All posts tagged Glass

Rediscovering gems @ the British Museum

Room 3

As you enter the main entrance of the British Museum it’s easy, in the hurly burly of the crowd, to walk right past room 3, immediately on your right. This small, dark, wood-lined room features small but beautifully formed and always FREE exhibitions. My favourite was the one about mummified crocodiles from ancient Egypt.

The story of the stolen gems

Room 3 is currently hosting a small exhibition titled ‘Rediscovering gems.’ This needs a bit of background:

You may have heard about the scandal caused by the discovery that many items had been stolen from the British Museum’s collection. In August 2023 the Museum announced that a number of items had been stolen, were missing or damaged. One report estimates that over 1,500 objects have gone missing.

The Museum soon realised that a major target of the thefts was its collection of engraved gems, including the Townley and Blacas collections (see details below). Such was the scandal that it led, regrettably to the resignation of the Museum’s Director, Hartwig Fischer, who did the decent (and wise) thing and jumped before he was pushed.

Details of stolen gems

Such is the scope of the theft issue that the Museum has a web page devoted to it, Recovery of missing items. From this we learn that the vast majority of the missing items are from the Department of Greece and Rome and mainly fall into two categories: gems and jewellery.

Ancient glass cameo with a Nereid riding a sea horse, a cupid in the waves. Roman, late 1st century BC to 1st century AD © The Trustees of the British Museum

Tell me about these gems

Gems, cameos or intaglios are small objects, often set in rings or other settings, or left unmounted and unfinished. They may be made of semi-precious stone – for example, sard, sardonyx, amethyst – or glass. They may be cast from a mould or engraved by hand.

The majority of these antique gems are from the Hellenistic and Roman world, but some may were made in modern times in imitation of ancient gems. They may feature images of famous individuals from the Classical past, or mythological scenes, animals or objects.

The gems are of varied quality. Some are fragmentary and damaged.

Onyx cameo depicting a nude woman (perhaps Venus) before the statue of Priapus. Roman, 1st century AD. Collection: Charles Townley © The Trustees of the British Museum

Recovered gems

A dedicated team at the Museum is working with the Metropolitan Police and with an international group of experts in gems, collection history and art theft, to recover the missing items. So far the Museum has recovered 356 items and has identified more than 300 others.

One of the challenges with retrieving the missing items is that many of them had never been fully documented. So the Museum has embarked on an ambitious five-year plan to catalogue and photograph the entire gem collection and to make this information freely available online for everyone. Every cloud has a silver lining.

It is 20 or so of these recovered gems which have been put on display in room 3, providing the curators with an opportunity to go to town and really explain this particular type of art form. Thus this small display manages to describe different types of gems, made in different eras, from different materials, as well as explaining the role played by early modern collectors (in the 1700s) in saving and categorising them.

Ancient intaglio representing the head of Omphale, wearing the lion-skin of her lover Herakles. Roman, late 1st century BC to 1st century AD © The Trustees of the British Museum

Rediscovering gems: the exhibition

So, now to the display itself. Room 3 is a relatively small gallery so this is a relatively small display but, then again, these are tiny objects, very tiny, generally the size of one or two pound coin. It’s surprising how much information and beauty you can pack into one room.

Note: if you go to the Museum’s own large print guide (link below) you’ll see that I’ve relied very heavily on the curators’ explanatory text, albeit reordered and partly rewritten to make it flow better. Hopefully.

Tell me more about gems

Gems were the picture book of the ancient Mediterranean world. Carved from semi-precious stones or cast from glass, they depicted famous individuals, gods and goddesses, animals or objects and scenes from myth or daily life.

Used as seals, worn as jewellery, or collected as objects of beauty in their own right, these miniature designs required phenomenal skill to carve and became sought-after luxury objects and status symbols.

Ancient glass intaglio (waster) with Jupiter as an eagle abducting Ganymede. Roman, late 1st century BC to 1st century AD © The Trustees of the British Museum

Classical gems have been highly prized by collectors from the Renaissance onwards, but never more so than in 18th-century Europe. Cabinets of gems took up little room but held large collections of beautiful miniature artworks.

Gems tells us about the ancient world but gem collections offer deep insights into the personal tastes and aesthetic preferences of the people who assembled them.

