The exhibition, MEDITATIONS ON MODERNISM: Thirty Years of Jewelry Design by Jacqueline Rabun, 1990–2022 and Selections from Notable Post-WWII Nordic Jewelry, presented as part of New York City Jewelry Week, was on view November 14– December 2 at Mahnaz Collection. This exhibit showcased the long and important career of the jewelry designer Jacqueline Rabun, whose aesthetic and philosophical vision has resulted in spare modernist jewelry of refined artistry and emotional resonance. In the extensive New York Times article (May 27, 2022) about her work, The Goal: ‘To Dream Bigger and Change the World’, the author Victoria Gomelsky praised her jewelry designs for their “powerful simplicity,” saying: “Ms. Rabun has forged a career as a jewelry artist working in silver and 18-karat gold. Her 22-year collaboration with the Danish silver firm Georg Jensen has cemented her reputation among connoisseurs of modernist design.” And her work was recently highlighted in Brilliant & Black: A Jewelry Renaissance, the important selling exhibition by twenty-one Black jewelers curated by Melanie Grant and held at Sotheby’s New York in the fall of 2021.
At the Mahnaz Collection exhibition, jewels from Rabun's current and archival designs for Georg Jensen, her early independent work from 1989 to 2000, and a preview of some of her newest creations featuring minimal designs with hand-carved, large-scale gemstones and sliced rings with diamonds were all on display.
The collaboration with the iconic Danish firm of Georg Jensen created a natural synergy for Mahnaz Collection to host the exhibition as we collect Nordic modernist jewelry. A selection of Nordic works made during the 1950s to the 1990s also was exhibited, creating a dialogue between Rabun’s work and earlier decades of innovative, modernist Nordic design.
“This is the perfect moment for a show of Jacqueline Rabun's work. Here you have a mature artist back in the United States after three decades away in Europe. What better way to welcome her than with a rich retrospective of her work and a preview of her independent new designs? This exhibition is also relevant because of the nature of our time. Deep differences exist among people, there is confusion and suffering, and many feel disheartened and left out. Jacqueline’s jewelry—in its delicacy and simplicity of form, in its bold beauty of stones, goldwork, and unencumbered metal—comforts us yet tells us to be strong. Her jewelry speaks of universal needs, mercy and love. Her genderless jewelry reminds us of the power of meditation in troubled times,” says Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos, founder and CEO of the Mahnaz Collection.
To call the American, German-born, decades-long London resident and now Los Angeles-based jeweler Jacqueline Rabun a designer is to miss the larger point. Considering her work, with its organic forms and stricter moments, its grieving hearts, and embryonic shapes - its rich narrative qualities, and its philosophical questions - Rabun consistently aims to create an intimate link between jewelry and our human need for adornment. Precious metals are this jewelry designer’s material of choice, the human body is her canvas and inspiration.
Rabun, a stylish woman, is a self-taught jeweler who started in Los Angeles and moved to London in 1989, where she launched her studio a few years later. In 1991, Barneys New York, often a key supporter of new talent, purchased Rabun’s first collection, Raw Elegance. (Barneys New York also brought in Mahnaz Collection as its modern vintage purveyor, from the vintage company's inception.) Rabun began collaborating with Georg Jensen in 2000 and has since designed Offspring and Mercy, two of Jensen's most acclaimed jewelry collections. Launched in 2022, Reflect is Jacqueline Rabun’s latest work for the company. Rabun has also collaborated with galleries such as Carpenters Workshop Gallery and designed under her eponymous label. Influenced by nature and the human condition, Rabun's collections are imbued with rich symbolism: they examine time's passing, the circle of life, and the complexities of our emotions.
