Brooch by Georges Braque (collection Diane Venet)

When most people think of Modern art, they picture Picasso’s jangled portraits, Alexander Calder’s giant mobiles, or Salvador Dalí’s surrealist dreamscapes. But all of these artists designed jewelry as well. So did several others who were well-known artists in the ’50s and ’60s.

Much of it was innovative, some quite beautiful. Yet, of the millions who line up in museums every year to admire 20th-century artists, few ever see their wearable art.

If y ou can make it to Barcelona in the next three months, you’ll have a rare opportunity to much of it in one place when Jewelry by Artists: From Modernism to the Avant-Garde opens tomorrow in Barcelona at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Among the jewels on view will be works by Auguste Rodin, Hector Guimard, Josep Hoffmann, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso.

Tete à Cornes, 23kt gold, by Max Ernst

In the 1960s, the boundaries between fine art and craft were blurring, and artists of all kinds were experimenting with various media. Both Picasso and Ernst designed limited production jewelry lines in collaboration with French goldsmith François Hugo. Using iconic images from their paintings, Hugo produced limited sets of numbered and signed pieces, and packed them in fitted wooden boxes with the images lithographed on the lid.

Decades later, it was discovered that Picasso had experimented with jewelry well before that, in a more private and impulsive way. The work he produced with Hugo was a commercial effort, capitalizing on a trend.

One of the first to find and market those boxed pieces in the U.S. was Joan Sonnabend, who ran a Manhattan gallery of artist-made jewelry from 1972 to 1975. Sculpture to Wear was tucked into the famous Plaza hotel, which Sonnabend’s husband owned at the time.

Le Grand Faune of 23kt gold by Pablo Picasso (collection Diane Venet)

The gallery helped foster a new appreciation and demand for jewelry made by artists of the day, both established and unknown. Some, like the young and then-unknown Robert Lee Morris, went on to become famous for jewelry rather than fine art.

When Sculpture to Wear opened, the artists she featured were alive and productive, including Picasso, Calder, Ernst, and Man Ray. Though legendary even then, they did not produce the overwhelming demand (and astronomical prices) that every napkin scribble by Picasso inspires today.

Sonnabend, who also sold modern paintings and sculpture, soon found that art jewelry, even jewelry made by famous artists like Picasso, was a hard sell. “It was a tough battle for years,” she told me. “There was no market for it. I had to create a market.”

Given the limited amount of name-artist jewelry, she had to search aggressively. “Picasso made jewelry mostly for friends; it’s not like he was pumping it out,” she explains. “Max Ernst produced somewhat more, but only in editions of six. These were not jewelry designers, after all. They were painters who also made jewelry—with the exception of a few young people like Morris, who was very inventive in those days.”

Brooch of enamel on sterling by Roy Lichtenstein, c. 1968 (collection Diane Venet)

What she couldn’t find, she solicited. “I was already selling painting, sculpture, and drawings. So, as I was traveling around seeing art, I’d say to the artist, ‘Why don’t you make a piece of jewelry for me?’ I figured, why shouldn’t we have art we can wear? It wasn’t about diamonds, you understand, it was about aesthetics.”

While artists who handed over their designs to professional goldsmiths were producing jewelry in traditional precious metals, others whose work Sonnabend carried were experimenting in rubber and plastic.  Even pop artist Roy Lichtenstein designed a series of pin/pendants that he had professionally enameled.

Alexander Calder is one of the few artists featured in the Barcelona exhibit who actually made his jewelry, mostly in brass and silver—materials similar to those used in his sculpture. “Like many artists, especially sculptors, jewelry served as a model, almost, for larger pieces,” says Toni Greenbaum, a specialist in Modernist jewelry. “That was certainly true of Calder.”

Gloria Leiberman, director of Skinner’s jewelry department, has sold jewelry by Picasso and Ernst, as well the French painter André Derian, “They were all very similar: plaques and faces,” she says. “They were all trying their hands, but they were not jewelers. They were painters and sculptors. I think that their jewelry is very interesting to the collector of works by those artists but not as beautiful pieces of jewelry.”

Alexander Calder's brass The Jealous Husband necklace, c. 1949 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Greenbaum points out, however, that the goldsmith-made work still bears the mark of the artists who designed it. Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Georges Braque “really worked on their jewelry,” she says. “They worked symbiotically with the artisans who made it. So the hand of the artisan was an extension of the artist. It was only done that way because you need skills to work specific materials. Picasso, Braque and Dalí were not skilled metalsmiths, whereas Calder was.”

