'Modernism In American Silver'

Twenty-five years ago, anyone wanting to know more about Modern American silver would not have thought to visit the DMA. But then, in the early 1980s, the field was much less developed. A few private collectors were presciently building collections, but there was much less institutional activity. In the case of the DMA, the achievement is especially significant because the museum's decorative arts department was officially founded only in 1983.

The DMA has the unenviable status of a midsize regional museum in a state with two world-class museums. The big Texas money naturally gravitates to places like the Amon Carter and the Kimbell Art Museum, and there are few Dallas collectors with artistically important heirlooms to pass on to the local museum. The risk in those early years was that DMA's decorative arts galleries would come to display a little bit of this and a little bit of that instead of forming a coherent collection.

To prevent a future of directionless acquisitions, the museum, beginning in the mid-1980s, built up its holdings in a few select fields of which one was silver. The choice of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries was both scholarly and strategic.

Unlike Colonial silver, significant pieces from the Twentieth Century were still affordable. The field, moreover, had not been "done" and presented an exciting challenge to the curators and researchers at the museum. It was possible to build a core collection quickly, thanks to effective fundraising and lucrative deaccessioning.

In 1989, DMA purchased several pieces from the sale of the Sam Wagstaff collection including Gorham's iconic iceberg bowl and a Tiffany "Chrysanthemum" pitcher. By the early 1990s the museum collection began to take shape with the addition of the Belmont-Rothschild humidor by Tiffany and the stool that Gorham made for the 1900 Paris Exposition.

DMA's traveling exhibition in the 1990s, showcasing the first acquisitions, attracted even more donor attention.

The most substantial addition to the museum's collection came from Florida collector, scholar and author Jewel Stern, who in recent years has transferred her priceless collection of Modern American silver to the DMA. Of the nearly 200 objects in the exhibition, the majority have a Stern provenance.

Stern, who curated the exhibition, began collecting in the 1980s, when the field of Modern silver was still poorly understood. She recalls the long hours in company archives and going through old magazines page by page. The results of her research are evident in the exhibition catalog, which will become a useful reference book for scholars and collectors.

The Jewel Stern Collection started with one necessary but serendipitous purchase (an hors d'oeuvres tray for home entertaining) and grew from there. Stern's original intentions were to collect only American Modern silver made between the wars, but this ambition was extended first to include the postwar years, and later to include the 1960s and 70s. Eventually, the cutoff date was practically abolished and the collection has pieces made as recently as the 1990s.

The result is a unique look at Modernism as interpreted by the American silver industry that includes designers such as Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Tommi Parzinger, Elsa Peretti, Eliel Saarinen, Belle Kogan, and Lella and Massimo Vigelli. It also includes largely unrecognized people such as Donald H. Colflesh, Kurt Eric Christoffersen, Helen Hughes Dulany, Robert J. King and Elsa Tennhardt, who are regarded as being instrumental in shaping silverware for a New Age.

"This is the first major exhibition to examine Modernism's transformation of the definition of progressive silver design from the late 1920s through the end of the century," stated Kevin W. Tucker, DMA project director, co-curator and the Margaret B. Perot curator of decorative arts and design at DMA.

During the late 1920s, there were many opportunities for American designers and consumers to learn about Modern European applied arts. The most spectacular venue was the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Modernes, the influential tradeshow that took place in Paris in 1925. There were also smaller exhibitions that were organized in America by department stores and museums.

In the field of silver, the revival styles, especially the Colonial Revival, continued to be popular, but there was an increased appreciation for the new European ways of doing things. Not to be left behind, American silver manufacturers began to invest in their own Modern lines.

Gorham hired the Danish silversmith Erik Magnussen (1884-1961), whose most important early design was the emphatically Modern "Cubic" coffee service, 1927. Some of the faceted sides were oxidized and gilded to suggest shadowing and, on the handles, to give the illusion that the metal was twisted about. When the "Cubic" coffee service was exhibited in the Gorham showroom, it was called the "Lights and Shadows of Manhattan" and shown next to a Cubist painting of the city.

A "Cubic" salad service was also produced and there were plans for a "Cubic" candlestick, sandwich tray, and bonbon dish. The design proved to radical for buyers, though, and Gorham not only stopped production, but backed away from the whole project. The "Cubic" line was intended, according to company literature published the following year, to be for exhibition only.

"Modernism in American Silver" includes not only the "Cubic" coffee service, but also the many other attempts of American manufacturers to gauge the daringness of consumer taste.

The "Modern American" line, which was Gorham's next essay into new style, is represented by a coffee service, 1928, again by Magnussen. Here the simple cylinder vessels are decorated at the base with vertical scoring and the ebony handles have an angular geometric form. "Modern American" by no means suggests timidity, but it is less polemical. The line grew to include candlesticks, bowls, and a pitcher with goblets, but it never really took off. After an unsuccessful advertising campaign, it was discontinued during the 1930s.