Circular brooch

Embellished with gold beads and inset with bezel-set stones, referencing Byzantine medieval jewelry from the Musée Cluny, Paris, this heavily hammered gold brooch was made by the modernist jeweler Ed Wiener. Wiener’s career started in the 1940s in the bohemian hot bed of Greenwich Village, where he produced hand-hammered silver jewelry alongside other artists such as Sam Kramer and Art Smith. Although his early jewelry found formal inspiration in Alexander Calder, as he progressed, Wiener evolved his own vocabulary, often shaped by his interest in adopting new materials and techniques in casting, setting, and joining. By the late 1960s–80s, he was on Madison Avenue, adopting a post-modern aesthetic in which he revived medieval gold settings with semi-precious stones, historical references including pre-Columbian forms, and semiotic play. This brooch is part of a collection of twelve pieces donated by Wiener’s daughter which show the development his own language of modernist forms.