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Exhibitions: Celebrating
Art Nouveau: The Kreuzer Collection
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 Buckle, ca. 1900, unknown artist (German); silver-plated copper, lustered glass stones; 1-7/8 x 4-1/8" (Photo by Katherine Wetzel, © 2002 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)
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The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts celebrates its recent acquisition of
an internationally acclaimed collection of Art Nouveau jewelry in Celebrating
Art Nouveau: The Kreuzer Collection.
The exhibition will be on view through Jan. 19, 2003. Admission is free. It features highlights of the 484-item Kreuzer Collection, acquired by the museum earlier this year through a gift-purchase arrangement with Dr. and Mrs. Karl Kreuzer of Munich, Germany, who have collected Art Nouveau belt buckles and decorative arts for more than 20 years. “Their efforts produced the greatest collection of its kind in the world,” says Dr. Michael Brand, the museum’s director. Arising in great European capitals such as Paris and Vienna at the end of the 19th century, Art Nouveau is probably the most popular and recognizable of all European artistic styles after Impressionism. “This new acquisition expands the scope of the museum’s already renowned collection of Art Nouveau decorative arts, established by Sydney and Frances Lewis of Richmond,” Brand says. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has collected and displayed Art Nouveau works for many years. In 1971, the museum presented one of the nation’s first major shows of Art Nouveau furniture and decorative arts. A year later, the Lewises gave the museum $500,000 for the purchase of Art Nouveau objects. |
In addition to the gift-purchase of the buckle collection, Dr. Kreuzer has also given his personal collection of period Art Nouveau publications to the museum’s library. It includes rare, complete, bound runs of significant periodicals along with highly prized books from the period. Selections from the Kreuzer library gift will be shown in the exhibition.
“The addition of the Kreuzer Collection and the Kreuzer library confirms the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as the nation's premier research and resource center for the study of Art Nouveau,” Brand says.
Featured in the exhibition are Kreuzer Collection pieces from France, Austria, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Germany, Denmark, Great Britain and the United States of America, including belt buckles and their accompanying necklaces, belts and buttons.
“These ornaments, produced in the period between 1890 and 1914, provide examples of the Symbolist, Jugendstil, Art Nouveau and Liberty-style aesthetic current around the year 1900, the high point of Art Nouveau,” says Frederick R. Brandt, the museum’s consulting curator for 20th-century decorative arts, who organized the exhibition.
“The high point of Art Nouveau coincided with a vogue for belts and belt buckles in feminine fashion throughout Europe and America because of the introduction of the wasp waist,” Brandt says. “Because of this overlap, the Kreuzer Collection presents a virtual microcosm of Art Nouveau style. This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see the entire collection.”
On display are buckles shown at the influential 1900 Paris World’s Fair, as well as buckles designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Wiener Werkstätte; by the famed Danish designer Georg Jensen; by Archibald Knox for Liberty & Company in London; and by René Lalique, the most renowned Parisian jeweler of his time.
The motifs featured on the buckles range from abstract or stylized geometric and plant forms to animals, humans and composite creatures. Other pieces feature scenes taken from literature and references to past cultures.
A number of additional examples of Art Nouveau ceramics, metalwork and furniture in the Lewis Collection of Art Nouveau are also being shown. Many of these pieces have not been exhibited publicly before. They include a length of embroidered silk upholstery by French artist Louis Majorelle; a color lithograph of Loïe Fuller by French artist Manuel Orazi; other lithographs by Alphonse Mucha of Czechoslovakia, Louis John Rhead of England and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec of France; a bronze inkwell by Sarah Bernhardt; a multi-piece tea service by Maurice Dufrène of France; and a table clock, a tea set and stemware by Josef Hoffmann of Austria.
“The combination of the pieces in this special celebratory installation with the Art Nouveau works already on display in the museum’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Gallery of Art Nouveau and Art Deco decorative arts creates a rare opportunity to explore in depth a truly remarkable international style,” the museum’s director says. “By viewing the Kreuzer Collection in tandem with other expressions of the Art Nouveau style, visitors will appreciate the unique resource that now exists in Richmond.”
The collection catalog, Art Nouveau Buckles: The Kreuzer Collection, is available in the Museum Shop, by telephoning (800) 943-8632, or on-line at the VMFA Shop. The 232-page hardcover publication not only illustrates buckles from Austria, Bohemia, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, but also gives a short history of buckles and fashion at the turn of the century. It includes 250 color illustrations. The price is $69.95.
The exhibition is made possible by principal support from The Julia Louise Reynolds Fund, The Council of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition Endowment, the Fabergé Ball Endowment, Patrons of Night Nouveau and gifts from other generous donors: Toni A. Ritzenberg, The Truland Foundation, Arlene and Robert Kogod, Anna Lou and Robert Schaberg, Kenneth and Chérie Swenson, Anne W. Kenny, Lilli and William Beyer, Best Products Foundation, Barry Friedman Ltd., Macklowe Gallery, Lee and Georgina Salomon, and Edmund A. Rennolds Jr.
CATALOGUE
ART NOUVEAU BUCKLES:
The Kreuzer Collection
foreword by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, essays by Ulricke von Hase-Schmundt and Karl Kreuzer;
includes biographical data on
the silversmiths, workshops, and designers, and a listing of makers’ marks; bi-lingual (English and German); published by the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, to accompany the 2000-01 exhibition of the collection.
232 pages, 250 color illus, 35 illus of marks. $69.95 hardcover (Museum members $62.96), $45.00 softcover (Museum members $40.50), plus tax.