Footnotes

1 - In the visual arts, Symbolism has both a general and a specific meaning. It refers, in one sense, to the use of certain pictorial conventions (pose, gesture, or a repertoire of attributes) to express a latent allegorical meaning in a work of art (see iconography). In another sense, the term Symbolism refers to a movement that began in France in the 1880s, as a reaction both to romanticism and to the realistic approach implicit in Impressionism. Not so much a style per se, Symbolism in art was an international ideological trend that served as a catalyst in the development away from representation in art and towards abstraction.

Inspiration was found initially in the work of the French painters Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Odilon Redon, who used brilliant colors and exaggerated expressiveness of line to represent emotionally charged dream visions, often verging on the macabre, inspired by literary, religious, or mythological subjects. Their followers included the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, renowned for his use of colour to express emotions, and the French painters Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. Gauguin and Bernard, working together at Pont-Aven, in Brittany, between 1888 and 1890, adopted a style that made use of pure, brilliant colors and forms defined by heavy contour lines, resulting in flat, decoratively patterned compositions-exemplified by Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). This style they dubbed synthetist, or symbolist (using the two terms interchangeably), in opposition to the analytic approach of Impressionism. Gauguin organised the first Symbolist exhibition in 1889-90 at the Paris World's Fair. Influenced by contemporary French Symbolist poetry, the Symbolist trend in painting led in one direction-from 1889 to 1900-to the work of Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard. Calling themselves the Nabis, they emphasized art as decoration and used colour subjectively. Symbolism also was basic to the very different styles of Ferdinand Hodler, the Swiss painter; James Ensor in Belgium; Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist; and Aubrey Beardsley in England. In Beardsley's art, the link between the erotic aspects of Symbolism and the sinuous forms of the Art Nouveau style is clearly seen. Symbolism, with its concern for the subjective, allusive employment of colour and form, can be seen to underlie successive later 20th-century art styles as well: Fauvism, Expressionism, and Surrealism.

2 - Tiffany, Louis Comfort (1848-1933), painter and designer of decorative glass art objects in the Art Nouveau style. Tiffany was born in New York. After studying painting with the American artists George Inness and Samuel Colman in New York, he went to Paris for further study. For a time, he remained in Europe, painting oils and watercolours. Among his most outstanding paintings is Snake Charmer at Tangiers (c. 1915, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Returning to New York, he turned his attention to media other than paints. He established a glassmaking factory and experimented with stained glass for decorative-art objects. He is best remembered for inventing a process for making an opalescent glass, known as Tiffany favrile glass, which he used to fashion colourful windows, vases, lamps, and other decorative-art objects. Much prized by collectors today, the pieces are characterized by the curved and delicate lines of the Art Nouveau style.

Among the most famous of Tiffany's works is an enormous glass curtain for the National Theatre in Mexico City. He also designed jewelry, rugs, and textiles. In 1877 he helped organize the Society of American Artists. He was director of art for the Tiffany Studios, president, and director of art for Tiffany and Company, the jewelry store founded by his father.

3 - Lalique, René (1860-1945), French jeweler and glassmaker whose products were some of the most characteristic works, first of the Art Nouveau period and later of Art Deco. He studied drawing and goldsmithing in Paris and became a designer of jewelry for firms such as Boucheron, Vever, and Cartier, as well as for his own clients, who included Sarah Bernhardt. By the 1890s, his workshop was considerable. His displays at the international exhibitions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, secured him international acclaim as an innovator.

4 - Jugend=youth + Stil=style

5 - Georg Jensen who was born in 1866, He was trained as both a sculptor and a goldsmith. In the beginning of the century, he opened his first silversmith shop in Copenhagen, and upon his death, in 1935, he had achieved worldwide fame and was acclaimed by The New York Herald Tribune as "The Greatest Silversmith of the Last 300 Years". Georg Jensen broke, decisively, with the fashion of his day. It has been said of him that he never followed fashion - he created it. This is maybe one of the reasons why jewelry designed by Georg Jensen remain as contemporary today as it was when created more than 90 years ago.

