Hermann Jünger: Authorial Identity and the Goldsmith’s Self-Fashioning Through Artistic Practice, Visual Language and Materiality

Training, Philosophy and the Goldsmith’s Identity
Jünger began his training in 1947 at the Staatliche Zeichenakademie in his hometown Hanau, known as the 'Town of Noble Jewellery' for its rich goldsmithing tradition, and later studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 1953 to 1956 under the mentorship of Franz Rickert, a renowned German silversmith. 1
Under Rickert’s guidance, Jünger embraced a philosophy that privileged intellectual and expressive creation as inseparable from technical skill.

Art historian Liesbeth den Besten beautifully articulates this artistic mentality in her discussion of Jünger’s influential book Über den Schmuck und das Machen, 1996, observing that the study considered the relationship of hand and head, and the joy of making and thinking through the process. 2
This perspective is also clearly conveyed by curator Ursula Ilse Neuman, who highlights his portrayal of the goldsmith as, a man who combines the two great human possibilities-Thought and Action-in one creative profession. He [is] a unified, un-split person, and in this unity he finds the meaning and harmony of his existence. 3

Rickert’s broad artistic vision proved formative, shaping both Jünger’s approach to goldsmithing and his understanding of the goldsmith’s identity as an intellectually engaged, creative agent rather than a mere technician. This view, in fact, reflects his ongoing effort to establish a noble and elevated identity for the goldsmith, distinguishing the role from common stereotypes of the craftsman or executor of others’ designs and situating him within a broader historical context, Jünger, like Rickert before him, may well have been reacting against the marginalized role of the craftsman and the handmade object amid Germany 's emphasis on mass production for the consumer society created by the postwar Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). 4

In a sense, Jünger’s intellectual approach to craft was profoundly shaped by Rickert, and this orientation remained central throughout his career. Rickert’s influence is clearly reflected in his recommendation that Every student should develop his or her own criteria for artistic quality, and that the formal preciousness is not necessarily dependent on the use of expensive materials. 5

Seeking a deeper historical grounding for his approach, Jünger turned to foundational texts on the goldsmith’s art. In works ranging from Theophilus Presbyter’s Schedule of Various Arts, c. 1110-1140, to The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture, written in 1565, he found a model of the goldsmith as an undivided figure, one in whom technical mastery and artistic intention formed a single, continuous act. Long before the later divide between artist and craftsman fully emerged, a distinction that would harden with Renaissance notions of artista versus artigiano and be further institutionalised by nineteenth-century academies and industrial production, these texts still reflected a pre-modern continuum in which making and meaning remained closely intertwined. In this earlier framework, the goldsmith was not split into conceptual and manual roles but understood as a unified practitioner whose intellect, technique, and material agency formed a single artistic identity.


Historical Context and Pedagogy
Alongside important masters of the post-war period such as Friedrich Becker, Reinhold Reiling, and Mario Pinton, Jünger was a pioneer in enriching the artistic and technical legacy of the discipline. In the global re-evaluation that followed World War II, when artists were reconsidering the meaning of craft, the identity of the artist, and the cultural purpose of adornment, Jünger and his contemporaries questioned jewellery’s inherited hierarchies of value and meaning, shifting the focus from ornamental convention to conceptual and aesthetic inquiry. As researcher in craft, design, and jewellery Roberta Bernabei observes, as the 1960s progressed, the initial signs of a new kind of practice emerged, in which the traditionally accepted norms of fiscal value, permanence, wearability, unrelatedness to the body, aesthetic beauty, and decoration were directly challenged. 6

These post-war shifts not only shaped Jünger’s artistic outlook but also informed the pedagogical methods he later developed at the Munich Academy. As head of the Goldsmithing Department at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München from 1972 to 1990, Jünger restructured the curriculum around Bauhaus-inspired foundational principles, emphasising conceptual exploration and reduction over traditional craftsmanship, profoundly shaping a new generation of contemporary jewellers. The Bauhaus ethos, rooted in material experimentation, formal analysis and the unity of art and craft, informed both his teachings and artistic language.


Hermann Jünger’s Jewellery
Jünger’s pieces, often derived from sketches and watercolours, display an individualistic, diverse and spontaneous approach. A distinctive treatment of form, visible solder marks, varied textures, asymmetries and contrasts foreground the indices of time, gesture, and authorship. Drawing on a constellation of sources that bridged archaeology, historical metalwork and twentieth-century art, Jünger cultivated an idiosyncratic visual language.

His interest in early European metal traditions, particularly Romanesque jewellery, together with ancient ritual artefacts, nurtured his sensitivity to the fragment, the trace and the tactile irregularity of historical objects. He engaged with the symbolic charge of these objects, from prehistoric tribal fetish finds to early mediaeval metalwork, adopting their unfinished and animated surfaces rather than the detailed ritualistic functions themselves. More specifically, Jünger found an individualistic use of materials, characteristic of Romanesque jewellery, informed by spontaneity that had been lost in the bland conformity of later jewelry design in Europe.  7 Taking Romanesque jewelry as models, Junger used a rich palette of colourful gems and enamels and preserved surface irregularities caused by the process of making. 8

Drawing from modern painting, Jünger embraced the spiritual abstraction of Paul Klee and, in particular, Julius Bissier, whose fluid brushwork and chromatic restraint deeply shaped his visual style, line, rhythm and spatial silence. Additionally, the gestural abstraction of Peter Brüning, noted by Jünger himself as an inspiration in his later works, is reflected through his evolving aesthetic.

