Silver is the best material we have. And silver has this wonderful shine like moonlight [...] a light taken straight from a Danish summer's night. When covered by dew, silver can look like magical mist.
Georg Jensen
Beloved to family and friends, as well as the Chicago art and design community, Fern Moss Kalai—also known as Fern Simon—passed away on February 16, 2024. Yet her legacy as a passionate collector and a knowledgeable dealer lives on through the many people she touched plus the enduring influence of her longstanding retail boutique, Arts 220.
In many ways, Fern was born into her eventual vocation. Along with her twin brother, the acclaimed design expert, Murray Moss, and her late sister, Jean Moss, an award-winning Esquire portrait photographer, Fern was raised in an aesthetically focused atmosphere by her mother and father. “My parents had remarkable and prescient visual acumen,” Fern told Chicago Tribune Magazine in 2009, “and passed it on to us, so there must be a genetic component involved.” Her father was Merton Moss, an engineer who invented and manufactured X-ray machines. His “hard-core, ultra-modern industrial ideals” contrasted in a stimulating manner with the playful outlook of Fern's mother, Ann, in which the lively unruliness of art often prevailed over logical design imperatives.
If someone were to ask me did I know my twin sister Fern well, given we lived our adult lives in different cities, I would have to say I didn’t know, but I, like most everybody who knew her, suspected so, hoped so.
Certainly I knew her the longest. We grew up comfortably together in my mother’s womb and yet she was the one who left first, diving into the world headfirst, leaving me alone on March 29, 1949, for six minutes until I had to come looking for her, I’m sure inspired by a pre-natal excitement she triggered even then—as well as a curiosity and her faith that there was a world out there rich with the complimentary contradictions she so loved.
It was the first time and I believe the only time I lost her even for a moment. Until now.
But in following her for 75 years, I early on found evidence of her looking almost everywhere, in every direction, determined to find a signpost that one would find at a junction in the road, with a hundred different arrows pointing to “Modernism, German Expressionism, Brutalism, Abstraction, Giuseppe Napoli, Picasso, Maarten Baas, Portanier.”
Fern delighted in the richness of human artistry—Fern was looking for the best way to get lost, to wander further and further into unknown, or known but overlooked, ideas expressed in art and design by famous and unfamous creators.
Please understand: Fern Moss was not a Collector. She was a Guide, with an ever-blooming passion for art, a visceral connection to historic and diverse ways of thinking and to the unique ways artists expressed that thinking. Fern led the way for many of us into the human heart that she was able to unearth in art.
Georg Jensen 1866–1935
Georg Jensen, a name synonymous internationally with fine tableware and jewelry design in silver, was the son of a knife grinder in Denmark. He apprenticed as a goldsmith and studied sculpture before taking a job as modeler at a porcelain factory. In 1898 he opened a small pottery workshop with a partner, but gave this up within a few years to work as a silversmith and designer with Mogens Ballin. By 1904, he had opened his own silversmith shop in Copenhagen, inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and the Art Nouveau Movement in France.
The public soon recognized Jensen as a gifted designer and craftsman. In collaboration with the Danish artist Christian Mohl Hansen he created the iconic Dove brooch used on many pieces of Jensen jewelry to this day. His success with jewelry encouraged him to make hollowware. He made a teapot with the now familiar flower motif that was bought by the Museum of Decorative Art. It became the protoype for a complete tea/coffee service. The pattern became known as "Magnolia". By the end of the 1920s, he had retail outlets in Stockholm, London, Paris, Berlin, and New York.
Though Georg Jensen favored the Art Nouveau style, he encouraged his designers to work in their own styles, as long as they did so with artistry and excellence in craftsmanship. In 1905 another collaboration important in Jensen's life began, this one with Johan Rohde who, in 1916, designed the most famous of Jensen's flatware patterns, “Acorn”. The popular flatware pattern "Pyramid" is a Harald Nielsen design. Gundorph Albertus, a Danish sculptor, was the designer of “Cactus” in silver and “Mitra” in stainless steel.
Georg Jensen died in 1935 after a series of financial difficulties. The culture created by Jensen’s open-mindedness succeeded in his lifetime and continued long after his death, attracting great designers such as Sigvard Bernadotte, Arne Malinowski, Henning Koppel, Vivianna Torun Bulow-Hube, Arne Jacobsen and Maria Berntsen. His firm continues to this day and his ethic gives the 100 years of design produced in his name the reputation it deserves, whether for earrings, necklaces, flatware, teapots, bowls or candlesticks.
Auction Results Georg Jensen
_1720727584.png "Fern with her husband, Ehud, at Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram")
_1720727700.png "Fern at home. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram")