6 - Chanel, Coco (Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel) (1883-1971), French fashion designer and one of the leaders of haute couture (high fashion), whose name was synonymous with elegance and chic. She was born in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire. In 1914 Chanel opened a millinery shop in Paris. By the mid-1920s she had launched the classic Chanel look, consisting of a casual but extremely well-cut wool jersey suit with straight, collarless cardigan jacket and short, full-cut skirt, worn with Art Deco costume jewelry and a sailor hat over short hair. Her Chanel No. 5, one of several perfumes she created, became world famous. Chanel designed nothing during World War II and its aftermath, but she successfully revived the understated Chanel look in 1954. The American musical Coco (1969) by Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn is based on her life.

7 - Chimera, in Greek mythology, a fire-breathing monster that had the head of a lion, the body of a she-goat, and the tail of a dragon. It terrorized Lycia, a region in Asia Minor, but was finally killed by the Greek hero Bellerophon.

8 - Dada (French: "hobby-horse"), nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zürich, New York City, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hannover, Ger. in the early 20th century. Several explanations have been given by various members of the movement as to how it received its name. According to the most widely accepted account, the name was adopted at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire, in Zürich, during one of the meetings held in 1916 by a group of young artists and war resisters that included Jean Arp, Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Emmy Hennings; when a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word dada, this word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. A precursor of what was to be called the Dada movement, and ultimately its leading member, was Marcel Duchamp, who in 1913 created his first ready-made (now lost), the "Bicycle Wheel," consisting of a wheel mounted on the seat of a stool.

9 - A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.

Surrealism, a movement in visual art and literature, flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content.

10 - The famous Bauhaus was constructed in 1925/26 from plans of Walter Gropius The spacious construction of glass, steel and concrete, where every object is naturally integrated with the whole, follows the concepts of its founder. Form obeys function. The High School for Design, exiled from Weimar, found its new home here. The studio wing, workshops, trade school and stage all embody the Bauhaus concept in their design. They reflect the words of Johannes Itten one of the Bauhaus members, "Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play".

The designs that originated in the Bauhaus united art and technology and ushered in a modern industrial culture. The work of the painters and other Bauhaus artisans was equally important. Works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe and many others have become part of our culture and are now taken for granted.

In 1932 the National Socialists forced the Dessau Bauhaus to close. The building was damaged in the war and makeshift repairs were carried out so that it could be used.

This architectural memorial was restored in 1975 - 76, and along with the Masters' Houses, have since 1996, been listed by UNESCO as sites of world-wide cultural importance. Now the Bauhaus Complex houses the Dessau Bauhaus Foundation and old parts of the building are used by the Anhalt Technical College. Today the cultural inheritance of the Bauhaus is preserved and carried forward by the Dessau Bauhaus Foundation which also devotes itself to the design of today's living environment. This work is divided into the workshop, the collection and the academy. The stage is again used for cultural events and exhibitions may be visited. There are tours of the Bauhaus and excursions to the Bauhaus buildings

11 - Alexander Calder. America (1899 - 1976)

The artist Alexander Calder was the inventor of the sculptural mobile back in the early thirties, initially powered by motors and air currents. He was successful with jewelry at a time when most artists produced a rather watered down version of fine art paintings.

He was able to handle beaten copper and silver without the aid of conventional tools of the trade, producing a prolific range of items from hair combs to bracelets and brooches, which he exhibited for the first time in 1940 at the Willard Gallery in New York. After the war, his work was marked by a more spindly style associated with the 50s, although visually forceful enough to echo the sharp, zigzag motifs of the forthcoming electronic age, the so-called 'electrocardiogram' of the fifties.

12 - The Goldsmiths' Company, which operates the London Assay Office, had been testing articles on manufacturer's premises for some time before it became compulsory in 1327. Tested articles were marked with a Leopard's Head. In 1363 the sponsors' mark became compulsory and eventually the testing and marking became too time consuming for the Wardens. Therefore, in 1478, a salaried Assay Master was appointed and the manufacturers were required to bring their articles to Goldsmiths' Hall to be marked, hence the term "hallmarked". The year date letter was introduced at the time to indicate which Assay Master was responsible for the testing. The fineness mark was not introduced until 1544, as .925 silver was the only permitted fineness.

Other Offices were opened in Newcastle, Exeter and York, (all of which closed in the 19th century), Chester (closed 1962) and Glasgow (closed 1964).

