. Aside from Jensen himself, other designers in his shop whose work is represented in this exhibition include Harald Nielsen, Henning Koppel, Soren Jensen, Torun Bulow-Hube, Nanna Ditzel, Bent Gabrielsen, Minas Spiridis, Arno Malinowski, Tuk Fischer, and Flemming Eskildsen.

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A catalogue of the exhibition is available by telephoning the gallery at 212-249-3602 or through its Web site (www.alastaircrawford.com).

It appears to be a Jensen moment. Opening on November 17 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is Georg Jensen Silversmiths, which remains on view until March 2007. The show includes some forty pieces of silver flatware and hollowware as well as design drawings for many of the objects on view. Information about this show may be found on the museum's Web site www.philamuseum.org.

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