Bookstore

While there is no denying the sheer variety of contemporary jewelry on display in this book (color images of 552 pieces of jewelry by 193 artists from fourteen countries) Dona Z Meilach doesn’t do much to lift the book beyond its origins in a call for submissions in which anyone could participate. Grouped by themes, mostly organized around materials, the analysis is rather slight and gives little sense of the particular contexts and issues that this jewelry and these jewelers are grappling with. Artist statements add moderate interest, but as this book includes a lot of jewelry without the rigor and critical engagement that is key to contemporary jewelry, it will only reward those with the ability and patience to create their own critical framework through which the work on show can be evaluated.

Showcasing the highlights of the jewelry collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this book, written by jewelry curator Yvonne Markowitz, is also a wide-ranging introduction to jewelry’s purpose and social meanings, its materials and processes. While the organization of the book around five chapters (‘Magical Jewels,’ ‘Emblems of Wealth & Power,’ ‘Tokens of Affection & Remembrance,’ ‘Dress & Adornment’ and ‘Jewelry & the Avant-Garde’), covering all periods and diverse social contexts, pushes the text towards generalization, the close readings of specific jewels are a model of concise and intelligent analysis. An approachable text and beautiful illustrations provide an enjoyable browsing experience, while the individual bibliographies, general reading list, illustrations list and index offer something to specialist readers. This book should be read because it helps restore ‘art’ or ‘contemporary’ jewelry to the wider set of meanings and rich history of jewelry in the world at large.

Part advertising brochure, scrapbook, owner’s manual, exhibition catalog and art history, this book presents the project of connecting contemporary jewelry and contemporary design that sits behind the Chi Ha Paura . . .? Foundation and its line of custom production jewelry. Articulating a strong belief that contemporary jewelry should be flirting with design rather than art, this book is an important documentation of the organization and the jewelry it produces. An essay by Liesbeth den Besten provides history and context, and there's succinct analysis of some of the jewelry. Images of the Chi Ha Paura . . .? range are accompanied by brief descriptions (also by den Besten). There is also a timeline, indexes organized by materials, typologies, designers, photographs of the production process and reproductions of publicity that the range has received in different magazines. Production remains a difficult concept for contemporary jewelry to deal with, which makes this book an important conceptual intervention, as well as a useful introduction to an important project and some interesting jewelry.

A survey of work from the past decade, this publication is a demonstration of Bürgel’s interdisciplinary practice, crossing and complicating the borders between sculpture and jewelry. The heart of the book is a series of images that document Bürgel’s visual and object experiments, as his endless loops and rhizomatic forms take shape as jewelry, sculptures and drawings superimposed on photographic environments. It is like having access to an artist’s workbook and insight into a practice that is effortlessly ambitious, escaping jewelry’s limits not to prove a point but because the work itself demands it. An artist CV provides all the practical details, while the standout texts are Rafael von Urslar’s excellent essay and Karl Fritsch’s perfectly judged interview with Bürgel, which oscillates between the hilarious, the ludicrous and the serious.

True to its name, this publication is grand and detailed enough to send shivers through the spine of any serious jewelry scholar, or collector. Page after page of entries carefully document every work made by Gerd Rothmann between 1967 and 2008. A small photograph accompanies information about title, date, materials, dimensions and bibliographic information (in German only), while the catalog raisonné is broken up by full page images of specific pieces of jewelry, writings by Rothmann, a preface by Christiane Lange and an interview between Sigrid Barten and Rothmann, introducing all the context and history any dedicated reader might require. (These texts are in both German and English.) The bibliography is a little thin, but in every other way this publication proves that contemporary jewelry can support the full attention of art history’s most esteemed scholarly apparatus.

Outclassed by other museum publications from Houston and Boston, which provide full collection checklists, biographies and bibliographies, this introduction to the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) collection is valuable for its beautiful photography and the sheer quality and historical importance of the jewelry on display. Curator Ursula Ilse-Neuman does a nice job of introducing major works in her introduction, although with the exception of the discussion of ‘Modernist Jewelry,’ objects are left to float somewhat out of time, in categories so general as to allow almost anything, from any period, to be included. No index and a two-page, three-column list of the names of jewelers featured in the collection (with no other information) severely limits the usefulness of this book for anyone other than the general reader, although the image captions have all the necessary information. Given the importance of MAD’s collection – which started life as part of the American Craft Council – more attention to the history of the museum and how this jewelry represents an attitude to studio craft would have made this an invaluable publication and a significant documentation of contemporary jewelry’s history.

An interesting book that seeks to survey contemporary (or as the authors call it, studio) jewelry in the 1990s and to provide some interpretative frameworks for understanding the practice. The discussions of individual jewelers are somewhat frustrating because of a lack of specifics and a tendency to rely on generalizations, but Amanda Game and Elizabeth Goring work hard to ground contemporary jewelry in a set of cultural, social, political and economic factors, making the essays about the context and production of contemporary jewelry the publication’s best feature. The geographical reach is also impressive, including jewelry from 24 countries. Color images, brief biographies of each jeweler, a select bibliography and a list of jewelry galleries and organizations, make this a historian’s delight as well as a good general introduction to the field.

This book is not only a good introduction to the work of a number of important contemporary jewelers, but also attempts to develop a kind of history of contemporary jewelry that is still relatively rare. In detailing a face-off between the United States and Europe (Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy) Turner does a credible job of demonstrating what contemporary jewelry from different places and traditions has in common, while also respecting differences and cultural politics (American isolationism versus European provincialism). Color sections and black-and-white illustrations mean there is a lot to look at and Turner’s text is thoughtful and surprisingly detailed, given the relatively small scale of the book.