Since its foundation, the aim of the Wiener Werkstätte was to create a close relationship between the design phase, which must be linked to an effective knowledge of materials and techniques, and the executive phase.
Their creations with clean and compact lines, worked on the surface, renewed the taste in various sectors of artistic activity, from furniture to jewellery, thus anticipating the industrial design operation implemented by the Bauhaus, a school founded in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919, with the aim of integrating aesthetic research and industrial production.
The artist who translated the theories of the Weimar school into the goldsmith field was Naum Slutzky (1894-1965) who created jewels with poor materials in vaguely geometric shapes.
The Viennese Secession, notes Graziella Folchini Grassetto , «defines the role of creativity in jewellery» in that the figure of the artist-artisan is exalted in his inseparable specificity, and the role of the creator is equated with that of the executor in an inseparable binomial: if the artist lacks the technical skills to create the work, he avails himself of the contribution of the artisan in a close experimental union .
This was the real novelty for the time. At that time, the great jewelry houses produced goldsmith pieces with a unique and easily recognizable style, the result of teamwork between artists-goldsmiths, designers, sculptors, cutters, engravers and others, placed on the same level. It was with the Viennese Secession that the artist-goldsmith conquered a privileged position above everyone else.
According to Lara Vinca Masini, however, the first revolution in the jewellery sector in the last century occurred with Art Deco , when the lines of the jewel became clearer and followed a new and different geometric shape .
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