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.
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,...
Miss America, royal weddings, red carpets, Madonna – they all have their tiara moments. But my personal favorite happened on Friday Night Lights, the TV series about high school football in small-town Texas. In a second-season episode, quarterback Matt Saracen accepts a postal delivery at the poverty-level tract house he shares with his grandmother,...
Buying antique or vintage jewelry means first figuring out what it is, where and when it was made, and by whom. That’s why the first thing an experienced buyer will do is hold a piece up to a loupe and examine it for hallmarks. If jewelry has hallmarks and they appear authentic, identifying its...