Charles Townley, Enlightenment collector

The 18th century was a highpoint for interest in engraved gems. Recognized as key pieces of art and culture, they were collected and studied by royals, aristocrats, artists, and antiquarians such as Charles Townley (1737 to 1805).

A wealthy English country gentleman and insatiable collector of antiquities, Townley travelled to Italy on the Grand Tour and acquired important Roman marble statues, and many other ancient objects. The smallest pieces of classical art that caught his eye were engraved gems.

Townley’s wooden cabinets, with their distinctive shallow drawers, were specially designed to hold some of his glass gems and their impressions, made from ‘red sulphur’. Most of the drawers are labelled with strips of paper bearing notes in his handwriting, revealing his enthusiasm and scholarship.

One of Charles Townley’s cabinets containing 656 glass gems © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photo by the author

Townley became a trustee of the British Museum in 1791, and his collection of gems was purchased together with drawings, bronzes, and coins by the Museum in 1814.

Collections of gem impressions

Impressions of gems in wax, plaster and other materials had been known since the Renaissance. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, collections of impressions were commercially produced for connoisseurs and scholars, or as souvenirs of the ‘Grand Tour’. The Roman workshop of Tommaso Cades specialised in making plaster impressions of gems glued in boxes resembling books.

A gem box containing a set of plaster casts of engraved gems, made by Tommaso Cades. It is one of twelve boxes in book form. The book opens each side to reveal 2 trays of 25 casts so that there are 50 casts per volume, 600 casts in all. The casts are copies of gems arranged by date, ancient to modern, and subject matter © The Trustees of the British Museum

The availability of reproductions of gems from the ancient Mediterranean world encouraged generations of engravers to copy famous examples and to create new intaglios in the style of the best ancient artists.

Plaster casts and magnifying glasses

Engraved gems are small. Often set in rings, they need to be seen close-up and with ample light (which is why each display case is accompanied by a magnifying glass (attacked by a wire to the wall so they can’t be pinched; once bitten, twice shy).

A gem impression in plaster is generally more easily read than the original stone even though it is the same size. Townley had access to magnifying glasses but he also employed artists to draw his gems. The sharp eyes and the interpretations of these talented professionals helped to make fine details visible.

Precious fragments

Many cameos appear to be the work of the best artists, which is understandable since the materials employed were intrinsically valuable. The style of cutting closely matches that of major sculpture in stone and metal. In these miniature works we are even able to detect references to more familiar monumental works.

Fragments became particularly coveted among 18th-century collectors because their damaged state was seen as proof of their antiquity. They were mounted in gold to make them wearable again.

Fragment of a banded onyx cameo engraved with the head of a woman in profile. Rome 1st century BC to 1st century AD. Set in an 18th century gold ring by Charles Townley. Collection: Charles Townley © The Trustees of the British Museum

Art in miniature

Cameos, gems where the design has been carved in relief, were probably an invention of the royal Hellenistic court in Alexandria, Egypt. The most spectacular use layered stones (sardonyx). They were particularly popular from the 1st century BC onwards for secular and religious subjects, and they were worn as jewellery.

Cameos were also used for imperial portraiture and propaganda. These are often unusually large, such as the Blacas Cameo.

The Blacas Cameo

This spectacular ancient Roman gem is made from a layered sardonyx and shows the emperor Augustus (ruled 27 BC to AD 14). Augustus wears a headband, which is embellished with a fine assemblage of small cameos and precious stones, probably medieval additions.

The Blacas Cameo is named after a collector of ancient objects, Pierre Louis Jean Casimir, Duc de Blacas d’Aulps (1771 to 1839), who greatly increased the size and scope of his father’s collection. In 1866, his entire collection, 951 pieces in all, was purchased by the British Museum.

The so-called Blacas Cameo: sardonyx cameo, engraved with a portrait of Augustus wearing a headband embellished with small cameos and precious stones, likely a medieval addition. Roman AD 14 to 20. Collection Duc de Blacas d’Aulps © The Trustees of the British Museum

Renaissance and neoclassical engravers

From the Renaissance (about 1400 to 1600) onwards ancient gems became popular, imitated and collected. Set in fabulous mounts, they were widely reproduced and sometimes faked. Gem engravers used the visual language of the classical world to create new versions of popular subjects, such as the Hellenistic rulers of ancient Egypt depicted on this cameo.

