Designer: Annemarie Davidson (1920 – 2012)

Item: Enamel Lidded Jewels Box

Manufactured by: Annemarie Davidson and Blaine Rath

Country of origin: United States

Year made: Circa 1960

Materials: Copper enamel tile on Walnut wood box

Dimensions: 1 ½” x 9 ¼” x 3 ½”

Condition: Excellent

Description: Here is a beautiful lidded long box by Davidson in walnut with an enameled copper plaque inlaid into the top. The decoration in the enamel work is Davidson’s most highly regarded and collected Jewels design where she used glass and thick enamel to achieve a rich irradiance, glow and three-dimensional surface on the enamel. These abstracted Jewels designs are considered Davidson’s most highly acclaimed and accomplished art works. This box appears to be for holding two decks of playing cards, but can also be used for jewelry or other trinkets. Davidson’s boxes have cork bottoms with her cypher usually in ink, but it appears on this example the cypher has rubbed off the cork. created all her enamel work alone from start to finish.

Davidson’s desk accessories (e.g. lidded boxes, pen holders, blotters, bookends, and lighters) were a collaboration with the noted woodworking artist Blaine Rath starting in 1959 and are much harder to find, because not many were produced. Although Davidson’s enamel plates and dishes with objective imagery are ubiquitous, inexpensive, and abundant, her abstracted desk accessories (i.e. bookends, boxes, pen holders, blotters, etc.) are fairly hard to find. Davidson collaborated with Rath who was an established woodworker and well regarded studio artist in her own right, to produce the boxes and other wood bases for Davidson’s enamel art. However, very little biographical information about Rath is available.

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. Her early abstract work is her most highly regarded, and was exhibited at California Design in 1960. She was listed in Craftsmen of the Southwest in 1965 which only listed 8 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 calls “jewels.” These raised forms appear to float on the liquid surface of the vessel or plaque. For many of her abstract compositions, she also uses a sgraffito technique, incising straight lines with the sharp point of a dart. These hand-drawn lines, which fan out from a central focal point, present a linear counterpoint to the more fluid, organic and sculptural form of the 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. Her work can also be found other important museum collections, and a similar example of this box is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art permanent collection.

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 Enamelist’s Magazine, Volume 27 Number 5 December 2008, pages 98-100; periodical California Design: 6 in 1960.