|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Paley's Power Pieces
| Article
# : |
20385 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
2,039 Words |
| Author
: |
Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
"I wasn't out to make a little gold pin to stick on a woman's lapel. I was out to create masterpiece". Albert Paley said. But before the mid-1960s and Paley's innovative designs, modern jewelry was just that, the perfect accessory to complement and complete the wearer's outfit. In the decade that followed, Albert Paley wrought a revolution in jewelry, making powerful pieces that not only redefined the role of feminine adornment but reinvented the pendant, the necklace, the brooch. With the counterculture of the 1960s women began to assert a new confidence embracing their physicality; a confidence engendered by the liberation that would shortly emerge as a national movement and Paley captured that spirit, "My Jewelry", he said, "was meant to be worn by women who had the psychological and political bearing to deal with their sexuality and self-image".
Jeremy Adamson, curator of Albert Paley; Sculptural Adornment, the internationally touring exhibition organized by the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, would agree. "Paley made totemic pieces that designated you not as wealthy but as possessing a certain psychological power. He wasn't concerned with jewelry as fashion. These are not 'fun' pieces but objects the wearer has to live up to. The wearer literally becomes the stage for the artist's creative expression.
While Paley is best known for the large-scale, wrought-iron designs that absorbed his attention after 1974 (ironically, winning the commission to make the Portal Gates for the Renwick Gallery led him to abandon his work with jewelry, the fifty-two pieces in the Renwick exhibition reveal an extraordinarily seminal body of work that presaged and inspired his achievements in ornamental public sculpture. Pale's reclamation of his history as art jeweler and creator of wearable sculpture gives us a recent and important chapter in the history of modern design.
Albert Paley's beginnings were unlikely ones for an artist. He grew up first in Philadelphia and then Pennsauken, New Jersey, in a middle-class family where holding a decent job with a decent wage was the ultimate goal. Graduating from high school in 1961, Paley was restless, sensing the anti Establishment rumblings that would later rock the decade. Fearing an ordinary life and looking for "a way out", he first thought of forestry, then buying a fishing boat and taking people for trips around scenic Cape. May, and even joining the Navy, a year later, a friend who enrolled at the Tyler School of art at Temple University in Philadelphia suggested he visit him and have a look at the
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
