Crossing the line - Art Jewelry
Art in America
Dec, 1993
By:
Janet Koplos
Using contemporary materials in Pop and Minimalist forms, Emmy van Leersum created serial jewerly linked to Holland's geometric art traditions.
Jewelry only rarely escapes from its perceived limitations as "mere" ornament. But that happens sometimes, when an established artist (Calder, for example) takes it up or when a craftsman (Lalique or Faberge, for example) becomes so successful that his production seems to exemplify his time. Emmy van Leersum (1930-1984) moved from craft training into the art world through sheer intensity of personality and focus. She had the advantage of being in Holland, where good contemporary design finds broad acceptance, and where, during the '60s, there was less institutional concern with separating fine and decorative arts. But her forcefulness distinguished her; museum curators remember her as intimidating.
Together she and her husband, the industrial designer and jeweler Gijs Bakker, keyed their "objects for the body" to the Pop spirit of the '60s. They rejected the use of precious stones, adopted industrial materials, made exaggerated collars that were attached to simple dresses of her design, and developed bodysuits that emphasized the wearer's joints with pneumatic protrusions. These last were presented in a show called "Clothing Suggestions" at Amsterdam's Art & Project gallery in 1970. Independently, van Leersum established a mature vocabulary of pure line and settled into the austere mode for which she is best known - a development documented in "Broken Lines," a retrospective exhibition of 160 drawings and objects organized by Museum Het Kruithuis in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, and now on view at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Montreal [through Dec. 7].
It was an approach with unmistakable links to Holland's reductive and geometric art traditions, then exemplified by the constructivist, serial work of such artists as Peter Struycken and Ad Dekkers, for whom geometry "had to be viewed as a moral statement, a plea for transparency of thinking."[1] Both men exhibited, along with van Leersum and Bakker, at the new Amsterdam gallery of Riekje Swart. The Dutch reductivism was akin to the American Minimalism of that time, but arose independently from different cultural sources.[2]
A series of armbands made in 1968 marked van Leersum's abandonment of Pop extremism. These are strips of stainless steel an inch or so wide, with a single crease or trough giving an unexpected, almost lapidary elegance to their industrial impassiveness. A seamless integrity characterizes each work; she did not build with welding or rely on any sort of supplements but stuck to unitary form. Brooches also made in '68 are just as reserved: they consist of squares or circles of stainless steel with one cut or fold or pinched line interrupting their regularity.
In the early '70s van Leersum applied her severe esthetic to other materials, making armbands of notched, creased or spiraling cylinders of clear acrylic and aluminum. Her method became increasingly systematic: each bracelet was the realization of the center one-third of a paper square on which she had plotted transsecting lines that looked orderly in the context of a drawing but bravely arbitrary in an autonomous object. The geometry was transferred even more directly in a 1975 series of plastic armbands consisting of an inked line laminated between thin layers of PVC. In these works she almost duplicated the appearance of her paper working materials; two years later she began to laminate paper itself inside the PVC, using tissue to create a shadowy layering.
By the late '70s she turned from embedding line in an object to cutting it free: she produced earrings, brooches, collars and bracelets that consist of the plotted line alone as a linear metal object. After some tentative explorations in color (colored paper inside PVC, paint on steel), van Leersum blossomed in her late work, before she died of cancer at the age of 54, into brilliant primaries achieved by means of marker pens or by working with pigmented strips of stiff nylon.
In all van Leersum's jewelry, the clarity of form, the brisk rationality of the lines she preferred, and the pure colors reminiscent of De Stijl add up to a refractory statement. The absolutes of her art are balanced by the irregularities of the body; she necessarily took it into consideration as the site, the context for her art (and her transparent or translucent bracelets allow the body to participate in the appearance of the jewelry in an interesting way). But her works are never selfless; they remain products of intellection from which the aura of the maker never entirely vanishes.
[1.] Antje von Graevenitz, "Instruments of Radical Thinking: Jewellery by Emmy van Leersum," in Gebroken Lijnen/Broken Lines: Emmy van Leersum 1930-1984, 's-Hertogenbosch, Museum Het Kruithuis, 1993, p. 13. [2.] The designer and collector Benno Premsela, a supporter of van Leersum's work, has said "Burning emotion is concealed behind a facade of rationality. It's something I've always considered to be very Dutch. Look at Dekkers, look at Mondrian. There is nothing distant about their work." Quoted in Gert Staal, "Broken Lines: The Contours of a Life," in Gebroken Lijnen/Broken Lines, p. 43.
COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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