Exhibition Torun "The Audacity of Femininer"
TORUN
The Audacity of Feminine Design
In 1948 Vivianna Torun Bülow Hübe made her first journey to France at the age of 21. The young Swedish student at art school in Stockholm stayed in Paris and also traveled to the Côte d'Azur. She spent time on the beach in Antibes between the Fort Carré and the Brague embouchure, fascinated by the pebbles she found there. While selecting and collecting the most beautiful of
them, she met Picasso who would discover her work later. Indeed, since that initial visit the jewelry she designed with the pebbles has always found an adoring public. In 1958, a decade after her first visit to the «blue country, as she called the Côte d'Azur, an exhibition honored her work at the Musée du Palais, the Picasso Museum in Antibes. During that exhibition she settled in Biot with her family. She stayed here for ten years. After Torun's first workshop in the "Roundoun" house, she moved to the Castel Julien, which was designed by the architect André Bloc in the Chemin de Saint Julien. There she gathered a group of young silversmiths and apprentices: The decade 1958-1968 saw the founding of the «Biot School of contemporary jewelry." She would later recall this period as the "adrenaline years," the most productive and creative of her life. Surrounded in Biot by artists and avant-garde jazz, she and her husband, the African-American painter Walter Coleman, engaged in the US civil rights movement and attained artistic fulfillment.
The Exhibition "L'audace de la douceur" highlights Toruns oeuvre but also shows the imprint she left in Biot. The village, its inhabitants and artists were marked by her presence, and her influence still can be seen in the silversmith filiation.
Who was Torun, this truly unique artist who came from the far north and who revolutionized jewelry design? To begin, she was one of the first women to become a silversmith, and the first to achieve international recognition. Coming from a family of artists and architects she spent the summers of her childhood at home, surrounded by nature and enjoying near complete autonomy. That is where her mother taught her to use the elements found "around her in nature." Growing up among boys, she was herself a tomboy, terrified by the idea that she would have to become a woman." Striking, then, that she would later develop a style of jewelry design that is at once feminine and feminist. Her closeness with nature and the elements, and the way she inhabited her own body, opened her field of artistic expression. Her experience of ice-skating, for example, corresponds to the theme of the Möbius loop that forms some of her iconic pieces. Her immersion in gesture and movement, as well as the fulfillment found in the manual work, allowed her to create jewelry as a sculpture around a neck, a wrist or a finger. She wanted jewelry to be beautiful and functional, "adapted to the movements of the human body"-part of the daily life of women--and to draw attention to the beauty of the girl, rather than merely decorating her "to give her a value in her own right."
The value of Torun's jewelry comes from the form the artist gives it much more than from the worth of the metal or the stone from which it is composed. A pebble shaped by waves crashing on the beach is banal until the artist sees it. The pendants of Torun's first necklaces with pebbles that look something like the mobiles of Calder. Her hammered necklaces are of a sleek/refined lines, yet they form a sensual wave: jewelry « to be and not to
seem. Torun also used moonstones, rock crystals, and glass She left Biot to settle down for a decade near Wolfsburg, Germany, where she found a new artist community. Before long, she moved to Indonesia. There, Torun found a society in Indonesia whose social harmony corresponded to her aspirations. She found creative inspir inspiration amid the abundant vegetation, which in turn influenced her work of that period.
Torun's jewelry, avant-garde at the moment of its conception, has become timeless. The journalist Ann Westin introduces her collection of interviews with Torun by observing of the latter: "Her innermost conviction overrides any concession to fashion (...) which may explain the aura of strength and clarity that emanates from her creations. Her creations anticipate a new era. Torun is a pioneer of modern art jewelry". According to Westin, Torun's work is an expression of an artistic volition that reaches beyond the merely decorative». Perhaps that is what made her art so audacious:
abandoning convention in order to create, with her hands, jewelry as an art-piece, as a worn sculpture: "coax from the resistant material a fluid and curving movement. There is a connection with skating, the physical awareness in expressing the curves." She thus enunciates her embodiment, the movement and the sensation of equilibrium, through the intelligence of her hands in her sensual and elegant jewelry. Her intuition, originating in physical experiences, enabled her to create pieces of jewelry that lay on the body like an undulation. Her designs display force and gentleness at once: this is the audacity of feminine design.
Maximilian Essayie Commissaire de l'exposition