Timeless Insights in Knox Works

The galleries of San Marino’s palatial Huntington Library don’t seem like a setting for the contemplation of esoteric science-fiction time-warps or the anatomy of modern art. Yet that’s exactly what emerges from a fascinating traveling exhibition of British Art Nouveau metalwork and designs by Archibald Knox.

Anyone who’s never heard of the artist needn’t be embarrassed. He was a willfully withdrawn bachelor born on the Isle of Man in 1864. The island, situated in the North Atlantic between Ireland and the British Isles, has a unique ancient Celtic inheritance known as Manx culture.

From boyhood, Knox was mesmerized by the rugged stone crosses and grave markers that haunt the landscape. Weathering makes their carved designs of interlocking knots, rings and mystical beasties appear to have been fashioned by some enchanted natural force.

At art school, Knox undoubtedly learned of such Celtic masterpieces as the Ardagh Chalice and the Book of Kells. At the same time, he was attracted to the sleek simplicity of emerging modernism. He put the two together, inventing a hybrid that tallied with a nationalistic and folkloric fashion for things Celtic.

The revivalist style became the leading British form of Art Nouveau. Knox’s stripped-down version, in the form of everything from wallpaper to chalices, was taken up first by the design firm Silver Studio and then the upscale retailer Liberty & Co.

Liberty successfully marketed Knox’s work, calling it Cymric (pronounced KOOM-ric), but the company insisted that its designers remain publicly anonymous. The policy might have driven a touchy ego to distraction, but it was fine with the reclusive Knox. He labored away, content on his gray, rugged island, and died virtually unknown in 1933.

Subsequent scholarship sorted out Knox’s importance. Today he’s ranked with such masters of Art Nouveau as Hector Guimard, Josef Hoffmann and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose work was recently seen at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

The Knox exhibition was organized at London’s Middlesex University from its Silver Studio Collection. Coordinated at the Huntington by Leah McCrary, it’s parsed out in two buildings. The special exhibitions room in the central gallery displays silver objects. The Scott Gallery houses works in pewter. (They have unusually bright surfaces because the usual dulling lead was eliminated from the mix.) Both spaces present numerous examples of Knox’s textile and wallpaper designs.

These get a trifle upstaged by the metalwork, but they more than reward attention. Their muted colors tally exactly with a description of the Isle of Man written by the artist. It begins, “The sea enters into every view, gray-white or glistening beneath the sun, tenderest of blues in the evening, or deep turquoise under the influence of a breeze. . . .”

As with only the finest of Art Nouveau, Knox’s work refuses to sit still in the domesticated realm of craft. His floral images press against their own form as if they want to become abstract paintings or Rorschach blots. Closely examined, Knox’s extreme stylization of natural motifs suggest robotic creatures.

His metalwork is stunning. He refines the sometimes encrusted muscularity of his Celtic sources into an exquisite oxymoron of languorous tension. The stem of a chalice is made of a serpentine of individual pieces. Jewelry is unburdened of Medieval heft, becoming airy and weightless. Enameling and semiprecious stones are minimized to grace notes.

Every once in a while, Knox seems to long for the gravity of Celtic stone. Some pewter clocks that try to echo it broadcast a humor that was probably unintentional.

As intrinsically fascinating as are his cups, flagons, desk sets and cigarette boxes, what’s really interesting is the effect of the ensemble. You cannot look at it and figure out where you are in any rational scheme of time. Knox’s designs would be at home on the set of a George Lucas retro-futuristic “Star Wars” spectacular. Several of his vases resemble nothing so much as Flash Gordon rocket ships.

We’re forcibly reminded that modernism grew from what amounted to a series of transformative revivals of ancient art. Beginning with the Medievalist Arts and Crafts movement, modernism moved through the Cycladic sculpture that inspired Brancusi and the African art that animated Picasso. Even the reductive shapes of modernism revived the stark beauty of the undecorated plane, cylinder, cube, cone and sphere.

So what is this time in which Knox deposits us? Well, Lucas said his pivotal guru was writer Joseph Campbell, who was a votary of psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung. Guess what? The curator of Knox’s exhibition and catalog editor is Jungian analyst Stephen A. Martin.

That appears to suggest that modernism didn’t function on clock time at all. It exists in the timeless, primal realm of the human subconscious.

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Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; through Jan. 4, closed Mondays, (626) 405-2141.