Since the beginning of time, it’s been used as a symbol of mortality, victory, the ultimate Memento Mori. Long before Nazis turned the death-head into a symbol of fear and bikers and rockers a charm for cheating death, the skull represented the contemplation of eternity. In Elizabethan England, it was an emblem of bawds,...
While musicians and poets were rebelling against the status quo in Greenwich Village in the mid-20th century, metalsmiths like Art Smith and Sam Kramer were setting up studios there and reinventing modern jewelry. Many people picture Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac or Bob Dylan when they think of Greenwich Village in its artistic heyday. Mad Men...
Picasso, Max Ernst, Georges Braque, Salvador Dali and Man Ray all designed jewelry, as did a surprising number of other 20th-century sculptors and painters. Much of it goes on display this week in Barcelona.
Under Toussaint's guidance in the 1930s, Cartier began to move away from abstract Deco designs and into figurative work: lacquered ladybugs, exotic birds and her signature, the panther. One of her famous panther bracelets that once belonged to the Duchess of Windsor may fetch $2 million at Christie's NY today.
The glamorous Belperron was a celebrity designer in her day, her jewelry worn by Colette, Frank Sinatra, Diana Vreeland and the Duchess of Windsor. A glance through the Belperron pieces up for sale this week offer a nice overview of her distinctive and timeless style.
It seems only natural that so many women design jewelry. After all, it’s primarily women who wear it—which may explain why female designers often bring a unique sensitivity to form-and-function. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that fifty years ago, jewelry was a male-dominated field, and a century ago, a gifted female designer counted herself...
Jewelry designed by Salvador Dali is the hot ticket these days at auction and museums. Three major exhibits are spotlighting the jeweled versions of his surrealism this year. “My art encompasses physics, mathematics, architecture, nuclear science – the psycho-nuclear, the mystico-nuclear – and jewelry – not paint alone,” Dali wrote in the 1959 catalog...
It’s the kind of jewelry you might find in a Moroccan street market or on a well-dressed belly dancer: colorful, exotic layers that clink and jangle as the wearer moves. Xavier Guerrand-Hermès, a director of the Paris-based fashion empire, spent three decades collecting North African jewelry and photography, and the creme of his collection...
What happens to jewelry abandoned in safety deposit boxes? Apparently, some of it ends up at auction. A portion of the 1,000 or so lots going on the block Thursday at Doyle New York come from the Puerto Rico-based Banco Popular. Most of the interesting stuff appears to come from more conventional sources, however, including...
Bakelite jewelry can look a lot like modern resin, but the earliest attempts at plastic didn’t look so plastic. Celluloid was invented, in 1868, with the greenest of intentions – to replace ivory and tortoiseshell. And it had to be hand-carved because it didn’t take a mold well. Bakelite, the first entirely synthetic plastic,...
