Georg Jensen, sculptor turned silversmith.(Current and coming)(Georg Jensen Jewelry)

Silver hollowware and flatware made by Georg Jensen and members of the firm he founded in Copenhagen in 1904 has hit its stride in the marketplace. In January the Rowler collection of about eight hundred pieces was auctioned at Christies in New York City. The results were spectacular, nearly tripling the presale estimate, and several pieces achieved new records for this category. Jewelry designed and made by Jensen is now taking its place in the limelight with an exhibition on view at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City from July 14 until October 16. Entitled Georg Jensen Jewelry, it comprises more than three hundred pieces of jewelry, silver hollowware, drawings, period photographs, and other documents.

Jensen was apprenticed to a goldsmith, before turning to sculpture and later ceramics. Both endeavors earned him artistic recognition but were financial failures, leading him to change course in 1901 when he became a foreman in the shop of the metalworker Mogens Ballin. There he designed and made metalwork in the idiom of the arts and crafts movement, whose founder, William Morris, he much admired. The shop employed about thirty workers who produced what were then avant-garde tablewares, lamps, writing sets, and jewelry of pewter, brass, bronze, copper, and silver. Much of the jewelry incorporated semiprecious cabochon stones and was ornamented with floral and other motifs drawn from nature. Both Jensen's pottery and his sculpture incorporated the human figure--a form of decoration he all but abandoned soon after he joined Ballin's workshop. He also fell under the spell of the art nouveau style, particularly as practiced by the French jeweler Rene Lalique.

With this experience in hand, Jensen secured financial backing and opened his own workshop in 1904 with a single journeyman, Otto Strange Friis. From the very beginning, his letterhead read "Georg Jensen, Sculptor." He soon took on another craftsman, a chaser named Georg ...