Gold jewelry by Jensen.(Georg Jensen's exhibition)

Shortly after Georg Jensen opened his silversmithing shop in Copenhagen in 1904, he received an invitation to participate in an exhibition to be held at the Danske Kunstindustrimuseum (Danish Museum of Art and Design), not far from his tiny shop. The exhibition was devoted to the latest in modern Danish design, and Jensen's display of ninety-one pieces of jewelry and nineteen pieces of flatware and hollowware was well reviewed. Over the course of the next century the firm's emphasis vacillated between jewelry and silverwares, but both were in continuous production. Today among the rarest of the firm's jewelry are objects fashioned in gold. An exhibition entitled Georg Jensen Gold Jewelry, which includes about fifty pieces, has been organized by Alastair Crawford and is on view in his eponymous New York City gallery from November 2 to 18.

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Jensen was apprenticed to the goldsmith A. R. Andersen in Copenhagen in 1881. He completed his training at the age of twenty and subsequently found work with a silversmith named Holm. However, sculpture was his first love, so he left Holm to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Having little success selling his pieces, he took a job at the Bing and Grondahl porcelain factory in order to support his wife and two children, then moved on to various other jobs in the ceramics industry, even making art pottery in his own studio. In 1901 he became foreman of a metal workshop owned by Mogens Ballin, a proponent of making affordable objects in base metals such as bronze, pewter, and polished copper. Jensen began to exhibit pieces of his metalwork, which met with critical acclaim and emboldened him to establish Georg Jensen ...