Necklace

Necklace comprising alternating geometric forms connected by a wire, one form in the shape of a rhomboid, with a coral bead, the other form consisting of two triangles connected at the base with turquoise beads strung on wires between them, made by Ed Wiener, a modernist jeweler who was active from the 1940s until his death. His career started in the bohemian hot bed of Greenwich Village, where he produced hand-hammered silver jewelry alongside other West Village artists such as Sam Kramer and the Afro-Cuban American Art Smith. Wiener’s early jewelry found formal inspiration in Alexander Calder, but as he progressed, Wiener evolved his own vocabulary, often shaped by his interest in adopting new materials and techniques in casting, setting, joining. This piece is part of a collection of twelve pieces donated by Wiener’s daughter, which show the evolution of his career from Calder to his own language of modernist forms, especially abstract expressionism and the conceptual approach of Bauhaus. By the 1950s, he produced organic and dynamic shapes that we identify with the new emphasis on anthropomorphic and ergonomic form and the optimism and progress of the atomic age. By the late 1960s-80s, he was on Madison Avenue, producing more jewelry in gold, and adopting a post-modern aesthetic in which he revived byzantine/medieval gold settings with semi-precious stones, historical references including pre-columbian forms, and sign/symbols with semiotic play. In 1988 the Fifty/50 Gallery in New York mounted a retrospective of his work.