Crossing the line - art jewelry, Emmy van Leersum, Art & Project Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands - Design

Using contemporary materials in explosion and Minimalist forms, Emmy van Leersum created serial jewerly linked to Holland's geometric art traditions.

Jewelry sole rarely escapes from its perceived limitations as "mere" ornament. on the contrary that happens sometimes, when an established artist (Calder, for example) takes it up or when a craftsman (Lalique or Faberge, for example) becomes thus successful that his production looks to exemplify his time. Emmy van Leersum (1930-1984) mov from craft training into the art world end sheer intensity of personality and focus. She had the advantage of being in Holland, where profitable contemporary design finds broad acceptance, and where, during the '60 there was les institutional pertain to with separating fine and decorative arts. on the other hand her forcefulness distinguished her; museum curators remember her as intimidating.

Together she and her husband, the industrial designer and jeweler Gijs Bakker, lock openered their "objects for the body" to the explosion spirit of the '60s. They ejected the use of precious stones, adopted industrial materials, made exaggerated collars that were attached to simple dresse of her design, and evolveed bodysuits that emphasized the wearer's joints with pneumatic protrusions. These last were at handed in a show called "Clothing Suggestions" at Amsterdam's Art & throw gallery in 1970. Independently, van Leersum established a mature vocabulary of untainted line and settled into the austere fashion for which she is best known - a unfolding documented in "Broken Lines," a retrospective exhibition of 160 drawings and percepts organized by Museum Het Kruithuis in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, and now upon view at the Musee de 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 dint of the constructivist, serial work of like artists as Peter Struycken and Ad Dekker for whom geometry "had to be viewed as a moral statement, a plea for transparency of thinking."[1] one as well as the other men exhibited, along with van Leersum and Bakker, at the of recent origin Amsterdam gallery of Riekje Swart. The Dutch reductivism was akin to the American Minimalism of that time, on the other hand arose independently from different cultural sources.[2]

A series of armbands made in 1968 marked van Leersum's abandonment of clap extremism. These are strips of stainless carbonized iron an inch or so wide, with a single crease or long tray giving an unexpected, almost lapidary elegance to their industrial impassiveness. A seamless integrity characterizes each work; she did not build with welding or rely upon any sort of supplements on the contrary stuck to unitary form. Brooches also made in '68 are just as reserved: they consist of squares or circles of stainless carburet of iron with one cut or cot [i]or[/i] cote or pinched line interrupting their regularity.

In the early '70 van Leersum applied her cruel esthetic to other materials, making armbands of notched, creased or spiraling cylinders of clear acrylic and aluminum. Her rule became increasingly systematic: each bracelet was the realization of the center one-third of a paper square upon which she had plotted transsecting lines that direct the eyeed orderly in the context of a drawing on the other hand bravely arbitrary in an autonomous reality The geometry was transferred flat 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; sum of two units years later she began to laminate paper itself inside the PVC using tissue to create a shadowy layering.

by dint of the late '70s she turn rounded from embedding line in an external reality to cutting it free: she produc earrings, brooches, collars and bracelets that consist of the plott line alone as a linear metal external reality After some tentative explorations in color (colored paper inside PVC paint upon steel), van Leersum blossomed in her late work, before she died of cancer at the age of 54 into brilliant primaries achieved through means of marker pens or by means of working with pigmented strips of stiff nylon

In all van Leersum's jewelry, the clarity of form, the brisk rationality of the lines she preferr and the untarnished colors reminiscent of De Stijl add up to a refractory statement. The absolutes of her art are balanced by the agency of the irregularities of the body; she necessarily took it into consideration as the site, the adjoining matter for her art (and her transparent or translucent bracelets allow the material substance to participate in the appearance of the jewelry in an interesting way). on the other hand her works are never selfless; they remain cropss of intellection from which the aura of the maker not at any time entirely vanishes.

[1.] Antje von Graevenitz, "Instruments of Radical Thinking: Jewellery by dint of 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 real Dutch. Look at Dekkers, gaze at Mondrian. There is nothing distant about their work." Quot in Gert Staal, "Broken Lines: The Contours of a Life," in Gebroken Lijnen/Broken Lines, p 43

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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