Jewellery in Context

Book excerpt: This is an indispensable and enlightening text by one of the most renowned art historians and design theorists, about the work of the great Marjan Unger. The Dutch art historian and jewellery expert Marjan Unger died back in 2018, at the age of seventy-two. Through her teaching and her myriad projects, exhibitions and publications, she influenced generations of jewellery artists and theorists in the applied disciplines. Yet one of her perhaps most enduring legacies is her doctoral thesis, Sieraad in Context, which she submitted in 2010.In her work, she endeavours to formulate a general definition of jewellery. Yet above all she also analyses to what extent jewellery is associated across the globe with different, sometimes contrary issues: in that all human fears but also desires have, in a sense, materialised around the world as objects of adornment.