This is a gorgeous large Mid Century Brutalist style 925 sterling silver and Tiger’s Eye floral design The ring is a large heavyweight featuring an abstract Modernist freeform design with two tiger’s eye polished stone nuggets. The tiger eye stones are beautiful shades of browns, caramels, and gold. I believe that this necklace is Scandinavian, specifically Danish, ring size 7.75 face of the ring measures 1″? X1″inch weight 22.6grams Vintage Avant-Garde – Brutalist & Modernist Jewelry. Argued rather convincingly that contemporary art as a movement has failed miserably. Whether it takes the form of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism or Post Minimalism, contemporary art is often unattractive, if not downright ugly. These aesthetic shortcomings, combined with the movement’s intellectual inaccessibility, make contemporary art both an elitist’s dream and a practical failure. However, in one of those little ironies of life, the principles of contemporary art which fail so miserably when applied to large works like paintings and sculptures succeed rather brilliantly when applied to miniature works like jewelry. Modernist jewelry is one of the very few places that the ideas of contemporary art found fertile ground, blooming into an effusion of exquisite, unrivaled beauty. Modernist jewelry stands alone as an island of elegance in a sea of humdrum contemporary art. To say it embodies many of our modern concepts of beauty, while true, doesn’t really do Modernist jewelry justice. Glittering precious metals gracefully fuse with countless different varieties of bewitching gemstones into a glittering mass of avant-garde style. One piece of Modernist jewelry may have sensuously organic forms seamlessly melt into heavily textured yellow gold while another hand-wrought specimen may have gracefully sweeping lines simultaneously vie with outrageously angular spikes for visual dominance. Modernist jewelry happily abandons all convention; the results are often breathtaking. The Modernist movement in jewelry had its origins in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. At that time, Victorian, Art Nouveau and Art Deco had all been popular jewelry styles within the past 50 years. However, some cutting-edge artists found these established traditions unreasonably constricting. In the end, they repudiated Victorian style as being needlessly ornamental, Art Nouveau as too rigidly naturalistic and Art Deco as excessively uncompromising and austere. Instead, Modernist jewelers envisioned themselves as peers to the great painters and sculptors of the age like Salvador Dali, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, among others. As a result, the radically new form of jewelry known as Modernism was born. Throwing convention to the wind, bold founding artists Sam Kramer and Art Smith fearlessly experimented with the new, unbounded Modernist ethos in their Greenwich Village studios. Andrew Grima, another famous Modernist jeweler, created such alluring, innovative work that he was appointed Crown Jeweller to the British Royal Family in 1970.
