The Brilliance of an Era, European Art Nouveau Jewellery

In early 2011, the Leopold Museum will be mounting Austria's most comprehensive exhibition to date on the topic of Art Nouveau jewellery. This exhibition is to present exquisite objects from the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt as well as from private collections. The holdings of the Hessian State Museum are based on the Arts-and-Crafts collection of the Dutch court jeweller Karel A. Citroen (*1922). Citroen began collecting in 1952, at a point in time when it was not at all fashionable to collect artisan craftwork from the Art Nouveau. By 1959, the Amsterdam-based jeweller had succeeded in bringing together several hundred objects from all over Europe, with the main focus being on jewellery.

The 220 jewellery objects from Citroen’s collection number among the highlights of the Hessian State Museum’s holdings. Works on display will also include those of the renowned Parisian jewellers, goldsmiths and enamellers René Lalique (1860–1945) and Georges Fouquet (1862–1957), as well as creations by André-Fernand Thesmar (1843–1912) and Lucien Gaillard (1861–1933). At the close of the 19th century, René Lalique touched off a revolution in the field of jewellery design. He designed sumptuous jewellery for the fin-de-siècle world, and his customers included important turn-of-the-century personalities. These works’ richness of colours and forms, coupled with the preciousness of the employed materials, seems virtually inexhaustible. Lalique was also an inspiration for Viennese jewellery-makers around the turn of the century; the Viennese, however, then proceeded to develop their work in a completely different direction.