These later gems were often difficult to distinguish from their ancient originals. Correctly identifying them can still be contentious, often requiring a laborious process of stylistic comparison and researching collection history.

Renaissance cameo depicting Hellenistic rulers of Egypt, set in a Renaissance enamelled mount. Late 16th to early 17th century. Collection: Dud de Blacas d’Aulps © The Trustees of the British Museum

Enter Michelangelo

The first publication devoted to describing precious gems was a set of engravings by Enea Vico (1523 to 1567) of the collection belonging to Cardinal Grimani (1461 to 1523). It has been claimed that the male pose in Grimani’s cameo of ‘Augustus on the Capricorn’ inspired the pose of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s figure of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, which is why the display shows them side by side.

Installation view of ‘Recovering gems’ at the British Museum showing (above) a cameo representing Augustus on the Capricorn, his chosen star sign (about 27 BC to AD 14) and (below) ‘The Creation of Adam’ from the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508 to 1512) by Michelangelo. Photo by the author

Glass gems

Gems were usually engraved in semi-precious stones, such as colourful quartzes. In the later 1st century BC Roman workshops started manufacturing glass gems that imitated hardstone – a difficult process. Glass was pressed into a mould and the excess removed. Often small air holes remain visible in the surface of the glass. Many were unfinished or never set in a mount, such as the cameo depicting the three graces. Slightly different techniques suggest that there were several distinct workshops in antiquity.

Ancient glass cameo with the Three Graces. Roman, late 1st century BC to 1st century AD. Collection: Felix Slade © The Trustees of the British Museum

Nineteenth century fakes

Modern glass reproductions were made in workshops in the 18th and 19th centuries, providing sets and selections of impressions of ancient and neoclassical gems in a variety of materials, including glass. Sometimes these imitations were fraudulently sold as ancient antiques.

Fakes flooded the market in the 19th century, finding their way into many collections. The ubiquity of fakes and the difficulty of establishing provenance explains why generations of scholars shunned this class of object. Today, scientific analysis can successfully detect and date fakes by identifying additives in the glass. Hopefully…

Modern fake intaglio with Venus on two sea-horses. 18th to 19th century. Collection: Felix Slade © The Trustees of the British Museum

Wasters

Sometimes gems were damaged in the production process, especially when made in glass, which was tricky to handle. These were discarded which we know because they were never finished or set. However, surprisingly many of these abandoned pieces survive. The technical term for them is ‘wasters’. Here’s a typical waster.

Ancient glass intaglio (waster) with profile bust of helmeted Minerva. Roman, late 1st century BC to early 1st century AD © The Trustees of the British Museum

Summary

Small but beautifully formed exhibition. Surprising amount of information and huge historical range from the ancient Greeks via the Rome of Augustus, Michelangelo’s Renaissance and Townley’s Enlightenment, right up to the present day and the embarrassing pickle the Museum has found itself in.

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by Simon on April 3, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on April 3, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/03/rediscovering-gems-the-british-museum/

Art Deco by Alastair Duncan (1988)

Perhaps most significant to the development of a twentieth century aesthetic was the birth in the interwar period of the professional industrial designer… (p.118) In the 1920s commercial art became a bona fide profession which, in turn, gave birth to the graphic artist. (p.150)

This is one of the older volumes from Thames and Hudson’s famous ‘World of Art’ series, famous for its thorough texts but also, alas, for the way most of the illustrations are in black and white (this book has 194 illustrations, but only 44 of them in colour, most of them quite small).

Duncan also wrote the WoA volume on Art Nouveau, which I read recently, and has gone on to write many more books on both these topics, including a huge Definitive Guide to the Decorative Arts of the 1920s and 30s. He knows his onions.

