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The content author was Vincent Martin and his coding has been used essentially unaltered.
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Celebrating Art Nouveau: The Kreuzer Collection
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts5 October 2002 - 19 January 2003
In celebration of its recent acquisition of an internationally acclaimed
collection of Art Nouveau jewelry, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts presents
an exhibition placing these major examples of Art Nouveau in their aesthetic
and historical context. The 484-item collection, which includes French,
Austrian, German, Danish, British, and American pieces, consists predominantly
of belt buckles and their accompanying necklaces, belts, buttons, and so
on. These ornaments, the only truly functional jewelry produced between
1890 and 1910, provide examples of the Symbolist, Jugendstil, Art Nouveau,
and Liberty-style aesthetic current around the year 1900, the high point
of Art Nouveau.
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by Piel Frères (French); silver gilt, enamel; 2 1/8 x 3 1/8". Photo by Katherine Wetzel, © 2002 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. |
Dr. and Mrs. Karl Kreuzer of Munich, Germany, have collected Art Nouveau
jewelry for more than twenty years, and their efforts have produced the
greatest collection of its kind in the world. This new acquisition expands
the scope of the museum's already renowned collection of Art Nouveau decorative
arts, established by Sydney and Frances Lewis and augmented with gifts
and purchases during the past seventeen years. In recognition of this,
a number of Art Nouveau works from the Lewis Collection are included in
the exhibition.
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by Max Josef Gradl for Theodore Fahmer (German); silver chrysoprases; 1 3/4 x 3". Photo by Katherine Wetzel, © 2002 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. |
The Kreuzer Collection includes magnificent examples of nearly all key
companies and jewelry designers active at the turn of the twentieth century.
The exhibition presents buckles shown at the influential 1900 Paris World's
Fair, as well as buckles designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Wiener Werkstatte,
by the great Danish designer Georg Jensen, by Archibald Knox for Liberty
& Company in London, and by René Lalique, the most famous Parisian
jeweler of his time. The motifs featured on these buckles range from abstract
or stylized geometric and plant forms to animals, humans, and composite
creatures. Other pieces feature scenes taken from literature and references
to past cultures.
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by unknown artist (French) (Piel Frères?); silver gilt, champlevé, two blue glass stones, one green glass stone; 2 3/4 x 5 1/8". Photo by Katherine Wetzel, © 2002 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. |
As a companion gift, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts library has received all of Dr. Karl Kreuzer's personal collection of period Art Nouveau publications. The addition of the Kreuzer Collection and the Kreuzer Library confirm the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as the nation’s premier research and resource center for the study of Art Nouveau.
The museum is at 2800 Grove Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, telephone
(804) 204-2704.