Svend incense

Svend Weihrauch (born July 8, 1899 in Viborg , Jutland , † June 14, 1962 in Aarhus ) was a Danish silversmith who, with his clear, ornament-free silversmith work, is one of the most prominent representatives of functionalism . Weihrauch's work received a lot of attention in the professional world during his lifetime and was accompanied by art critics. He achieved great international success at the world exhibitions in Brussels in 1935 , Paris in 1937 and New York in 1939 .

life and work

From 1914 to 1918, Svend Weihrauch trained as a silversmith and chaser with Hans Christian Matthiasen in Nykøbing , one of the leading workshops for art nouveau silver. In the following years he worked in the silversmiths of Georg Arthur Jensen . In 1928, Svend Weihrauch and Vilhelm Hingelberg set up a new type of silver workshop in Aarhus, where he was the workshop manager and the sole artistic designer from 1929 to 1956.

Special features of the silversmiths were an organization based on division of labor in which Weihrauch's designs were implemented by specialists in their individual production steps, even though it was a relatively small company with around ten to twelve employees. In this way, despite extensive rationalization and partial mechanization of production, the highest demands on good processing of silver goods were met. Weihrauch saw the machine as a means of producing contemporary work, the design of which was determined by the technical process; the end result was always dependent on solid, handcrafted processing.

His self-image as a silversmith almost forbade serial production. Up to 1954, the body work is almost exclusively one-off. Small series of simpler works of four to six copies remained the exception. As a logical consequence, Weihrauch left the company when Hingelberg published the first sales catalog in 1954 due to sales difficulties, thus denying the opportunity to intervene and make changes to individual objects. Svend Weihrauch ran a café in Aarhus until his death.

literature

• Jörg Schwandt, Svend Weihrauch. Silver 1928–1956, Koldinghus 1998, ISBN 87-87152-32-0
• Modern metal art, inventory catalogs of the Bröhan Museum IV, 1990, (pages 52–57: Hingelberg )