Contemporary Silver

Book excerpt: "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 collection of Benton Seymour Rabinovitch have produced a 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 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." "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 in the volume a fund of information and inspiration."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved