Jewellery in the Age of Modernism 1918-1940 by Simon Bliss

Author:Simon Bliss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Evans laments the fact that jewellery could only have a future as an ephemeral art whereby a piece may only have a very short life span – perhaps only that of the costume that it adorns – an intriguing notion now, perhaps less so for Evans.

Her views are far from the ‘democratic’ conception of modern jewellery identified by Barthes that, as has already been pointed out in Chapter 1, provides us with a way of identifying and discussing changing attitudes to the materiality and fashion-related functions of twentieth-century jewellery. Evans’s pessimism aside, her views on design are worth considering when exploring the relationship between costume jewellery and modernism in the interwar years. We have seen that the designers working for the great jewellery houses were very serious about their designs (even ‘portentously’ so) and that they saw them as representing a way of bringing together the eternal and the modern – basing some of their collections on modern themes, geometric configurations and hitherto unexplored combinations of materials. But their markets were still the rich, wealthy and powerful élites of the day. Costume jewellery sought to serve markets in different ways and it would be wrong to suggest that the costume jewellery produced in Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s was produced entirely without quality, serious intent or design sensibility. It is as easy to find examples of absurdist design produced without irony by the purveyors of ‘high jewellery’ as it is to encounter examples of ‘meretricious’ costume jewellery. However, some of the major interwar European manufacturers of costume jewellery, such as the Pforzheim-based company Fahrner Schmuck were able to combine a modern design sensibility with mass production techniques to produce what the company proudly proclaimed on one of their 1920s posters as ‘der schmuck unserer zeit’ (jewellery of our time) (Buxbaum 1992, 102).

Cornelie Holzach has written that ‘thanks to the emancipation of costume jewellery, many women were able to afford to “wear a fortune that is worth nothing”’ (2008, 16). She also points out that the ranges of jewellery produced by the larger companies in Germany were both affordable and modern. Some of the materials used (such as ‘galalith’ made from casein and formaldehyde) were hard plastics which could be cut, drilled and coloured to imitate gem stones or simply stand for itself. Across Europe and America materials such as bakelite and celluloid, originally developed as substitutes for other more expensive materials (such as ebony, ivory and shellac), quickly became suitable for use in new languages of design. For example, German jeweller Jacob Bengel, based in Idar-Oberstein, produced ranges of cheap, flexible, industrial-standard products in which ‘substitute’ materials were used to great effect. These were large pieces of jewellery which brought together the visual syntax of the metalworker’s shop, the precision of the engineer, the aesthetic of the standardized product and the experimentation of the chemist’s laboratory. As Holzach suggests, materially these pieces were worth relatively little, yet in their own way are as modern as anything produced by Parisian interwar jewellers.

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