Streamlined silver in Vienna.(Current and coming/"Viennese Silver: Modern Design, 1780-1918" at Neue Galerie, New York, New York)

With hindsight the sleek unadorned silver produced in Europe in the early twentieth century is generally accepted as radical because its pared-down aesthetic seems like such an enormous departure from what preceded it. Now, an exhibition that considers silver made in Vienna between the end of the nineteenth century and World War I proposes that the seeds for modern design in silver were really sown at the end of the eighteenth century when Viennese craftsmen, working in the neo-classical style, created plain forms with an eye for symmetry and simple lines. The show opens at the Neue Galerie in New York City on October 17 and comprises nearly two hundred objects that present a range of forms, functions, and decorations. Entitled Viennese Silver: Modern Design, 1780-1918, it remains on view until February 16, 2004. It is co-organized with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where it will be on view next autumn.

In 1808 there was such an abundance of silver in affluent Austrian households that, as a way to raise funds to support the military, it was decreed that its owners must have enough money to cover the value of the metal or risk having it confiscated by the state. By 1820 Vienna, the largest German-speaking city in Europe, was home to 123 silversmiths at a time when the city's population was 280,000. The Biedermeier style, born and bred in Vienna in the early nineteenth century, was largely an idiosyncratic offshoot of neoclassicism, which depended on a reduction of ornament in favor of smooth surfaces. By contrast, around the ...