Excellent!!! | Contemporary Silver: Commissioning, Designing, Collecting

book: Contemporary Silver: Commissioning, Designing, Collecting | Benton Seymour Rabinovitch, Helen Clifford

books:


	• Contemporary Silver: Commissioning, Designing, Collecting Benton Seymour Rabinovitch, Helen Clifford Merrell, 2000 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Must-Have Book on Silver

Looking for a book on contemporary silver?

If you go to the Web and enter "contemporary silver" in a search engine, what comes up? Not much, right? Go into Amazon.com and look there as well. You'll find just one book: Contemporary Silver: Commissioning, Designing, Creating. Sure, you'll find a few out-of-print books published in Europe, but who has the time to brush up on their German? The authors of Contemporary Silver are Benton Seymour Rabinovitch and Helen Clifford, Ph.D. Rabinovitch is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle, a member of the Silver Society (London), and Honorary Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. He is a longtime collector of antique silver and serving pieces and is the author of Antique Silver Servers for the Dining Table. Clifford has a number of degrees, is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, member of the Silver Society (London), and an honorary member of the Association of British Designer-Silversmiths. She has written and curated exhibitions on historical and contemporary silver.

The two authors have produced a book that is both beautiful and inspiring. Rabinovitch commissioned 62 notable silversmiths from the United States and Great Britain to design and create silver serving pieces in fish-server or cake-slice form. The result is an incredible range of servers in every conceivable technique. From the minimalist to the baroque, from the abstract to the representational, all are meant for practical use, though cleaning some of the more intricate pieces would certainly be a challenge.

These servers demonstrate mastery of the craft, and offer a comparative survey in technique and design between the two countries.

Each of the 62 pieces illustrated (75 have been commissioned to date) has a full description, including materials used, dimensions, and narrative, an artist's philosophy/statement, and brief personal history. Rabinovitch also comments on how he chose each silversmith for the commission.

Within the 160 pages lie chapters on the commissioning process; historical background on servers in the 18th and 19th centuries; silver design in Britain and the U.S. between 1950 and 2000; understanding the collection; the collection itself; and a helpful glossary of terms.

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Excellent!!!

This is a gorgeous book that will delight and inspire. The photos are very beautiful and show the details clearly. The book covers lots of different silver jewellers/artists and their work. I highly recommend it.

The art of the silversmith is at the cutting edge of modern design. Complex and vital, the work in the field of contemporary silverware combines ancient skills and techniques with the latest innovations in technology to produce objects that both reflect and challenge current aesthetic ideas.Taking as their brief the design of a simple fish server or cake slice, the British and American silversmiths whose work is represented in the more than sixty-strong collection of Benton Seymour Rabinovitch have produced an astonishing range of variations on a single theme. From the minimal simplicity of the purely functional to the lavish ostentation of the truly baroque, these pieces utilize elements of sea life, Scandinavian design, Florida Art Deco, eighteenth-century Rococo and totemic, timeless symbols of the natural world to forceful effect. Whether entirely abstract or startlingly representative, what these pieces have in common is the immense technical mastery that has gone into their design and construction - as well as the fact that, no matter how fantastic their appearance, they are all meant for practical use.Each piece in the collection is lavishly illustrated in colour with a specially commissioned photograph and accompanied by an account of the work's conception. Personal accounts of the artists' guiding aesthetic and technical principles provide a long-needed, unique and authoritative window into current design practice both in Britain and the United States.What keeps silversmithing alive today is the practice of commissioning, by individuals as well as institutions. Commissioning offers the prestige of associating with some of the world's greatest silversmiths, the pleasure of owning something unique and handwrought, and the opportunity of contributing to the survival of the craft - a personal stake in the future.The authors provide a step-by-step guide to commissioning one's own pieces, as well as a design-historical context to the last fifty years of the craft. Designers and makers, curators and collectors, craft writers and historians, as well as anyone interested in the beautiful, will find this volume a fund of information and inspiration.AUTHORBIO: Professor Benton Seymour Rabinovitch is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Silver Society (London). He is a long-time collector of antique silver and serving pieces and is the author of Antique Silver Servers for the Dining Table. Helen Clifford, MA (Cantab), PhD (RCA), FSA, is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, a member of the Silver Society (London) and an honorary member of the Association of British Designer-Silversmiths. She has written and curated exhibitions on historical and contemporary silver.

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