The advent of the Industrial Revolution, especially in Birmingham and Sheffield, created large quantities of silver articles, which were inconvenient to transport to London or Chester. Representatives of manufacturers from these two cities, after meeting in London at the "Crown and Anchor" hotel made successful representations to Parliament resulting in Acts being passed in 1773 establishing the Birmingham Assay and Sheffield Assay Offices. Sheffield chose the "Crown" as its mark, later to become a rose and Birmingham the "Anchor". Each Office had its own year date letter system, which was not unified until the 1973 Hallmarking Act.

In Scotland, the Deacon's mark was first applied in 1457, and the town mark was added in 1485. Various statutes and authorisations culminated in a Charter for the Edinburgh Assay office in 1687. The year date letter marking was not adopted until 1681. This different development prior to the Act of Union in 1707 is still evident today with Edinburgh using a lion rampart for 925 silver, whereas London, Birmingham and Sheffield use a lion passant.

This emphasizes the independence of the Assay Offices, which have no financial links whatsoever, and illustrates why Birmingham and Sheffield have similar structures and overall duties and powers, which are different from London and Edinburgh. However, the principle of the structure is the same.

The Hallmarking Act was amended in January 1999.

The range of finenesses was increased, and each fineness is now indicated in parts per thousand. The year date letter and the traditional fineness symbols remain on a voluntary basis only.

The Act also permits other European Economic Area Hallmarks and finesnesses, which are equivalent to UK Hallmarks. Guidance notes on equivalence have been developed by the British Hallmarking Council and are available through the Assay Offices and from LACOTS.

13 - Wendy Ramshaw (Born 1939. Studied Newcastle College of Art, Reading University. Awarded OBE) is one of Britain's leading post-war studio jewelers. Her collections of jewelry, in particular her Ringsets, have become classics of modern design since their first appearance in the late 1960s. She returns constantly to the theme of these tiny, constructed sculptures which transcend all boundaries of art, craft and design whilst never undermining their essential function as beautiful, wearable jewelry. She has worked with a wide range of materials and has designed clothing and ironwork - including a pair of gates in 1993 for St. John's College, Oxford - as well as jewelry.

14 - Pop Art, visual arts movement of the 1950s and 1960s, principally in the United States and Great Britain. The images of Pop Art (an abbreviation of "popular art") were taken from mass culture. Some artists duplicated beer bottles, soup cans, comic strips, road signs, and similar objects in paintings, collages, and sculptures. Others incorporated the objects themselves into their paintings or sculptures, sometimes in startlingly modified form. Materials of modern technology, such as plastic, urethane foam, and acrylic paint, often figured prominently. One of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century, Pop Art not only influenced the work of subsequent artists but also had an impact on commercial, graphic, and fashion design.

The historical antecedents of Pop Art include the work of Dadaists such as the French artist Marcel Duchamp, as well as a tradition, in US painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, of trompe l'oeil pictures and other depictions of familiar objects. Moreover, a number of Pop Artists had at times earned their living by working as commercial artists.

The Pop Art movement itself, however, began as a reaction against the Abstract Expressionist style of the 1940s and 1950s, which the Pop Artists considered over-intellectual, subjective, and divorced from reality. Adopting the aim of the American composer John Cage - to close the gap between life and art - Pop Artists embraced the environment of everyday life. In using images that reflected the materialism and vulgarity of modern mass culture, they sought to deliver a perception of reality even more immediate than that offered by the realistic painting of the past. They also strove to be impersonal -that is, to allow the viewer to respond directly to the object, rather than to the skill and personality of the artist. Occasionally, however, an element of satire or social criticism can be discerned.

In the United States, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns provided the initial impetus - Rauschenberg with his collages constructed from household objects such as quilts and pillows, Johns with his series of paintings depicting American flags and bull's-eye targets. The first fully fledged instance of Pop Art was Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? (1956, private collection) by the British artist Richard Hamilton. In this satiric collage of two ludicrous figures in a living room, the Pop hallmarks of exuberance, incongruity, crudeness, and good humour are emphasized.