Through this synthesis of multicultural aesthetics and material experimentation, Jünger approached jewellery as a medium for aesthetic and philosophical inquiry. He positioned jewellery as an autonomous and critical object, introducing a formalist, additive method based on small, chance-influenced components. This process fused craftsmanship with spontaneity and formal strategy as critique. His intuitive, experimental, and critically self-aware formalism marked a key transition from modernist clarity to postmodern conceptual openness.

While Jünger’s strategies reveal a sustained preoccupation with material and process, they ultimately underscore the expressive intelligence of form itself.

In this sense, his practice resonates with art historian Meyer Schapiro’s understanding of form as a bearer of thought, emotion, and cultural significance. 9

Form thus, through this lens becomes the site where personal intention and perception converge, a language through which the maker’s sensibility and context are articulated. Jünger’s treatment of form and design elements thus becomes a mode of examination that transforms formal composition into philosophical and personal reflection.

Additionally, Jünger’s radical approach anticipated many of the currents that define contemporary jewellery today, particularly the adoption of imperfection and material experimentation, as strategies that highlight conceptual authorship. His embrace of the visibility of the processes, and unique treatment of the form and materials resonate with recent artistic practices that prioritise the aesthetics of incompletion and intimacy. As seen in today’s post-disciplinary jewellery practices, Jünger’s legacy endures in works that foreground gesture, trace, and critical reflection. Like the Arte Povera artists and contemporary creators who engaged with slow design, Jünger reframed jewellery as a site of resistance against mass production, luxury, and fetishism, proposing instead the poetic autonomy of form.

Ultimately, his assertion of the goldsmith’s identity, and authorship within his formal language was his consistent use of a personal hallmark, a raised bird, applied to all his jewellery, a gesticulation that elevated the artistic status of his idiom embedded in each piece.


Final Thoughts
Jünger’s artistic legacy bridges mid-century modernist aesthetics with postmodern critical approaches, positioning him as a pivotal figure whose work embodies both continuity and disruption in the evolution of contemporary jewellery.
His enduring significance lies in the reflective and experimental ethos he championed, which positioned jewellery as an autonomous and intellectually engaged art form, an approach that Liesbeth den Besten summarises as the sensitive, intelligent and sometimes colourful handling of precious metals and the artistic discourse with traditional goldsmith’s materials and techniques. 10




Notes
1 Franz Rickert (1904-1991), was a German influential goldsmith, educator, and philosopher whose teaching at the Munich Academy shaped an entire generation of post-war jewellers. His emphasis on individual expression and the unity of thinking and making transformed the goldsmith’s role from technical executor to creative author, profoundly influencing the direction of contemporary jewellery, and Munich as an international centre of education and artistic research.
2 Den Besten 2012: 198.
3 Jünger 1989, p. 58, quoted in Neuman 2025.
4 Neuman 2025.
5 Den Besten 2012: 198.
6 Bernabei 2011: 25.
7 Jünger quoted in Neuman. Source from personal communication August 1999. 2025.
8 Source from personal communication August 1999. 2025.
9 Shapiro 1953: 287–318.
10 Den Besten 199.


References
- Bernabei, Roberta, Contemporary Jewellers: Interviews with European Artists (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- Den Besten, Liesbeth, On Jewellery: A Compendium of International Contemporary Art Jewellery (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2012). Jünger, Hermann, ‘A Goldsmith’s World’, Art Aurea, 1 (1989), 58.
- Neuman, Ursula Ilse, ‘The Jewelry of Hermann Jünger’, Ganoksin, https://www.ganoksin.com/article/jewelry-hermann-junger/\ [accessed 10 November 2025].
- Schapiro, Meyer, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: G. Braziller, 1978; repr. 1979).

Links
- emuseum.mfah.org/people/19630/hermann-junger/objects?utm_source=chatgpt.com
- die-neue-sammlung.de/ausstellung/hermann-juenger-schmuckstuecke-fundstuecke/
 

About the author

Sotiria Vasileiou is a visual artist and jewellery maker with an academic background in art history. She holds a BA and MA in Art History from the Open University UK. Her skill set includes traditional and modern artistic practices, with a particular area of research on 19th-century fashion and crafts and, more recently, contemporary art and crafts. She has a Certificate from the Technical School of Goldsmiths in Athens and has apprenticed next to several prominent Greek goldsmiths. Her practice entails an exploration of materials, which she transforms and synthesises through artisanal work and contemporary design. She employs a multifaceted method that includes art history, fashion, material culture, and jewellery history to explore topics of identity, experience, value, and aesthetics. She has also contributed to the local art scene in her hometown of Kalamata by creating exhibition catalogues.

Mail: info@sotiriavasileiou.com
Website: https://info@sotiriavasileiou.com/
Instagram: @sotiria_vasileiou_jewellery