November 10, 2006 through March 25, 2007

Overview
Silver for Modern America

During the nineteenth century, the American silverware industry became the largest in the world. By the 1920s, however, silver manufacturers faced serious challenges that included higher production costs and a trend toward smaller, easier to maintain homes. The use of silverware began to decline, especially during the economic stress of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when less expensive alternatives to silver, such as chromium-plated metal and aluminum, became increasingly popular.

Faced with a shrinking market, manufacturers sought new ways to sell their silver. Continuing to produce silver in historic styles for their more conservative clientele, they also hoped to attract progressive customers by introducing innovative designs reflecting contemporary fashion, art and architecture, and new technologies.

This exhibition focuses on the advent of modern design in the American silver industry between 1925 and 2000, a period that witnessed the transformation of American life and with it, the traditional role of silverware.

Although the United States did not officially participate, the display of modern European decorative arts at the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industries in Paris had a powerful effect on American design. To some visitors to the exposition, the luxurious products by French designers and their rivals appeared bizarre, but for many the bold geometric forms and stylized decoration of what was known in France as art moderne (later called Art Deco) soon proved irresistibly fashionable.

Streamlining: A Machine Aesthetic

In the 1930s, fascination with efficiency, mass production, and speed transformed machine imagery into a distinctive new aesthetic. Whereas the skyscraper had proved an authentic symbol of American modernism in the 1920s, streamlining took its place in the 1930s as the ultimate modernist form and became a distinct style featuring curvilinear forms and sleek surfaces and was adopted for a variety of consumer products.

During the Depression years of the 1930s, most consumers stopped buying silver altogether, but those who continued were especially price conscious. The vogue for simple yet bold designs that could be produced economically, especially in silverplate, helped silver makers survive a difficult period.

Architecture and the Avant-Garde

The emergence of the United States as a leading industrial power during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the rapid growth of American cities. By the late 1920s, the skyscraper was a vivid symbol of modern America. From candlesticks to cocktail shakers, silverware assumed the recognizable stepped, vertical profiles of skyscrapers.

Both the skyscraper and cubist-inspired aesthetic created smooth geometric surfaces and lines that became a part of the modern styling of silver objects in the 1920s. In general, Americans who appreciated modernist silver design rejected the most radical forms, favoring instead works featuring sleek surfaces juxtaposed with abstracted ornament in keeping with the more restrained aspects of French art moderne design.

Science fiction fantasies about the exploration of space became reality in 1957 when Russia launched Sputnik, the first manmade satellite to orbit the earth. With subsequent American missions and the quest to reach the moon, Space Age imagery quickly entered the popular culture. Even silverware assumed cosmic forms.

The soaring, attenuated shapes of Gorham’s forward-looking Circa ‘70 holloware line introduced in 1960 brought exceptional grace to the modern table, and the application of vivid color to the interiors of bowls and trays was an innovation that remained popular for several decades.

The effect on the silver industry was catastrophic. With few exceptions, almost no modernist silver holloware was produced by American firms in the last years of the twentieth century. Even so, several individuals working collaboratively with firms or small workshops offer hope that progressive American silver design will continue to be a vital force during the twenty-first century.

Water pitcher and tumbler, 1939 (designed 1938)
Attributed to Arthur Leroy Barney, American, 1884–1955
Tiffany & Co., New York, New York, active 1837–present
Gilded silver
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Jolie and Robert Shelton, 2001.308.1-2

Back to Past Exhibitions Main