“Jacqueline's meditative, compassionate, and accessible works have brought her international recognition. Her designs are bold and sensual, simple and passionate, elegant and timeless. She offers the world modernism with a twist. Jacqueline shares the design sensibility of her predecessors in certain respects - pathbreaking female Nordic modernist jewelers who took geometric circles and encased them in softer eye shapes, as Nanna Ditzel did, or rejected sharp angles in favor of curved lines of gold, as in the case of Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe. While Jacqueline’s work begins much later, the broader Nordic region’s history of modernism in jewelry design clearly left its mark. Jacqueline ventures somewhere beyond—her jewels can be multisensory—you touch them, stroke them, search for their hidden secrets, take them to heart, and, most importantly, wear them easily and close to your body. . There is so much in her work from which the current generation of jewelers can learn.” says Ispahani Bartos.
The gallery's own Nordic collection includes those silversmiths and goldsmiths, artists, sculptors, and designers who were at the leading edge of modernist innovation in several different spheres, ranging from architecture to jewelry to ceramics to design for home goods. In jewelry, their work showcased form, materials, and simplicity, while jewelers from different Nordic countries explored organic curves, minimalism, brutalism, geometric design, and a profound engagement with nature. Among the modernist jewelry artists represented are Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe, Ibe Dahlquist, Nanna Ditzel and Tuk Fischer for Georg Jensen, along with Hans Hansen, Sigurd Persson, Theresia Hvorslev, Tone Vigeland, Rey Urban, Matti Hyvärinen, Bent Exner, Bent Gabrielsen, Reino Olavi Saastamoinen, Elis Kauppi, Tapio Wirkkala, and of course Björn Weckström who designed for Lapponia. The exhibition also includes an essential work by the Danish jeweler Arje Griegst who rejected modernism and returned to art nouveau for inspiration, creating a gold, gem-encrusted tiara of poppies for Queen Margrethe II of Denmark as well as other extravagantly imagined jewels.
International design exhibitions played a major role in fostering and promoting the new post-World War II concept of Nordic modernist design and designers, including several of those included in Mahnaz Collection. At the Ninth Milan Triennial of 1951, which was the first major design show following the war, Finland took six Grand Prix Awards, second only in number to Italy. Tapio Wirkkala, whose jewelry you can see in the exhibition today, won three of the six prizes awarded to Finland. The second important exhibition, a traveling one this time, Design in Scandinavia, imprinted the new modernist style on the American imagination. Between 1954 and 1957, the exhibition was seen in twenty-four US museums by large numbers of visitors, while Georg Jensen organized the displays in multiple department stores across the country (source: Finnish Modern Design, Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts and Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 237, 239). We hope this exhibition will spotlight the gifts of Jacqueline Rabun who has had such a sympathetic relationship with an iconic Danish design firm. It is our hope, too, that this exhibition continues the tradition of revealing the unique beauty, simplicity, democratic impulse and relevance of twentieth-century Nordic modernist jewelry for our times.
Select Biographies of Featured Nordic Jewelers
VIVIANNA TORUN (1927-2004) was born in Malmö, Sweden. Known simply as Torun, she was the first female jeweler to become internationally famous. Her jewelry is the sine qua non of mid-century Nordic/Scandinavian design. She attended the Academy of Industrial Arts in Stockholm and was later the first female silversmith in Sweden to have her own workshop. Torun began working with Georg Jensen in 1967 and made uncompromising jewelry using sculptural, simple spiral forms. She did not use valuable stones, preferring pebbles, granite, rock crystal, moonstone and quartz to design what she called her änti-status jewelry. Torun's jewelry was inspired by natural shapes: flowers, leaves, swirls and the flow of water. It is described as sober, minimalist and simple, but it also emphasizes the lines of a woman’s body. One of Torun's most celebrated designs was the open watch band. The watch was renamed the ‘Vivianna’ in honor of its creator. It was the first watch Georg Jensen ever produced and continues to be a success. Torun was much admired, including Picasso, whose museum in Antibes showed her work for two years. Billie Holiday and Ingrid Bergman wore her jewelry. Torun insisted that jewelry must marry with the contours of a woman’s body: “A piece of jewelry should be a symbol of love. It should enhance and move with the body so that it blends with you. It must not overwhelm but enhance you. This is why it must be timeless. It shouldn’t matter if you are seventeen or eighty-seven years old.”
