The Bugatti Ring by Onno Boekhoudt. A Future Classic in Contemporary Jewellery

Carin E.M. Reinders, Director of the CODA Museum in Apeldoorn, responds to Klimt02’s invitation to professionals by sharing his Future Classics choice. Rather than defining fixed criteria, this initiative gathers subjective perspectives to explore the values shaping the field and to open a conversation on durability, relevance, and how certain works continue to resonate over time.

The Bugatti Ring by Onno Boekhoudt from the CODA collection features on the cover of CODA’s publication Redefining Jewellery. The ring is constructed from amber, a halved wooden clothes peg, two drawing pins and a series of iron rings. Boekhoudt deliberately left an open space for the finger where a passenger seat might be expected. The title foregrounds the tension between the humble materials employed and the value conventionally attributed to jewellery and a ring in particular. (It also alludes, with characteristic irony of the artist, to the car brand once sold by his grandfather.) The Bugatti Ring also invites comparison with Picasso’s Tête de taureau (1942), in which a bicycle saddle and handlebars were reconfigured into a bull’s head through minimal intervention. In both cases, found objects are mobilised to challenge established hierarchies of material and meaning. Yet Boekhoudt’s ring extends beyond the logic of assemblage. As a pars pro toto, it encapsulates the artist’s broader working practice and signals a decisive and enduring shift in the field of contemporary jewellery. Its iconic status lies not only in its formal and conceptual innovation, but also in its lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists such as Lucy Sarneel, Jantje Fleischhut and Benedikt Fischer.


​Onno Boekhoudt. Ring: Buggatti, 2001. Part of the CODA Museum Collection.


Onno Boekhoudt (1944-2002) trained at the vocational school in Schoonhoven and at the Kunst und Werkschule in Pforzheim. He achieved international recognition primarily as a jewellery artist, while also producing objects, installations and drawings. In 1973, together with Berend Peter, Marion Herbst, Françoise van den Bosch and Karel Niehorster, he founded the Bond van Oproerige Edelsmeden (Union of Rebellious Goldsmiths, the BOEgroep). This group positioned itself in opposition to the prevailing conservatism of Dutch jewellery practice and to the austere formalism of Hollands Glad, associated with Gijs Bakker and Emmy van Leersum. Although the group disbanded following the death of Françoise van den Bosch in 1977, it marked a critical turning point: jewellery would no longer revert to its former conventions. The Bugatti Ring is emblematic of this moment of rupture.

Central to Boekhoudt’s practice was the primacy of process over outcome and end result. His work was driven by a sustained impulse to order and reorder the world through observation and material engagement. During daily walks he collected objects, natural and manufactured, which he carefully arranged into still lifes that informed his studies and jewellery. Acts of picking up, holding, touching and keeping objects were, for Boekhoudt, intrinsically connected to the concept of jewellery itself. His studios were densely populated with objects, experiments, studies, sketches and finished works, all regarded as equally significant. The boundary between study and finished piece was deliberately porous. As Boekhoudt stated: Everything is study in search of form. These investigations constituted an ongoing exploration of form and materiality rather than a progression towards a definitive result.

Recurrent motifs in Boekhoudt’s work include the use of discarded or modest materials – broken branches, rusted nails, wooden blocks, plastic bottle caps – systematically organised in boxes, trays and improvised containers. Through collecting, drawing, writing and material play, Boekhoudt constructed a self-contained artistic universe defined by continual discovery. The resulting works could be provocative within their historical context, yet they consistently rejected ornamentation or rhetorical excess. A key conceptual concern in Boekhoudt’s oeuvre is the notion of the hole. The hole, engaging with nothingness, sets one free, he once remarked. In jewellery, the hole represents the interior: intimate, bodily and personal. For Boekhoudt, this internal, corporeal dimension was more significant than outward appearance. Jewellery, in his view, was fundamentally about making space for the body and, by extension, for the human subject.

Boekhoudt died in 2002 as a result of a tragic accident. Prior to his death, he expressed the wish that his archive remain intact. With support from the Mondriaan Foundation (now the Mondriaan Fund), CODA acquired this substantial archive. CODA also holds the archives of Chris Steenbergen (1920-2007) and Nicolaas Thuys (1927-1989). These archives are made accessible to enable a broad audience to engage with the artists’ modes of thinking and working. Design drawings, correspondence, photographs, tools and material documentation together articulate the narratives behind the jewellery. Boekhoudt’s archive, in particular, reveals a sustained trajectory of searching and experimentation, unconcerned with the imperative of resolution.

Boekhoudt’s influence on the national and international art world has been considerable. He taught for many years at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the Academy of Fine Arts in Kampen, and the Royal College of Art in London. His work is represented in major museum collections, including the Centraal Museum, Museum Arnhem, the Fries Museum and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Françoise van den Bosch Prize, following several international distinctions.


Why Future Classics?
What Makes a Contemporary Jewellery Piece Become a Classic? Our aim is not to define academic criteria or impose any form of conservatism, but to collect subjective perspectives that help us understand the values and expectations shaping our field, without reducing them to fixed rules or hierarchies. By sharing these voices, we invite you to think together and open a conversation about durability, relevance, and the ways particular works contain certain patterns or enigmas that make them continue to speak over time.
 

About the author

CODA Director Carin E.M. Reinders (1959) studied Art History and Archaeology at the University of Utrecht. After several years as a policy officer of Fine Arts in Almelo and a year as a lecturer of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede she became director of the Stedelijke Musea Zutphen in 1987. In 1996 she moved to Tilburg to become director of the Dutch Textile Museum. In 2002, Carin Reinders was appointed director of CODA. She has been managing director of CODA since 2006. Carin lives in Apeldoorn, the Netherland. She is married and is mother of Elizabeth (1991) and Beatrijs (1994).