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This collection was created by Mary Kretsinger over a period of forty
years for her dear friend and mentor, Josephine Wallace. The
two women corresponded about the process often, and challenged each other
with the kind of creative energy that produces great art.
The collection was
exhibited at The Wichita Center for the Arts from November 12, 2008 to
January 4, 2009.
This collection has never before been
offered for sale. It consists of over twenty handmade pieces of jewelry by Mary Kretsinger in gold, silver, brass, ivory, and enamels. Each
ingeniously designed piece is a one-of-a-kind work of art. The excellent
quality and magnificent craftsmanship of this jewelry rivals anything
I've seen before.
Kansas native, Mary Kretsinger (1915-2001) was on one of the most
respected, experimental enamellists of her generation. She
received a master's degree in art history and design at the State
University of Iowa and then continued her art studies at Columbia
University in New York and at the Craft Student's League with Adda
Husted-Andersen.
By the 1950s, she was already an established member of the American
modernist crafts movement. She exhibited in 1955 in the Walker Art
Center's Contemporary Jewelry Exhibit on Paper. Throughout
her career she continued to exhibit, winning many awards and receiving
invitations to exhibit in over eighty museum and gallery shows.
After
teaching art in elementary schools, intermediate schools and colleges in
Arizona, Iowa, and Kansas, she became an Associate Professor of crafts
and design at Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State
University). In the 1960s she became a full time artist and became
successful through gallery representation, patrons, and commissioned
work.
"Her earliest jewelry was primarily done in brass, formatted in
ribbons of metal in maze-like configurations with jagged edges, or flat
metal pieces that were hammered, gouged and fused, creating rugged
moonscape-like surfaces. Later she tamed some of the wildness with more
subtle nuances, preferring to work in fine silver and 18k or 24k gold."
She was a master enamellist, especially in the technique of
cloisonné. "Her colors are rich and powerful....She used
jewel-toned enamels in small irregular shapes, floating independently in
luminous backgrounds of silver-gray, gold or pearl white....."
Kretsinger's jewelry "reflects a playful wit, containing surprise
elements in the design; pendants, bracelet and rings may have double and
triple hinges, often hiding some clever treatment on the back surface or
may have convertible parts and removable pieces that serve dual
purposes. "
(From Form & Function, American Modernist Jewelry, 1940 - 1970
by Marbeth Schon, biography of Mary Kretsinger by Sheila Pamfiloff)
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I'm very pleased to present a
collection of
rare jewelry by Winfield Fine Art in Jewelry, a gallery/workshop located in
Greenwich Village during the 1940s. Winfield Fine Art in Jewelry
was the brainchild of Armand Winfield (1919 - 2009), who
developed one of the first commercial, mass production embedding
processes using crystal clear acrylics. All the pieces in the
collection were made between 1946-1948.
Art students from New York City's prestigious
Cooper Union were brought together to produce original signed miniature
works of art which were encased in plastics and sold as jewelry.
The jewelry became very popular and feature stories about Winfield Fine
Art appeared in a 1947 issue of Cosmopolitan, the New Yorker, Plastics Magazine,
the Newark Evening News, the Village Chatter, and the European and
Australian press. Bert Parks interviewed Armand Winfield on radio and
an article about the jewelry appeared in Vogue Magazine. The business
began in 1946 and closed in 1948.
Twenty-one pieces of Mr.
Winfield's work were archived into the Smithsonian Institution's
National Design Museum in 2000 and his jewelry and a photograph of him
are displayed at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. See:
"Winfield Fine
Art in Jewelry, a fusion of art and scientific discovery," MODERN
SILVER magazine, February/March, 2003.
www.modernsilver.com/winfieldfineart.htm
You can read more about Winfield Fine Art in Jewelry in my books,
Modernist Jewelry, 1930-1960, The
Wearable Art Movement and Form & Function, American Modernist Jewelry,
1940 - 1970
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All the pieces below were handmade by Winifred Clark Shaw and
are from one single collection.Winifred Clark Shaw attended Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield
Hills,
Michigan where, in 1953, she received a Master of Fine Arts
degree with a major in metalsmithing and a minor in weaving. Her
large body of work demonstrates her refined sense of color and material
in both linear and three-dimensional design. Of particular
interest are her pieces that combine original weavings with metals.
Shaw participated in many important national mid-20th century exhibits
including Midwest Designer Craftsmen (1954), The Chicago Art
Institute; American Jewelry Today (1963), Everhart Museum,
Scranton, Pennsylvania; Craftsmen of the Eastern States (1963),
Worcester, Massachusetts; Jewelry 64 (1964), State University
College, Plattsburgh, New York; Decorative Arts Exhibition
(1964), Wichita, Kansas; as well as many juried exhibitions in New
Hampshire and a retrospective exhibit at the University of New Hampshire
in 1987.
Her work was also included in the League of New Hampshire exhibit at the
1964 New York World's Fair.
Winifred Clark Shaw taught jewelry making and weaving at the
University of New Hampshire for thirty-three years beginning in 1954.
Source: Win's Best: The Jewelry and Weaving of Winifred Clark
Shaw, The University of New Hampshire, 1987 |
This piece by merry renk is a rare and exquisite 14k
yellow gold wedding crown with thirty-five Australian opals titled "James
Love Peacock"
merry renk (one of my very favorite American studio
jewelers) has played a very important role in the American studio
jewelry movement since the 1950s. In the late 1940s, she studied with
Laszlo Maholy-Nagy in Chicago, where she opened a gallery called "750
Studio." She began working with wire, forming simple shapes into designs
for jewelry.
In 1948, she moved to California where she worked full
time making jewelry. She is well-known for work in enamels and
interlocking forms. In 1974, renk received a National Endowment of the
Arts Craftsmen Award for her work with plique-a-jour enameling.
She had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1954, The
M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1971, The Smithsonian
Institution, National Museum of History and Technology, Washington D.C.
in 1971, and a retrospective at the California Crafts Museum in Palo
Alto in 1981.
More information about merry renk and photographs of her work can be
found in both of my books,
Modernist Jewelry,1930-1960, The Wearable Art Movement and Form &
Function, American Modernist Jewelry, 1940 - 1970 and her work
was included in the exhibit "American
Modernist Jewelry, 1940 - 1970" at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art,
2008. |
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