The
first Cleveland Arts Prize to be awarded in the visual arts was given
to a man who had set out to be a painter, but instead made an international
reputation in a very different art form: gold jewelry. In 1961, the
same year John Paul Miller was awarded the arts prize, examples of
his work were included in an international exhibition at London's
Goldsmiths Hall.
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Northeast
Ohioans had known and admired Miller's work since 1949, the
year of his first appearance in the Cleveland Museum of Art's
annual May Show, which he won several times in the course
of the next 25 years. Indeed, his distinctive creations were
in a very real sense made possible by his dramatic rediscovery,
as a young teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the
late 1940s, of the secret process of attaching tiny beads
of gold to a gold surface without the use of solder, a technical
feat that had been perfected by the ancient Romans and lost
with the fall of the Roman Empire.
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Moth
pendant
c. 1998
18 karat and pure gold and enamel
3 1/2 x 1 7/8 inches |
Born
April 23, 1918, in Huntington, Pennsylvania, as a young boy Miller
(whose mother died when he was two) moved with his family to Cleveland,
where he attended Hough Elementary School and Shaker Heights High
School. Saturday morning classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art
and later at the Cleveland School of Art (CSA), where he studied
enameling with Kenneth Bates, awakened an interest in painting and
design. And in the fall of 1936, Miller enrolled in CSA's industrial
design program.
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It
was the accomplished silver jewelry of fellow first-year student,
Fred Miller, that made John Paul want to master the techniques
of working with silver. Soon he was producing rings and brooches,
drawing on what would remain two lifelong sources of inspiration:
classical music and the natural world. He would also be deeply
influenced by several of his teachers: Kay Dorn Cass, Paul
Travis, Walter Sinz, Carl Gaertner and Viktor Schreckengost.
John Paul and Fred Miller would later share a studio, influencing
and enriching one another's work, for many years.
After
graduating in 1940, John Paul taught for a year at CSA before
he found himself learning to drive an Army tank. Perhaps prophetically,
he was to spend his entire tour of duty illustrating field
manuals on tank tactics at Fort Knox, Kentucky (famous as
the repository of the U.S. government's gold supply). In any
case, he became obsessed with the idea of rediscovering the
lost Roman technique of gold granulation.
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Helgramite
pendant
c. 1985–86
18 karat and pure gold and enamel
3 1/2 x 1 7/8 inches |
Cephalopod
pendant
c. 1985–86
18 karat and pure gold and enamel
3 1/2 x 1 7/8 inches
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It
was shortly after returning to his faculty position at CSA in
1946 (the school's name was changed to the Cleveland Institute
of Art in 1949) that he came across a treatise written by an
archeologist at the American Academy in Rome that speculated
on the ancient technique of granulation. It was enough to push
Miller in the right direction. It seems gold melts at a much
lower temperature in the presence of copper than either metal
does normally. By causing copper to oxidize on the surface of
gold granules, then heating the gold, Miller provoked a reaction
that allowed him to join even larger pieces of gold with no
visible joints, making possible the creation of exquisite shapes
and designs. |
His
work was to win attention at 1953's Designer Craftsman U.S.A.
show and one-man shows at the Art Institute of Chicago (1957) and
New York's Museum of Contemporary Crafts (1964), as well as international
recognition at the Brussels World's Fair, the Objects U.S.A.
traveling exhibition (1970), the Museum Bellerive in Zurich (1971),
the Vatican Exhibition of American Crafts, and the Great Jewelry
of the Ages exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London. In 1994, the American Craft Council presented him with its
gold medal for artistic excellence. His work is owned by the Cleveland
Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution,
the Museum
of Contemporary Arts and Design in New York City, the Minnesota
Museum of American Art in
St. Paul, Vassar College, Yale University, and the Fleischman
Collection.
For
the 40th anniversary of the Cleveland Arts Prize, he was asked to
create a gold seal ring to be given to recipients of the newly created
Robert P. Bergman Prize.
text
by
Dennis
Dooley
1986 Winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature
Fall
2002
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