SIGURD PERSSON (1914- 2003) was one of the Nordic region’s most prominent and internationally influential designers. Born in Sweden into a family of jewelers in Hälsingborg, Persson trained as a silversmith in his father’s workshop, from 1928 to 1937, and then studied at the Akademie für Angewandte Kunst (Academy of Applied Arts), in Munich, from 1937 to 1939, and at the Konstfackskolan (University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design) in Stockholm from 1939 to 1942. In 1942, he established his own silver workshop in Stockholm to design jewelry and cutlery. He sought to design items that were an expression of the times. Still, his jewelry, in particular, has come to be seen as particularly expressive of his individuality. he experimented with unusual forms, Informed by the early influence of Swedish functionalism as well as biological forms in nature, he experimented with unique forms in his rings, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. Persson designed almost everything. He created forms for diverse purposes, from jewelry to coffee pots to ecclesiastical silver, plywood chairs to coins, uniforms and much more. Persson was honored worldwide in his lifetime. In 1955, he was honored by the Gesellschaft für Goldschmiedekunst e.V, and in 1965, he was appointed an honorary member of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in London.
THERESIA HVORSLEV (b. 1935) is one of the most influential contemporary Swedish jewelers. She is also known for her silver hollowware, tableware and cutlery. After graduating from the Konstfackskolan (University College of Arts & Craft and Design) in Stockholm, Hvorslev apprenticed with pioneering contemporary jewelry designers, including Georg Jensen in Copenhagen. In 1964, she returned to her native Sweden to open her studio. Hvorslev’s designs are inspired by her love of Nordic nature and often depict natural themes. Among her later projects are small silver sculptures made for the Swedish royal family in the 1970s. Hvorslev is the only Scandinavian jewelry designer to have won the Diamonds International Award three times.
IBE DAHLQUIST (1924 - 1996) born in Gotland, Sweden ranks as one of Sweden's most prominent contemporary jewelry designers. Ibe Dahlquist studied at the Swedish School of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, after which, she started her silver workshop in Visby, with Mr Olof Barve where they both maintained close cooperation for almost thirty years, with Dahlquist focusing on the designs and Barve executing them. A breakthrough came in the mid-50s with the exhibition "Contemporary Jewelry," where they showed a series set in silver with fossils and rocks picked on Gotland beaches. Early designs by Dahlquist often show organic yet geometric expression, showing how nature is both an inspiration and incorporates unworked materials. From 1965, Dahlquist was an employee of George Jensen, and it was here she created more austere modernist jewelry. Rhythmic patterns and repeated elements remained present in her designs. She has had exhibitions in Sweden and elsewhere, and her work is displayed in Goldsmith's Hall, London, and many Swedish museums.
TAPIO WIRKKALA (1915- 1985) was born in Hanko, Finland. He is considered one of the twentieth century’s most influential designers. He was also a sculptor. Beginning in the early 1930s, Wirkkala applied his talents to work in glass, metal, wood, and ceramics. His range was extraordinary, and he mastered all these materials and designed unique artworks and mass-produced everyday objects such as ketchup bottles. He graduated from the school of art of design in 1936 and quickly developed a reputation as a master of silver and glasswork. One of his most essential partners in silver for thirty years was the firm of Kultakeskus. After World War II, until the end of his life, Wirkkala was associated with the glassmaking-firm Iittala. Wirkalla’s design genius was recognized early and often, and he participated in numerous international exhibitions and fairs.
