SILVER
Cultural History: Silver has been used for thousands of years to create jewelry and coins; and many hundreds of years for silverware. Most mirrors are made from a thin layer of silver on glass. Over the centuries, cultures from around the world have created beautiful objects in silver.
Navajo Indians, from the American southwest, are famous for their stunning silver jewelry. The Navajo wore silver jewelry at least 300 years before they started creating their own. They acquired their silver adornments from the Spanish and Mexicans. John Adair writes in his book “The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths” that Atsidi Sani (“Old Smith”) was their first silversmith who learned his trade from the Mexican plateros (silversmiths). At first, the Navajo Indians created bells, cases, bridles and jewelry. Today, the Navajo silversmiths have brought a high art form to their trade merging “tradition with originality and innovation” according to Marion Wood in her essay “North American Indian Jewelry”.
Art Deco is a creative period in art and design between the World Wars—1920 to 1930. The artists used geometric forms and bold, pure colors one of them being silver. The Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) are the finest examples of American Art Deco architecture. Silver is an important color to these New York City skyscrapers.
The Chrysler Building was designed by William Van Alen for Walter P. Chrysler. This giant of the car industry wanted the building to capture the spirit of the automobile. Van Alen topped the building with a silver steel spire of repeating arcs and triangles giving the building a sense of movement, wealth, energy and strength. Chrysler chose Nirosata steel for this tower because it had an “attractive dignified color similar to platinum.”
On the Empire State Building designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, the color silver in the form of steel and aluminum is used as an accent on the body to accentuate the vertical lines that emphasize the building’s soaring height. The Empire State Building is crowned with a refined and elegant steel and aluminum winged pinnacle. The building suggests a spirit of reaching for the stars as well as wealth, energy and glamour.
Streamline Design was a design style created in the 1930s that celebrated simplicity, speed and logic. The materials favored in this new age were aluminum (a new material in the 30s), steel and chrome. The design movement came out of the desire for faster moving ships, trains, planes and automobiles. The style was sleek, bold, and larger than life—it was a design movement to help take the country out of the Great Depression. The top designers were Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss. The style evolved to objects that didn’t need to move through space such as home appliances, office equipment and furniture. The industrial designer, Egmont Arens stated, “Streamlining has captured American imagination to mean modern, efficient, well organized, sweet, clean and beautiful.”
Today, silver remains a popular color seen on trains, airplanes and automobiles and in home appliances where it still suggests glamour and cleanliness. In architecture, Frank Gehry, the contemporary visionary, has used the color silver on most of his famous buildings—Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Experience Music Project and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Today the modern story of silver continues to be about contrasts. We see it in the unique—jewelry, musical instruments and religious artifacts to the common sites in our day—coins, utensils and various tools. We see it in objects of great proportion bridges, spacecraft, satellites down to the smallest of things on our desks—pens, staples and paperclips.
Where do you see silver?
• Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary © 2001 Random House, Inc.
• World Book © 2010 World Book, Inc.
• The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths by John Adair © 1989 University of Oklahoma Press.
(Originally published in 1944.)
• Ethnic Jewelry Edited by John Mack, Marion Wood’s essay: “North American Indian Jewelry
© 1998 Harry A. Abrams
• The Jeweler’s Art by Katherine MacFarlane © 2007 Thomson Gale
• New York Deco by Carla Breeze © 1993 Carla Breeze and Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
• Art Deco New York by David Garrard Lowe © 2004 Watson-Guptill Publications
• All Color Book of Art Deco by Dan Klein © 1974 Octopus Books Limited
• American Streamlined Design, The World of Tomorrow by David A. Hanks and Anne Hoy
© 2005 Editions Flammarion
• Industrial Design by Raymond Loewy © 1979 by Raymond Loewy, © 1998 Overlook Press,
Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
• The Indian Arts and Crafts Association, www.iaca.com