Main points from the introduction

  • Art Deco was the last really luxurious style – people look back to Art Deco and Art Nouveau with nostalgia because they were florid, indulgent and luxurious – since the Second World War all styles have been variations on plain functionalism.
  • Art Deco is not a reaction against Art Nouveau but a continuation of it, in terms of ‘lavish ornamentation, superlative craftsmanship and fine materials’.
  • Received opinion has it that Art Deco started after the war, but Duncan asserts that it had begun earlier, with some indisputable Art Deco pieces made before 1914 or during the war. In fact he boldly suggests that, had there been no war, Art Deco might have flourished, peaked and been over by 1920.
  • Art Deco is hard to define because designers and craftsmen had so many disparate sources to draw on by 1920 – Cubism, Fauvism, Constructivism, Futurism, but also high fashion, motifs from the Orient, tribal Africa, the Ballets Russes, or Egypt, especially after the tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered in 1922.
  • Duncan distinguishes between the decorative styles of the 1920s which were luxurious and ornamented, and of the 1930s, when machine chic became more dominant, lines sleeker, more mechanical. The chapter on metalwork makes this clear with the 1920s work alive with gazelles, flowers and sunbursts, while the 1930s work copies the sleek straight lines of airplanes and steamships. In the architecture chapter he distinguishes between zigzag’ Moderne of the 1920s and the ‘streamline’ Moderne of the 1930s (p.195).
  • There’s also a distinction between the French style (the French continued to lead the field in almost all the decorative art) exuberant and playful, and the style of the rest of Europe and, a little later, America, which was cooler, more functional and intellectual. Throughout the book Duncan refers to the former as Art Deco and the latter as Modernism.
  • To my surprise Duncan asserts that Modernism was born at the moment of Art Deco’s greatest triumph i.e. the famous Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925. The severe modernist Le Corbusier wrote an article criticising almost all the exhibits for their luxury and foppishness and arguing that true design should be functional, and mass produced so as to be affordable.
  • Duncan contrasts the attenuated flowers and fairy maidens of Art Nouveau with the more severe functionalism of the Munich Werkbund, set up as early as 1907, which sought to integrate design with the reality of machine production. This spartan approach, insistence on modern materials, and mass production to make its objects affordable, underpinned the Bauhaus, established in 1919, whose influence spread slowly, but affected particularly American design during the 1930s, as many Bauhaus teachers fled the Nazis.

So the entire period between the wars can be simplified down to a tension between a French tradition of luxury, embellished and ornamented objects made for rich clients, and a much more severe, modern, functionalist, Bauhaus style intended for mass consumption, with the Bauhaus concern for sleek lines and modern materials gaining ground in the streamlined 1930s.

In reality, the hundreds of designers Duncan mentions hovered between these two poles.

Structure

The book is laid out very logically, indeed with the rather dry logic of an encyclopedia. There are ten chapters:

  1. Furniture
  2. textiles
  3. Ironwork and lighting
  4. Silver, Lacquer and Metalware
  5. Glass
  6. Ceramics
  7. Sculpture
  8. Paintings, Graphics, Posters and Bookbinding
  9. Jewelry
  10. Architecture

Each of the chapters tends to be broken down into a handful of trends or topics. Each of these is then broken down into area or country, so that successive paragraphs begin ‘In America’ or ‘In Belgium’ or ‘In Britain’. And then each of these sections is broken down into a paragraph or so about leading designers or manufacturers. So, for example, the chapter on ceramics is divided into sections on: artist-potters, traditional manufactories, and industrial ceramics; each of these is then sub-divided into countries – France, Germany, America, England; each of these sub-sections then has a paragraph or so about the leading practitioners in each style.

On the up side, the book is encyclopedic in its coverage. On the down side it sometimes feels like reading a glorified list and, particularly when entire paragraphs are made up of lists of the designers who worked for this or that ceramics firm or glass manufacturer, you frequently find your mind going blank and your eye skipping entire paragraphs (one paragraph, on page 51, lists 34 designers of Art Deco rugs).

It’s a shame because whenever Duncan does break out of this encyclopedia structure, whenever he stops to explain something – for example, the background to a particular technique or medium – he is invariably fascinating and authoritative. For example, take his explanation of pâte-de-verre, something I’d never heard of before:

Pâte-de-verre is made of finely crushed pieces of glass ground into a powder mixed with a fluxing agent that facilitates melting. Colouring is achieved by using coloured glass or by adding metallic oxides after the ground glass has been melted into a paste. In paste form, pâte-de-verre is as malleable as clay, and it is modelled by being packed into a mould where it is fused by firing. It can likewise be moulded in several layers or refined by carving after firing. (p.93)

Having myself spent quite a few years being paid to turn a wide variety of information (about medicine, or botany, or VAT) into clear English, I am full of admiration for Duncan’s simple, clear prose. There’s a similar paragraph about silver which, in a short space, brings an entire craft to life.

