Test of time
Classic, compelling and beautiful: the pieces by the late Swedish silversmith Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe for Georg Jensen mirror the woman herself. By Jeni Porter.
Time was the essence for the Swedish jewellery designer Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe, but in unexpected ways. Torun, as she was known, wanted her jewellery to stand the test of time, but she rebelled against the marching of it. Her best-known creation is a timepiece, the bangle watch, but she intended it as an ornament, not a chronometer. She made it as a provocation for a landmark exhibition called Antagonisms II in Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratif in 1962.
“The relentless of time is what I abhor, so I designed a watch with no numbers,” Torun said of the piece that came to be known as the Vivianna watch. It had only a second hand and the bracelet was left open so as not to “feel oneself a prisoner of time”, she said. “The dial was a mirror so whenever you looked at it you saw your own reflection a reminder of the present moment … the very second.”
In 1969, Danish silverware company Georg Jensen turned the anti-watch into a functioning piece with hour and minute hands. Making something so modern was an audacious move by a brand renowned for its art nouveau and art deco pieces. Almost half a century later, the Vivianna has proven to be as timeless as its creator had hoped.
“It’s a complicated form, but beautiful in its simplicity,” says Georg Jensen’s senior vice-president of design and merchandising, Nicholas Manville. He says it was difficult to make and Torun bent spoons to work out how to get the curvature flowing from the round face rather than having an indented joint.
To mark the 50th anniversary of Torun’s first collaboration, Manville has set up a shrine in Georg Jensen’s headquarters in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen. Working with Torun’s daughter Marcia Coleman Diallo, Manville has recreated Vivianna’s universe around a wooden workbench in the smithy where she sometimes worked with Jensen’s silversmiths. There are steel pieces showing early workings of the watch, chunks of the rutilated quartz she favoured for signature bracelets and necklaces, and pebbles polished by the sea like the ones she collected on the beach in the French Riviera, where she famously met Pablo Picasso. That chance encounter led to a friendship and her exhibiting at the Musée Picasso in Antibes.
Torun, a self-described tomboy born in Malmö in 1927, was a trailblazer who decided in her late teens that jewellery would be her mode of expression even though there were few women silversmiths. By her early 20s she was working and living in Paris, where she wed the painter Walter Coleman, adding two more children to the two she already had. In their milieu were the jazz greats Charlie Mingus and Billie Holiday, for whom Torun designed many daring pieces.
A stunning beauty, Torun had her own sense of style, modifying a Christian Dior swing coat with mother-of-pearl buttons. That coat is hanging in the Georg Jensen smithy alongside photos, sketches and mementoes of her life in France, Germany, and later, Indonesia. She moved there in the 1970s to be near the source of Subud, a spiritual movement whose followers surrender to the divine force. This practice was inextricably linked with her creativity and evident in her fascination with the vortex and the universe.
“Everything about us swirls – the vortex symbolises to me the vibrations of life, infinity and heavenly creation,” she said. For her, jewellery was a symbol of love that enhanced and moved with the body. She loved organic sinuous forms, often incorporating pebbleshaped semi-precious stones. She talked about her pieces such as the twisting Möbius bangle depicting inner and outer forces, a central Subud belief.
In 1967, when Torun began her collaboration with Georg Jensen, it was during a period of great turbulence in her life. Her third marriage had failed and she had to provide for her children. She was running her own jewellery studio, but it was challenging and exacting work. She found solace in Subud, taking on the name Vivianna, considered balanced because of its repeating letters.
Georg Jensen signed her up exclusively and took over the manufacturing, thus beginning a creative and productive partnership that endured until her death in 2004.
Her work was so modern it was deemed “not Jensen”, but later came to define the brand. It’s still a reference point. “She was pushing it with a lot of these forms that were so advanced for their time, and now they have become icons for us for sure,” says Manville.
“She’s come to embody a lot of the feelings that the house has continued with – the experimentation, the types of stones we use. Sometimes we look to the Vivianna world and say: ‘Is this us or not?’ Would she have done it or maybe not; it’s a nice litmus test for us to know what we stand for.”