Pop Art developed rapidly during the 1960s. In 1960 the British artist David Hockney produced Typhoo Tea (London, Kasmin Gallery), one of the earliest paintings to portray a brand-name commercial product. In the same year Johns finished his painted cast bronzes of Ballantine beer cans. In 1961 Claes Oldenburg, an American, constructed the first of his garish, humorous plastic sculptures of hamburgers and other kinds of fast food. At the same time Roy Lichtenstein, another American, extended the range of Pop Art with his oil paintings that mimic blown-up frames of comic strips. Several Pop Artists also produced happenings, or theatrical events staged as works of art.

In addition to appropriating the subject matter of mass culture, Pop Art appropriated the techniques of mass production. Rauschenberg and Johns had already abandoned individual, titled paintings in favour of large series of works, all depicting the same objects. In the early 1960s the American Andy Warhol carried the idea a step further by adopting the mass-production technique of silk-screen printing, turning out hundreds of identical prints of Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell's soup cans, and other familiar subjects, including identical three-dimensional Brillo boxes.

Other important examples of Pop Art works by American artists are George Segal's white plaster casts of real people in real settings; pastries depicted in thick paint that resembles cake frosting, by Wayne Thiebaud; paintings imitating billboards, by James Rosenquist; the satiric Great American Nudes series by Tom Wesselmann; objects combined with painting, by Jim Dine; and designs of words, numbers and symbols, by Robert Indiana. In Great Britain, Peter Blake produced mock-serious publicity-shot images of popular heroes, and the American-born R. B. Kitaj painted images often called "collages of ideas", incorporating obscure literary allusions but with a strong figurative basis.

15 - Post-Modernism (literature and art), international movement affecting all arts. Historically it refers to a period after Modernism, that is to say, broadly speaking, to the decades from the 1970s to the present day. Theoretically, it refers to an attitude to Modernism. It is a global movement that can be traced in almost all cultural manifestations, from the films of Quentin Tarantino to architecture, the literature of William Burroughs and John Fowles to painting, from philosophy to television. In literature, Post-Modernism has its origins in the rejection of traditional mimetic fiction. Instead, it favoured a sense of artifice, a suspicion of absolute truth, and stressed the fictionality of fiction. In literature in English Post-Modern theories were often used by writers confronting a post-colonial experience, such as Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children (1981). The movement also embraced popular forms such as detective fiction (Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, 1983), science fiction (Doris Lessing's Canopy in Argus, 1979-1985), and fairy tale (Angela Carter's Bloody Chamber, 1979). What Post-Modern theorists agree on is perhaps only one thing: that the radical scandal of Modernist art has long since been assimilated and recuperated by those very liberal bourgeois critics who were initially so shocked by it. Modernism has become part of the cultural institution, enshrined in art-galleries, museums, and academic syllabuses. But there is no Post-Modernist consensus about the value of Modernism, nor any cultural consensus about the value of Post-Modernism. In architecture, for example, the Post-Modern rejection of Brutalism and the International Style associated with Le Corbusier, and its replacement by an allusive, eclectic mode, which refers in a whimsical or parodic pastiche to earlier styles, from Neo-Classical to Mannerist or Rococo, has been the centre of much public debate. Such debate often misses the ironic self-mocking of the Post-Modern position, and may welcome the apparent return to traditional values, without recognizing it as an attempt to refer self-consciously to earlier styles rather than to embrace them. Post-Modernism is marked by "camp" and "kitsch" rather than nostalgia; in general it lacks the "high seriousness" of Modernism. However, it may be seen as the logical consequence of Modernist irony and relativism: even the Modernist values themselves are thrown into question. The playfulness of Post-Modernism makes it more easily assimilable by mass or "pop" culture; and its superficial acceptance of contemporary alienation and the fetishisation of the art-object have led to accusations of political irresponsibility. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard sees the explosion of information technology and the associated ease of access to a proliferation of diverse materials of apparently anonymous origin as an integral part of Post-Modern culture, and as contributing to the dissolution of the values of personal identity and responsibility. However, he views the Post-Modern multiplicity of styles as part of an attack on a representational conception of art and language which thereby reaffirms rather than rejects high Modernism, and which constitutes, indeed, a paradoxical preparation for its triumphant return.

Additional Reading

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Daniele Ravenna

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Anne Barros / Hardcover / Published 1998

Charlotte Gere, Geoffrey C. Munn / Hardcover / Published 1989

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Patricia Anderson, Patricia Anderon / Hardcover / Published 1998

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