Georg Jensen: Silversmith Extraordinaire

Georg Jensen:
Silversmith Extraordinaire
by Bob Brooke

George Jensen, known for his fine designs in silver, brought the artistry of Scandinavian design to the public eye throughout the world.

Born in 1866, Jensen was the son of a knife grinder in Raadvad, a town north of Copenhagen. He began his training in goldsmithing as an apprentice at the age of 14 with Guldsmed Andersen, a firm which closed in 1884. This freed Jensen to enroll in sculpture courses at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Graduating in 1892, he began exhibiting his clay sculptures. And though the exhibitions proved successful, he discovered that making a living as a fine artist would be hard, so he turned to the applied arts to support himself. He began his career as a modeler at the Bing & Grøndahl porcelain factory and in 1898 opened a small pottery workshop he founded with Christian Petersen. Though their work soon became popular, sales weren’t strong enough to support Jensen and his two small sons. A devoted family man, Jensen eventually had eight children by four wives, three of whom died of illnesses.

He returned from a two-year traveling scholarship to Paris and Rome in 1900, determined to create useful objects. Jensen began working on his own designs during a period of creative activity in Denmark known as the skonvirke, meaning artistic endeavors, style, inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and the Art Nouveau Movement in France.

The Georg Jensen silversmithy is still flourishing because the founder and the artistic directors who followed him were always open to changing styles. A signature style of the firm is based on Functionalism, named after the "form follows function" philosophy of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus of the Twenties, who favored unembellished, clean lines for utilitarian objects. This was better suited to mass-production than the classic handcrafted Jensen techniques.

In 1901, Jensen gave up working in pottery and began working as a silversmith and designer with Mogens Ballin. By 1904, he had decided to open his own silversmith shop in Copenhagen.

Jensen's apprenticeship metalwork, plus his education in sculpture allowed him to become an artist craftsman. Soon, the public recognized the beauty, sophistication, and fine quality of his Art Nouveau creations, and he was on the road to success. Business was so good that Jensen expanded his operations and by the end of the 1920s, Jensen had opened retail outlets in Stockholm, London, Paris, Berlin, and New York.

Though Jensen favored the Art Nouveau style, he encouraged his designers to follow throuigh on their own ideas as long as they adhered to the artistry and excellence in craftmanship that he had striven for in his own work. And although Jensen died in 1935, his ideals have given the work produced by his workshops the reputation they deserve.

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