Four Jewelry Designs 

Josef Hoffmann rendered these four jewelry designs with pencil, brush, and ink on paper. Hoffmann was a founding member of the Vienna Secession, an art movement that broke away from the conservative artistic establishment in Austria-Hungary at the turn of the 20th century. These designs, with their bold geometry and stylized natural forms, reflect the Secession's embrace of modernism and its aspiration to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, encompassing all aspects of life. Think of it as an integration of art and design into everyday living. This aesthetic arose from a dissatisfaction with industrial mass production and a yearning for a return to craftsmanship, but it also speaks to a progressive desire to democratize art and make it accessible to all, not just the elite. To truly understand these designs, we might turn to manifestos and exhibition catalogs of the Secession, as well as studies of the social and cultural history of Vienna at this time. By doing so we realize that these are not just pretty trinkets, but emblems of a cultural movement and a society in flux.