BJÖRN WECKSTRÖM (b. 1935) was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is a sculptor and jeweler whose work over the past decades has helped define modern Nordic jewelry. Weckström studied at the Finnish Goldsmith School in the 1950s. His designs range from abstractions of nature to clean-cut classical forms. He participated in the landmark International Exhibition of Modern Jewelry, curated by Graham Hughes and held in London, in 1961. Over his long career, Weckström has been closely associated with the Finnish jewelry firm Lapponia. The designer has said that he is inspired by “nature, snowfalls, the sea and forms of water. Also, mythologies and future visions.” Weckström’s work uses gold, bronze, silver, and sometimes even acrylic. His geometric forms combine with textured surfaces and irregular shapes in exquisite sculptural styles. He is credited with being one of the first jewelry designers to combine silver and acrylic. In 1975, Yoko Ono wore Weckström’s futuristic silver and acrylic ring, Petrified Lake, when she was on the Dick Cavett Show. In 1977, Weckström’s Planetoid Valleys and Darina's Bracelet appeared in Star Wars, worn by Carrie Fisher in her role as Princess Leia. Björn Weckström’s jewelry is in the collections of the Designmuseo in Helsinki.
LIISA VITALI (1918-1987 ) was born in Helsinki, Finland. She is considered to be one of Finland’s most well-known designers. She worked from her home and designed feminine, sensual jewelry. Her jewelry designs in silver and gold were also modern and inspired by nature. Vitali’s used a technique in her jewelry where she would cut holes in the metal. These were extremely popular not only in Finland but worldwide during the 1960s and 1970s, with Pitsi (Lace) being one of the reigning favorites, still highly popular today. Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret of Britain is said to have been a fan.
REINO OLAVI SAASTAMOINEN was born in Finland in 1928 and it is unclear when he died. He had well known silver and goldsmith mentors and graduated with a degree in goldsmithing in 1949. He designed jewelry in his own workshop but only attained national fame in the jewelry world in 1969 with the collection called “Maahiset” (Earth Imp, literally). He won a major design award for the collection comprised of a series of unique pieces which showed the birth of a stone from the bosom of Mother Earth. Centered in each piece was a rough crystal form of various gemstones – amethysts, chalcedony, zoisite and rose quartz and spectrolite. He used lost wax casting and each piece he made was unique. The vast majority of his work was done in silver. Mahnaz Collection owns a unique, exceptionally rare set of gold and amethyst jewels as well as silver examples of his work.
GEORG JENSEN (1866–1935) was a world-renowned Danish silversmith born in Raadvad, Denmark. His legacy also encompasses his eponymous firm, which began in 1904, where Jensen established a thoroughly modern Danish silver style of artist-designed works and hand-crafted quality that continues to this day. By age fourteen, Georg Jensen was apprenticing as a goldsmith with aspirations of becoming a sculptor. Subsequently, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited and sold his ceramics on graduation. He transitioned from fine to applied art and became one of the most notable silversmiths of the twentieth century. Jensen founded his company at the age of thirty-seven, in Copenhagen, and embraced the art nouveau style of the day, injecting his distinct vision. At the start of his career, Jensen focused primarily on jewelry. His material of choice was silver in combination with semiprecious stones such as opal, amber, and moonstone. He was designing jewelry pieces for the middle class and especially for those who would appreciate their artistic merit. His work was perfectly in line with the Arts and Crafts movement that could also be found in other European cities. Soon after opening the shop, Jensen started to work with Johan Rhode, who was interested in designing flatware under the Jensen name, the beginnings of one of the most important relationships in the history of design. Jensen’s business grew rapidly over the course of the next twenty years. Shops opened in Berlin, Paris, London, Copenhagen, and New York that were financially successful. Jensen also continued to be recognized as an important artist: in 1925, he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Paris World's Fair, and at the 1929 World’s Fair in Barcelona, he won the Grand Prix. In 1932, he was the only silversmith outside Great Britain to exhibit at the Goldsmiths' Hall. In 1935, he won the Grand Prix at the World's Fair in Brussels. That same year, at the age of sixty-nine, Jensen passed away in Denmark. The Jensen company has operated for more than a hundred years, and remains renowned for collaborations with prominent artists, designers, and architects such as Nanna Ditzel, Henning Koppel, and Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe, who defined the modern Scandinavian aesthetic of silver and gold jewelry during the 1960s and 1970s. Later artistic partners included Zaha Hadid and Jacqueline Rabun.
