Designer: Annemarie Davidson (1920 – 2012)

Item: Enamel Early Jewels Plate

Manufactured by: Annemarie Davidson

Country of origin: United States

Year made: Circa late 1950s, probably about 1958

Materials: Copper, enamel and glass

Dimensions:: 8 ½” in diameter

Condition: Excellent.

References: Nelson, Harold; Jazzar, Bernard, Painting with Fire: Masters of Enameling in America, 1930-1980. Long Beach Museum of Art, California (2006); Rosenberg, Alan, Alluring Enamel. Modernism Magazine: (Spring 2003) pages 68–72; Jazzar, Bernard N and Nelson, Harold B. The Enamels of Annemarie Davidson, Glass on Metal, The Enamellist’s Magazine, Volume 27 Number 5 December 2008, pages 98-100; periodical California Design: 6 in 1960.

Description: Here is an early and very rare Jewels plate by Davidson. This example relates to Davidson’s earliest works using her Jewels design. Pieces from this series were first shown at California Design shows at the Pasadena Art Museum in the early 1960s. Other examples from this period can be found on the websites of The Enamel Arts Foundation and the Ganoskin Community. Pieces from the late 1950s are very very hard to find, and this piece is very similar to some of the pieces that Davidson donated to the Long Beach Museum of Art from that period and that can be found on its website.

Davidson was born in Berlin in 1920, and came to the US in 1936. She studied economics at New York University and later at Columbia University. She studied enameling with the prominent enamel pioneer Doris Hall in the 1950s. Davidson moved to southern California with her husband in 1946, and lived and worked in the Los Angeles area until her death in 2012.

Davidson had a thriving retail business creating enamel objects with objective imagery that is somewhat kitschy, such as birds, trees, frogs, and other depictions from life, and which can be easily found in thrift shops. However, her abstract work is her most highly regarded and was her “fine art” practice. That work was exhibited at California Design in 1960 and several western museums. She was listed in Craftsmen of the Southwest in 1965, which only listed eight enamelists total including Fred Ball, Margaret Montgomery Barlow, Nik Krevitsky, June Schwarcz, Kay Whitcomb and Elllamarie and Jackson Woolley.

In her work, Davidson frequently uses pieces of glass of varying sizes to create irregular organic shapes which she called her “jewels.” These raised forms appear to float on the liquid surface of the vessel or plaque. For many of her abstract compositions, she also used a sgraffito technique, incising straight lines with the sharp point of a dart. These hand-drawn lines, which often radiate outward from a central focal point, present a linear counterpoint to the more fluid, organic and sculptural form of the raised jewels.

Her works were exhibited in her lifetime at the Pasadena Art Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Mobile Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and are now beginning to be widely collected.