Antonio Pineda

Antonio Pineda Gómez (19 July 1919 – 14 December 2009) was a Mexican silversmith and designer, one of the leading figures of the group of Taxco workshops associated with the 20th-century revival of Mexican silver design. He was known for modernist jewellery, hollowware and tableware that connected the Taxco School with broader currents in Mexican modernism. His career was the subject of the 2008–09 retrospective Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue devoted to his work.

Early life and training Pineda was born in Taxco, in the state of Guerrero, on 19 July 1919, the third of ten children. At the age of eleven he served a brief apprenticeship in the workshop of the American designer William Spratling, and he later trained with the painter and silversmith Valentín Vidaurreta in Mexico City, returning to Taxco in 1936. He worked in mining and then in sales and management at Spratling's workshop before establishing his own taller in 1939. He was among the first young taxqueños to apprentice at Spratling's Taller de las Delicias, where two master goldsmiths from nearby Iguala, Artemio Navarrete and Alfonso Mondragón, had been set to work experimenting with silver.

Workshop and career Pineda's workshop grew from an initial staff of about ten smiths to roughly one hundred at its height. He credited the master smiths Bruno Pineda — his brother, who oversaw workshop operations — together with Rafael "Chino" Ruiz, José María "Chema" Pineda and Filiberto Gómez for the increasing technical ambition of his work in the 1950s and 1960s.

A turning point came in 1944, when his work was shown at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Richard Gump, of the San Francisco luxury store Gump's, bought all 160 pieces Pineda had brought and offered to carry his designs exclusively; further outlets followed in Mexico, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. His output came to include sculpture, and he exhibited internationally in cities including Chicago, Paris, London, Rome, Amsterdam and Mexico City. The records and sales catalogues documenting his work for Gump's were later lost when the store's archive was destroyed by fire.

Pineda also took a hand in running Taxco's National Silver Fair. He chaired the organizing committee in 1953, the year the fair became a national event, and won the first Galardón Nacional for a silver eagle brooch set with jade and pearls; he took the national prize three more times, and later helped widen the program to take in exhibitions, concerts, ballet and contemporary dance.

Work Pineda's designs combined the abstracted forms of pre-Columbian art with the geometry of Art Deco, within the broader idiom of Mexican modernism. According to the Fowler Museum, no other Taxco jeweler used as many semiprecious stones or set them with comparable variety; Pineda held gems with as little surrounding metal as possible, producing a floating effect, and favored cultured pearls, amethyst and onyx. His jewellery was faceted, hinged or hollowed so that apparently massive forms sat comfortably on the body. He identified himself primarily as a taxqueño silversmith. Surviving pieces are attributed by means of his workshop hallmarks.

Later life and death Pineda was married and divorced three times and had children from each marriage. By the time of the Fowler retrospective he was one of the last surviving members of the group of Taxco designers with whom he had begun his career. He died of kidney failure at his ranch home in Taxco on 14 December 2009, aged 90.

Exhibition and legacy Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda opened at the Fowler Museum at UCLA on 24 August 2008 and ran until 15 March 2009 before travelling. Drawn largely from the collection of Cindy Tietze and Stuart Hodosh, it presented nearly two hundred works spanning the 1930s to the 1970s, and was accompanied by a catalogue written by the anthropologist Gobi Stromberg with an essay by the curator Ana Elena Mallet. Reviewing the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times, the critic Christopher Knight described it as a large and illuminating survey of Pineda's jewellery designs. Pineda's work is held in several American museum collections. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art holds four pieces of his jewellery in its Latin American art collection: the Necklace with Thumbnail Design and a matching bracelet, both of about 1953; a silver and amethyst Teardrop Necklace of the same date; and a silver and pearl bracelet of about 1960. The Dallas Museum of Art holds a silver and bone tea service that Pineda designed about 1960, a version of which was shown at the Milan Triennale that year, together with a pair of two-branch silver candelabra from the Patsy Lacy Griffith bequest.

The Newark Museum of Art holds a silver and amethyst bracelet made between 1948 and 1965, given by Barbara Livenstein in 2017 and displayed in the museum's jewellery gallery. The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis holds a silver cuff incised with cave figures, made in the 1950s, and a pair of cuff links of about 1950.