HANS HANSEN (1884–1940) was a Danish silversmith whose first shop and smithy were established in Kolding, Denmark, in about 1906. At the start of his career, Hansen focused on flatware, which he produced based on his designs and those of others. As his fledgling company expanded, it also began to develop lines of jewelry. However, it was not until Hansen’s son, Karl Gustav Hansen, came on board in 1932, that the company’s reputation for fine silver jewelry was truly established. Hansen’s work is recognized for its clean, geometric lines in the Art Deco style.
KARL GUSTAV HANSEN (1914–2002) left school at sixteen to become an apprentice to Einar Olsen, a hollowware smith. Shortly after, the younger Hansen also apprenticed with his father. In 1934, Karl Hansen received the silver medal, the highest distinction in the Danish apprenticeship system. Shortly afterward, he enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, yet his interest in silver did not wane. In 1940, he joined his father in the family business in Kolding, opened a workshop in Copenhagen, and became the artistic director at Hans Hansen Silversmithy on his father’s early death at the age of fifty-six. Most notable among his many jewelry designs was Karl Hansen’s first collection called "Future," which comprised about fifty pieces, including brooches, rings, clasps, earrings, and more. Other designers such as Bent Gabrielsen, Ole Bent Pedersen, and Bent Knudsen also worked for Hansen, and by the 1980s, Allan Scharff had become the lead designer. In 1982, Karl Hansen was awarded the Golden Ring of Honor by the Association for Goldsmiths’ Art. In 1992, the firm merged with the Georg Jensen Company.
BENT GABRIELSEN (1928-2014) was born in Soborg, Denmark. He graduated from one of the earliest classes of the Goldsmith’s Academy in 1953 and then worked for the prominent firm of Hans Hansen Solvsmedie until 1969. By that point, he was responsible for the firm's whole production. He left to set up an independent company, "Gabrielsen's Guldsmedie", with his wife and himself as the only employees. A jewelry designer of exceptional skill, especially admired in Japan, Gabrielsen won the Lunning Prize in 1964. Gabrielsen’s expanded beyond silver in his work but also used enamel, ivory, and ebony. His forms were often clean and simple and he favored elliptical shapes. Erik Bohr, Chairman of the Lunning Committee, wrote, "Bent Gabrielsen's jewelry carries absolute conviction as to its function; his handling of materials is so restrained and well-considered that one feels this could hardly be otherwise. His jewelry is simple and clearly constructed, often with links connecting naturally with each other so that the complete piece makes up a beautiful whole. Every single detail…is worked out. There are no false effects. He does not take the easy way out." (BENT GABRIELSEN, 40 YEARS WITH JEWELRY at the TRAPHOLT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, KOLDING, DENMARK 1994)
NANNA DITZEL (1923-2005) was a designer and architect born in Copenhagen, Denmark. She was, without a doubt, one of the most successful Danish designers of the twentieth century. Ditzel attended the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts, where she graduated as a cabinetmaker in 1943. The following year she studied at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi) in Copenhagen, under the famous professor Kaare Klint. In collaboration with her husband, Jørgen Ditzel, Ditzel began designing silver jewelry in the 1950s for Georg Jensen. Their collaboration was long, and Ditzel's jewelry designs helped establish Georg Jensen's image as a modernist silver jeweler. Ditzel was often inspired by nature, and she managed to fuse the natural shapes and colors into her fine architectural designs. She was never afraid to try different materials and styles, and because of this, her work has a wide range of appearances. She experimented with unconventional constructions and often used bright colors in her furniture designs. Throughout the 1970s Ditzel continued her work, and she received much global attention. In 1981 she was elected chairwoman for the Design and Industries Association in London. She held this position until her second husband’s death in 1985. She stepped down as chairwoman and moved back to Denmark to open her own design studio in Copenhagen.
