Linke - Artinfo

Asia Society
Art Gala
MAY 20, 2013 • Hong Kong
Celebrating Visionary Contemporary artists
Lee Ufan
Nyoman Masriadi
Zeng Fanzhi
Coincides with the first edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong
Please contact ArtGala@AsiaSociety.org or visit AsiaSociety.org/ArtGala2013 for more information.
FROM TOP: RAGO, LAMBERTVILLE, NEW JERSEY; DAVID COLE AND AMERICAN DECORATIVE ART 1900 FOUNDATION
American Original
Inventive, independent, and under the radar, 20th-century
designer Marie Zimmermann is ready for a new generation of collectors
By William L. Hamilton
A ONE-WOMAN DECORATIVE
ARTS MOVEMENT
Zimmermann richly deserves it. Her
output, dating from 1902 to 1939,
displays astonishing range: work in
copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold,
and precious stones, in styles fluent
with inspirations from historical
classicism and ancient Asia to the Arts
& Crafts, Art Deco, and modernism
of Zimmermann’s own time. And
her designs—bowls, vases, lidded
vessels, table service, gates, garden
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | MARCH/APRIL 2013
furniture, candelabra, jewelry—were
realized with a boldly experimental
approach to patina, coloration,
and applied ornament.
“She marched to the beat of her
own drum,” says Nonie Gadsden,
the senior curator for American
decorative arts and sculpture at the
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, who calls
Zimmermann an “iconoclast,” in part
because she entered and mastered a
field—metalwork—regarded strictly as
men’s work. Reviewing a Zimmermann
theconnoisseur
There aren’t too many names left to discover in 20th-century design, but Marie Zimmermann, a New York metalworker
who created decorative objects and jewelry, might be one of them. Despite inclusion in “High Styles,” a seminal exhibition
of 20th-century 20th-century American design at at the Whitney Museum in 1985, and “The Art that is Life,” an important show of
American Arts & Crafts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston two years later, Zimmermann is known to only a small
circle of cognoscenti. Among these are Rudy Ciccarello, the American Arts & Crafts collector and patron of the
Two Red Roses Foundation; Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, who set the auction record for Zimmermann with her purchase
of a carved, jeweled chest for $120,000 in 2005, which she donated that year to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art; and Bruce Barnes and and Joseph Cunningham, founder/president and director, respectively, of the American
Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, whose American Arts Arts & Crafts collection is considered one of the finest in the councountry. In 2011 the foundation and Yale University Press published The Jewelry and Metalwork Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann, by
Barnes, Cunningham, and Deborah Dependahl Waters, which should bring Zimmermann (1879–1972) wider notice.
gallery exhibition in 1916, the New
York Evening Sun told readers, “This
being a feminist age, the village smithy
is a studio and the smith is a comely
young woman.” Covering her onewoman
show in Charleston, South
Carolina, in 1935, the local press called
Zimmermann “the female Cellini.”
Born into an affluent Brooklyn
family, Zimmermann lived as an
independent professional at the
National Arts Club in Gramercy Park,
in Manhattan, moved in high society,
Just under a foot
tall, the richly
carved and
jeweled wooden
chest, top, fetched
$120,000—still
the artist record—
at Rago in
Lambertville,
New Jersey, in
2005. Created
prior to 1922,
the handsome
gold ring,
above, features
a baroque pearl,
emeralds, pink
sapphires and
(possibly) rubies.
The Art of Living
39