1880-1920 Art Nouveau to WW1

The turn of the century saw a revolution in jewelry-almost a revolution against jewelry. For decades, people had decked themselves out in the decorative machine made jewelry flooding the market, but the new aesthetic movement attacked the prevailing Victorian taste for opulence. The Aesthetes refined sensibility recoiled at the vulgarity of showy jewels. True believers favored simple strands of beads and rejected anything percieved as ostentation. The schools of Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, The Glasgow School and Jugendstil all espoused an aesthetic that emphasized artistic value over the value of the materials. One of the most prominent Art Nouveau designers, Rene Lalique, combined meticulous craftmanship with innovative design in the era´s most enduring pieces. Much like the period of the French Revolution, little or no jewelry was produced in Europe during the First World War and the Russian Revolution. People either tucked away their few precious pieces or sold them in order to survive.