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.

The “Diament” dinette set, 1928, alludes to the setback skyscraper of the 1920s and 30s. It was designed by Jean G. Theobald for the Wilcox Silver Plate Company. Dallas Museum of Art, the Jewel Stern American Silver Collection.

Unlike Colonial silver, significant pieces from the TwentiethCentury were still affordable. The field, moreover, had not been”done” and presented an exciting challenge to the curators andresearchers at the museum. It was possible to build a corecollection quickly, thanks to effective fundraising and lucrativedeaccessioning.

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.

The “Circa ’70” tea and coffee service, 1963, anticipated space travel with its upward lifting tray and “antenna” handles. Dallas Museum of Art, The Patsy Lacy Griffith Collection.

During the late 1920s, there were many opportunities forAmerican designers and consumers to learn about Modern Europeanapplied arts. The most spectacular venue was the ExpositionInternationale des Arts Décoratifs et Modernes, the influentialtradeshow that took place in Paris in 1925. There were also smallerexhibitions that were organized in America by department stores andmuseums.

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.

Capturing the Modern market was touch and go for the silver industry. Clearly, a market for these types of wares existed, yet there was an underlying sense of uncertainty pertaining to which version of the Modern look that American buyers would willingly bring into their home.

A range of styles was tried out on the public during these years. French design was especially influential; hence the “Modernism” compote, 1928, by Reed & Barton, which has a stepped base and a ribbed foot. It was closely inspired by a similar piece by Jean Puiforcat, the French designer who was well known to contemporary silver collectors in this country. (His work was sold exclusively in America by Saks Fifth Avenue, the New York department store.)

Silver manufacturers used silver plate for their more experimental models; hence this unusual tea ball and stand, 1928, by Paye and Baker. Dallas Museum of Art, the Jewel Stern American Silver Collection.

Another French characteristic that was adopted by Americansilver manufacturers was narrow fluted ribbing. A tea and coffeeservice, 1928, by the A.L. Wagner Manufacturing Company and acoffee service, circa 1928-1929, by Barbour Sterling Fine Arts arejust two examples of its many appearances in the exhibition.

American manufacturers also looked to the Bauhaus for inspiration, although the influence of the German design school was, in practice, comparatively limited. A tea ball and stand, 1928, by Paye and Baker is one of the most successful interpretations of the Bauhaus style. Both the tea ball and the stand are cone shaped, and the stand rests on cruciform supports. After steeping, the tea ball is hooked a few inches above the stand for healthful draining. This piece is devoid of any embellishment, and the elegance of the design rests on its spare geometric form. It was designed by Ilonka Karasz (1896-1981), the Hungarian native, who was one of the many European designers employed by the silver industry in America.

Manufacturers learned to use silver plate for the more experimental designs. The Paye and Baker tea ball and stand are an early example of this prudence. Silver plate was used by the Wilcox Silver Plate Company to make a variety of unconventional dinette sets in the 1920s and 30s. These compact tea services, which comprised the usual teapot, creamer and sugar bowl, were fitted on one compact tray. The three in the exhibition were designed by Jean G. Theobald.

By contrast, the “Modernist” coffee service by Reed & Barton, 1928, has a more traditional design and is made of silver. It has undulating-shaped vessels with delicate old-fashioned handles. In the case of the teapot, the handle is decorated with ivory. The teapot, creamer and sugar bowl are neatly arranged on a large ovoid hand-hammered tray.

One of the most successful native motifs that flourished between the wars was the skyscraper. It was used successfully by furniture designers and architects, and it was also used to great effectiveness by the silver industry. The skyscraper motif emerged in mainstream design in the mid-1920s; accordingly buyers would have grasped the allusion when it began to be widely employed by silver manufacturers a couple years later.

Modern American silver abounded in urban and industrial imagery. “The skyscraper is the inspiration of Modernism” explained Apollo Studios in its advertisement for their “Skyscraper” tea set, 1928. Its stepped lids were designed to suggest the Modernist buildings and the black handles represented smokestacks. The style was similarly evoked in the black handle of a tea strainer, circa 1929, that was made by R. Wallace & Sons.

As architectural styles changed, so too changed the popular silver forms. Designs of the 20s and 30s became passé, only to be replaced in the 40s and 50s with the “early glass box” look. The candlesticks, circa 1943, that were designed by Merle Fenelon Faber (1891-1980), look like something dreamed up by the midcentury architect Wallace K. Harrison.

For all the seeming remoteness of Victorian culture, the visitor to the “Modernism in American Silver” exhibition enters a world not very many generations removed from that era and from its emphasis on formality and ritual. Compotes, centerpieces, bonbon dishes, cigarette boxes and vanity sets, not to mention all manner of trays and bowls – there could have been nothing slack or casual about a society that used such a range of objects in daily life. The panoply of bourgeois life also included tea and coffee services, here on display in impressive numbers.

The candleholder is likewise represented in a variety of striking and unusual forms. Its paradoxical survival in the age of electricity is highlighted in the “industrial” candelabra, 1935, by Helen Hughes Dulany (1885-1968). The piece is characterized by flat planes with circular cutouts and cylinder candleholders to suggest the precision and impersonality of machine production. Twenty years later, silver designers were looking to the work of Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi for inspiration. The fashion for biomorphic forms is evoked in the hookah-shaped candlestick, circa 1957, by Marion Anderson Noyes (1907-2002).

Modern silver has been the subject of some high quality exhibitions in recent years, “Modernism in American Silver” is part of this rediscovery. The exhibition will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art in 2006 with exhibit dates from June 18 to September 24, then on to The Wolfsonian in November 2006, and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis in April of 2007.

The catalog for the exhibition, Modernism in American Silver: 20th Century Design, authored by Jewel Stern, co-edited by Tucker and Charles Venable and published by Yale University Press in association with the Dallas Museum of Art, is available for $75. The Renwick Gallery is at 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue NW (at 17th Street).

For more information, 202-633-2850 or americanart.si.edu/renwick.