BIZARRE BEAUTY: THE ART OF WILLIAM HARPER

This luxurious hardback book, bound in maroon fabric with gold tooling, opens with an extended biographical essay on leading American jewellery artist William Harper and his work by curator Glenn Adamson. Born in 1944 in rural Ohio, Harper studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, a centre of American craft, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. His fascination with the medieval, African and Asian collections, together with artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Joseph Cornell and Cy Twombly, would be fundamental to his creative output. This is marked by the ability to transform materials, meanings and aesthetics.

Harper initially studied painting until a friend introduced him to metalwork and enamel. He began making jewellery in 1973 when teaching at Florida State University. By the end of the 70s, he was exhibiting in the USA and London. His second show at New York’s Kennedy Galleries in 1982, the groundbreaking, transcultural `Saints, Martyrs and Savages’, introduced characterisation: he presented jewels which combined numerous religious iconographies and manifested personae.

By the late 80s and early 90s he was directly referencing his own experience in his art. Harper stopped teaching in 1995, moved to New York, and began making books, a series of ‘casks’ as containers for jewellery, and suites of drawings. He is still making today, with a new group of jewels exploring Surrealist juxtapositions.

The second half of the monograph is made up of two short but illuminating texts by Harper himself, and excellent longer essays by specialists on various aspects of his work, including his engagement with medieval art, the Ballets Russes, and his own collection of the art of the West African Fon people. Overall, this sumptuous, wide-ranging volume provides an engaging visual and intellectual context for Harper’s outstanding work.

BIZARRE BEAUTY: THE ART OF WILLIAM HARPER

Glenn Adamson & Martha J. Fleischman (eds), Arnoldsche, 2024, hb £54

Condensed from a review by Frances Parton in DAS Newsletter No. 134