What We Talk About When We Talk About Silver

The resulting imprecision makes it difficult to articulate their true properties and qualities. This challenge becomes particularly evident in lamentations about silver’s perceived decline. These are often grounded in the experience of its long-standing tradition. In contrast, people correctly note today’s scarcity of public and private commissions necessary to sustain silversmithing as a viable craft.

Discussions of silver, meaning utensils as well as objects, often focus narrowly on a specific type of silver: the domestic silver of bourgeois households—the trays, pitchers, and cutlery that proliferated over the past 150 years. The economic growth of the 19th century enabled silver’s widespread entry into private homes, marking a distinctive period in European cultural development. These objects emerged during the era of Historicism, characterized by its revival of historical styles. While in Germany, the end of this phase is commonly equated with the fall of the monarchy in 1918, its influence on silver design has persisted remarkably longer, extending into the present day. The focus on traditional domestic silver among the general public tends to reduce the works featured in the Silver Triennial to considerations of utility or taste. Questions revolve around practical concerns like the effort required to polish silver or personal aesthetic preferences, reinforcing good and bad clichés about supposed bourgeois values. This perspective is ill-suited to the appreciation of artistic silver design and offers no meaningful framework for discussing contemporary silver.

This narrow view is compounded by another problem: placing artistic silver into categories such as applied art, decorative arts, or artisan crafts inherently restricts its perception. These labels hinder the objects’ ability to receive the serious critical attention routinely granted to other art forms. When academic art history emerged in the 19th century, silver objects handed down from bygone centuries were assigned to the category of applied arts. This led to an emphasis on utility value and production context as primary criteria for classification. Consequently, in applied arts museums, representative tableware and resplendent exhibition objects serve to illustrate ornamental development, showcase technical innovation, or provide anecdotal accounts of their provenance. This approach may reflect these institutions’ origins as reference collections for craftspeople and industry. However, framing these objects within a restrictive museum narrative or educational purpose rarely allows them to express their inherent artistic value or fully reveal their qualities to viewers.

What these objects lack is unprejudiced examination. Inquiries into themes that reach beyond their material properties are scarce. In applied arts museums, artistic silver of centuries past is removed from its original functional contexts. Even in preserved palace settings, where silver remains in its historical environment, the process of musealization deprives the objects of their complex functional dimensions. While viewers might sense the impressive effect of an elaborately set table, they often miss that these objects were more than decorative tableware for dining. These pieces had a performative quality, shaping the way they were used, displayed, and spoken about and playing a crucial role in the societies in which they originated.

Shifting our focus towards these sociological and cultural dimensions offers a pathway to understanding silversmithing as equal to other forms of art. Successfully broadening this perspective on musealized silver could inspire significant momentum for the present. A renewed outlook on silver sharpens our perception. In this Silver Triennial, exquisitely designed functional objects stand alongside thought-provoking artistic objects, demonstrating silver’s diverse applications. The selected works reveal a sophisticated engagement with form, surface, and a striking diversity of themes. These artistically significant silver pieces can hold their own among other art forms. They should not only be regarded with an appreciative eye but also spoken about with equal recognition.

 

About the author

Malte Guttek, executive manager of the Association for Goldsmiths’ Art and the directorship of the German Goldsmiths’ House Hanau. Following his studies in Art History and Christian Archeology in Bonn and Rome, Gutter earned his doctorate via the sculptor Heinz Breloh. Following a scientific traineeship at Kolumba – Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne, Guttek worked as a freelance curator for various exhibition projects. His focus lies on examining objects of applied art: among other shows, last year he curated an exhibition of the ceramicist Young-Jae Lee in Cologne.