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The Queen of Arts
| Article
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19515 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,180 Words |
| Author
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Karen S. Chambers
Karen S. Chambers is a craft writer, critic, and curator
currently based in New York. |
"Mosaic is both a queen and a Cinderella among the arts; other arts may be greater, but none can be finer," according to mosaic historian Peter Fischer. Manfred Hoehn, a master craftsman who has spent thirty-five years working with mosaics, says mosaic has a "vibrant, living character [that is] at the base impressionistic; the eye brings everything together."
A 5,000-year-old medium, mosaics, which are simply bits of any type of colored material set into a matrix, have played a rich role in the history of architectural ornament. In the twentieth century, mosaic, like the other traditional forms of architectural ornamentation, has suffered from the decades of hegemony exerted by the spare International Style of architecture. Guided by the dictum of its leading exponent, Mies van der Rohe, that "less is more," architects have all but ignored opportunities for ornamentation for many years. Postmodernism and "movements" like "Pattern and Decoration" painting have reintroduced ornament into our environment.
Well aware of this renewed interest in architectural decoration, and with a strong desire to introduce the medium of mosaic to artists who have not realized its aesthetic possibilities, Gabriel Mayer, the president of Franz Mayer of Munich, Inc., decided to open a mosaic studio by the same name in the United States in 1998. The Fairfield, New Jersey, studio is known worldwide for its work with stained glass and mosaic, and carries on the tradition begun in Munich in 1845 by Mayer's great-grandfather, Josef Gabriel Mayer.
The first stained-glass windows imported from Europe were made by the German shop in the 1870s. Its stained-glass work can now be seen in thousands of churches in the United States and Canada. From the beginning of the 1900s there was a Mayer sales office in New York, but it was closed in the late 1930s because of the Second World War.
The studio in Germany did not begin making mosaics until the 1930s. After the First World War the German expressionist sculptor Karl Knappe, who is credited with revolutionizing the art of mosaic, became associated with the studio. Although delicate modeling can be achieved with mosaic, this type of execution denies the true nature of the medium, which Knappe reasserted by using larger chunks of material. According to Hoehn, Knappe insisted that he could not make a mosaic "until he chopped or cut the material. He had to see the character of the material and then he would know where to place the particular stone or
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