Marjan Unger


Marianne de Boer, later known as Marjan Unger, was a Dutch art historian. She acquired a public reputation as the author of a standard work on Dutch jewelry and as a jewelry collector.

Life and work

Early life and education

Marianne de Boer was born into an entrepreneurial family, as she likes to remind people exactly nine months after :nl:Bevrijding van de Duitse bezetting in Nederland|the liberation. She was born and grew up at Bussum, a small town located between Amsterdam and Utrecht, and close to the southern part of the Zuiderzee. Marianne was one of three children in the family: her father was a contractor for the hydraulic engineering sector. At school she excelled in Mathematics. She studied Industrial Design at the Arts and Crafts Academy in Amsterdam between 1964 and 1967, but never completed her course. It was here that she met the artist-designer Gerard Unger whom she married in 1968. At the academy she suffered terribly from headaches which were diagnosed provisionally as "migraine-related". The academy was housed in a brand new building with modern plastic ceilings, carpet block flooring and a permanent smell of "paint" in the air. Ten years later it would be determined that the headaches were part of an allergic reaction to the chemical gases given off by the exotic materials used in the interior construction of the modern academy building.
Marjan Unger's drive to find out everything about art remained undimmed, and after the birth of Flora, the couple's daughter, she again became a student, studying art history at the University of Amsterdam between 1974 and 1987. She combined this with a teaching job at the Amsterdam Fashion Academy of which she became a director in 1973 and where, according to her husband she brought about a change of culture by attracting guest-lecturers from industry. Unger left the Amsterdam academy in 1977, but teaching was a recurring theme throughout her career. She later taught both at the Rotterdam Art Academy and, between 1982 and 2006, at the Rietveld Academie.

Early career

A compulsive communicator, between 1980 and 1989 Unger was editor in chief of "Bijvoorbeeld", a magazine focusing on creative and applied arts which according to one admirer she "transformed from a rather dusty magazine into a lively and critical periodical". In 1995 she took a position at Amsterdam's ":de:Sandberg Instituut|Sandberg Institute", teaching a post graduate course on what she termed "Vrije vormgeving" which placed her at the heart of a rapidly shifting three-way interface between art, design and commerce.
It was around 1995 that Marjan Unger's passion for jewelry came to the fore. She launched herself on more than a decade of intensive research. She also began to build up a jewelry collection of her own, many of her purchases consciously supporting younger innovative designers working outside the mainstream jewelry industry. She did not hesitate, on occasion, to wear one of her more unconventional pieces, giving rise to "how do you dare wear that?" reactions. In 2002 Unger organised the "Zonder wrijving geen glans" jewelry exhibition at the Utrecht Art Museum, which provided a showcase for her findings on the - till now little researched or chronicled - Dutch jewelry industry during the first two thirds of the twentieth century.
Her first book appeared two years later. "Het Nederlandse sieraad in de 20ste eeuw", published in 2004, dealt with the Dutch jewelry business during the twentieth century, thereby filling a perceived gap in the academic literature. It might be described as a "bulky standard work". She also agreed to produce a new arts magazine aimed at arts students. Roughly 20,000 copies appeared twice yearly between 2004 and 2008 under the title "Morf", and provided a mixture of old and new texts giving wider context for Unger's lectures, and those of colleagues.

Later career

Continuing with her researches led to the award of her doctorate from Leiden University on 17 March 2010. Her dissertation was entitled "Sieraad in context, een multidisciplinair kader voor de beschouwing van het sieraad".
At the same time as she was completing her doctoral dissertation Marjan Unger and her husband made a substantial donation of 492 pieces of jewelry from her collection to the Dutch National Museum in Amsterdam. The pieces donated included items she had commissioned from known designers but also many pieces produced by unknown artists from outside the jewelry mainstream. Alongside the jewelry collection, items donated also included a large collection of ABBA button-badges and some coin-based jewelry.
Personal tragedy struck in 2012 when the Ungers' only child was killed by cancer. Gerard Unger had by now established himself internationally as a typeface designer as a result of which Flora Unger-Weisfelt is celebrated by an unusual memorial. An "upright sans italic" font was named after her in 1984.
Marjan Unger's second book, "Jewellery Matters", was written jointly with the Rijksmuseum curator Suzanne van Leeuwen and was published in 2017. In 2017 Unger handed over another 200 pieces, described by sources as "the rest of her collection", to the Rijksmuseum. She told an interviewer that this had always been her intention, but the discovery of her incurable metastatic bone cancer had hastened the action.

Publications, a selection