ASTRID FOG (1911 - 1993) was a Danish fashion designer who started designing jewelry to complement her clothes. Fog created her first jewelry collection for Georg Jensen in 1969. Her designs attracted widespread recognition and her pieces for George Jensen won her a strong following among the fashion-forward. Astrid Fog was also associated with the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufacturer during her lifetime. Whether producing lamps, jewelry, or clothing, her designs bear certain similarities, including keen attention to manufacturing detail and clear simplicity. Today, Fog’s legacy includes a rich development of modernist sensibility. She used combinations of simple geometric shapes in ways that were wholly new at the time. Fog’s jewelry can be found in many prominent museum collections worldwide, including the British Museum.
BENT KNUDSEN (1924–1996) was trained as a silversmith at C. M. Cohr's in Fredericia, Denmark. During the early part of his career, he also worked for several prominent silversmiths in Copenhagen. Starting in 1946, Knudsen joined Hans Hansen's smithy in Kolding, where he remained for the next ten years only taking a short break to work in Norway in the early 1950s. In 1950, he married Anni, who was also interested in arts and crafts. Together, they made Christmas decorations that brought them recognition and were sold in design shops in Copenhagen and exported to the United States and Japan. In 1956, Knudsen and Anni opened their own shop in Søndergade. During this time, Knudsen returned to making silver work, focusing on jewelry in geometric shapes with semiprecious stones. Ginger Moro, author of the book, European Designer Jewelry” described the couples work “unfailingly elegant and wearable”. Anni and Bent Knudsen have exhibited at the Danish Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen; the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte der Stadt Dortmund in Schloss Cappenberg; and the Museum at Koldinghus.
GRETE PRYTZ KITTELSEN (1917 - 2010) was a goldsmith, enamel artist, and designer from Oslo, Norway. She is often referred to as the grand dame of Norwegian Modernist design. The daughter of the well-known Norwegian goldsmith, Jacob Tostrup Prytz, her father was her first teacher of goldsmithing and enameling. However, outside the home, Grete studied at Chicago’s Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), from 1949 to 1950. At the start of her career, Kittelsen created inexpensive pieces of high quality that targeted a younger generation. However, in the 1950s, she contributed to a series called “Med Punkter (With Dots)”—this series was the modernist response to the filigree brooch worn as part of traditional Norwegian dress. While Med Punkter became Grete’s entry into Georg Jensen’s Nordic competition in 1953, it eventually became one of Grete’s best-selling series.
TONE VIGELAND (b. 1938), the daughter of the artist Per Vigeland, was born into one of Norway's illustrious artistic families in Oslo, Norway. She was inspired by the organic forms in silver of Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe and jewelry from Indian and Egyptian cultures. Vigeland studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry. Early in her career, she became involved with PLUS, a collective of Scandinavian craftspeople who produced models for production by small manufacturers. Their goal was to make good design available to all. Vigeland continued working with them after opening her own shop in 1961. In the 1970s, Vigeland produced more flexible and fluid jewelry that would move with the wearer. Although she has made jewelry that incorporates gold, stones, steel, and enamel, she prefers silver because it becomes more polished with wear. In 1980, she was given a gift of a hand-forged nail from a friend’s home, and it led her to gather nails and tacks, materials that started prominently to appear in her work. Her most famous necklace from this period is made from two sheets of silver mesh onto which she forged individual steel nails hammered so that they would lay against the body like feathers. She then added an old steel nail and soldered gold to it. She said that the hardest part of forging, soldering, fusing, and shaping metals is to give them artistry and sculptural form. While people associate her work with body armor from the Viking Age and chain mail—which pleases her, even if that is not what she set out to do—Vigeland says that she is inspired by the gray Norwegian landscape. In 1981, she had a solo show at Electrum Gallery, in London, a key hub for artist-jewelers opened by Barbara Cartlidge, which further propelled her career. Vigeland's work is held by museums worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; along with the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She was awarded the Prince Eugen Medal in 1988 and decorated with the Commander of the Order of St. Olav in 1996.
PRESS
“Jacqueline Rabun Reflects On Her Modernist Jewellery Design As Part of NYC Jewelry Week”
By Hannah Silver, Wallpaper Magazine, November 18, 2022