By virtue of its colour, silver is a ‘dry’ material. To give it life without the use of surface ornament, the 1920s Modernist silversmith had to rely on interplay of light, shadow, and reflection created by contrasting planes and curves. Another way to enrich its monotone colour was by incorporating semiprecious stones, rare woods, ivory and glass. Towards the 1930s, vermeil or gold panels were applied to the surface as an additional means of embellishment. (p.71)

He tells us that the pinnacle of commercial Art Deco sculpture was work done in chryselephantine, combining bronze and ivory, and that the acknowledged master of this genre was Demêtre Chiparus, who made works depicting French ballet and theatre.

Duncan makes the simple but profound point that, in architecture, Art Deco tended to be applied to buildings which had no tradition behind them, to new types of building for the machine age – this explains the prevalence of the Art Deco look in so many power stations, airport buildings, cinemas and swimming pools. Think (in London) Battersea power station (1935), Croydon airport (1928), the Golden Mile of Art Deco factories along the Great West Road at Brentford, Brixton Lido (1937), Charles Holden’s Art Deco Tube stations, and scores of Odeon cinemas across the country.

I liked his wonderfully crisp explanation of costume jewelry.

Costume jewelry differs from fine jewelry in that it is made out of base metals or silver set with marcasite, paste or imitation stones. (p.167)

Now you know. When he’s explaining, he’s wonderful.

Likes and dislikes

To my great surprise I actively disliked most of the objects and art shown in this book. I thought I liked Art Deco, but I didn’t like a lot of this stuff.

Maybe I’m a Bauhaus baby at heart. I consistently preferred the more linear work from the 1930s.

Then it dawned on me that maybe it’s because Duncan doesn’t include much about Art Deco posters (despite having authored a whole book about them). Indeed the section on posters here was remarkably short and with hardly any illustrations (7 pages, 6 pictures).

Similarly, the section on the scores of fashionable magazines and graphic illustrations from the era (Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and countless others) is barely 3 pages long.

There’s nothing at all about movies or photography, either. Maybe this is fair enough since Duncan is an expert in the decorative and applied arts and that’s the focus of the book. Still, Gary Cooper is a masterpiece of Art Deco, with his strong lines ending in beautiful machine-tooled curves (nose and chin), his powerful symmetries – as beautiful as any skyscraper.

Gary Cooper, super duper

Gary Cooper, super duper

French terms

  • animalier – an artist who specializes in the realistic portrayal of animals
  • cabochon –  a gemstone which has been shaped and polished as opposed to faceted
  • éditeur d’art – publisher of art works
  • nécessaire – vanity case for ladies
  • objet d’art – used in English to describe works of art that are not paintings, large or medium-sized sculptures, prints or drawings. It therefore covers a wide range of works, usually small and three-dimensional, of high quality and finish in areas of the decorative arts, such as metalwork items, with or without enamel, small carvings, statuettes and plaquettes in any material, including engraved gems, hardstone carvings, ivory carvings and similar items, non-utilitarian porcelain and glass, and a vast range of objects that would also be classed as antiques (or indeed antiquities), such as small clocks, watches, gold boxes, and sometimes textiles, especially tapestries. Might include books with fine bookbindings.
  • pâte-de-verre – a kiln casting method that literally means ‘paste of glass’
  • pieces uniques – one-off works for rich buyers

Conclusion

In summary, this is an encyclopedic overview of the period with some very useful insights, not least the fundamental distinction between the French ‘high’ Art Deco of the 1920s and the ‘Modernist’ Art Deco of the 1930s (which flourished more in America than Europe). But it is also a rather dry and colourless book, only occasionally coming to life when Duncan gives one of his beautifully lucid technical explanations.

Probably better to invest in a coffee-table volume which has plenty of large illustrations (particularly of the great posters and magazine illustrations) to get a more accessible and exciting feel for the period.

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by Simon on January 17, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, Art, Books, Design, European History
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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/art-deco-alastair-duncan/