But the wearable experiments of the 20th century’s most famous artists brought new respect to jewelry as an art form. “They lent it relevance,” says Leiberman. “This was a body of work by well-established artists, not jewelers.” Some would also say they paved the way for celebrity jewelry designers, Picasso’s granddaughter Paloma being one. “Paloma is still mainstream jewelry,” Leiberman says. “If her name wasn’t Picasso and she wasn’t working for Tiffany, I don’t know. It makes people think, ‘Oh, we have artist-designed jewelry.’ ”

One thing is certain: the concept found a receptive audience. “The artist-designed jewelry trend uncovered a niche in the market,” says Leiberman. To some degree, that niche turned into a demand for both big-name designers and unique, self-expressive jewelry—and it’s been growing ever since.

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“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 Dalí: A Study of his Art-in-Jewels. “My jewels are a protest against emphasis upon the cost of the materials of jewelry.

“My object is to show the jeweler’s art in true perspective – where the design and craftsmanship are to be valued above the material worth of the gems, as in Renaissance times.”

Dali had everything to do with the design but little to do with the craftsmanship of his jewels. Like most Modern artists who experimented with jewelry, he relied on others for that – specifically, New York goldsmith Carlos Alemany. (Alexander Calder was a notable exception, making all his jewelry by hand.)

But Dali personally selected the stones: rubies to represent energy, sapphires tranquility and lapis lazuli the subconscious mind. His early attempts produced striking, bejeweled translations of his surrealist paintings: hearts bursting open and dripping blood, eyes weeping and melting, sensuous lips.

Eye of Time brooch. "Man cannot escape or change his time. The eye sees the present and the future." -Dali

Years later, Dali produced an uninspired series of commemorative medallions for operas which were widely copied. “Dali’s jewelry is a mixed bag,” Joan Sonnabend told me in 2000. “Those extraordinary early pieces are rare and hard to find.” Sonnabend helped create the demand for artist-made jewelry in the early ’70s at Sculpture to Wear, the Manhattan gallery where she sold jewels by famous artists, including Picasso. Dali was one artist whose work she avoided. “The world was flooded with phony Dalis,” she said.

Ruby and diamond "Honeycomb Heart" brooch and matching earrings sold at Sotheby's in 2006

Dalí was a prolific jewelry designer by the time that 1959 catalog was published for the Owen Cheatham Foundation. “Though many of Dali’s jewels would also amuse the most surfeited, others startle with a note that is not common in such expensive objects, for they explode with agony,” wrote the late A. Hyatt Major, then curator of prints for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the foreword. “Crystals pierce; rubies bleed.”

Mae West's come-hither smile inspired this 1949 brooch. "Poets of the ages, of all lands, write of ruby lips and teeth like pearls." -Dali (photo courtesy Primavera Gallery)

Before he began designing his own opulent jewels, Dali had already impacted avant-garde fashion and costume jewelry. Elsa Schiaperelli was a big fan of Dali and the Surrealist movement, which noticeably influenced her own designs in the 1930s and 1940s.

Schiaparelli commissioned Dali’s earliest  jewelry, including his telephone ear “rings.”  During this period, he designed his heart brooch dripping ruby blood and a melting-eye watch.

Dali’s fabulous mid-century jewels have always brought good prices and their value is rising as the work he produced later in his career attracts more serious attention. (Until recently, most of what Dali created after 1940 was panned by critics.) In 1995, a Dali Starfish piece with an unsigned drawing sold for $170,000 at Christies. Two years later, the Dali museum in Figueras, Spain, opened a permanent collection of his jewelry.

Among the exhibits highlighting Dali’s jewelry this year, Salvador Dalí: The Late Work opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in August and runs through January 9, 2011, the first major museum exhibit devoted specifically to work the Spanish artist created after Dalí split with the Surrealists in the late 1930s.

Dali’s surrealistic jewels also appear in Jewelries by artist: From Modernisme to the avant-garde opening October 27 at Barcelona’s Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

His Starfish brooch (right) was among the nine Dali jewels featured in “Surreal Things”  at the Art Gallery of Ontario last summer. Each arm of the pearl, diamond, ruby and emerald pin is articulated to wrap around hand and fingers.

A signed watercolor sketch for Dali’s “Etoile de Mer” series sold at Christie’s last year for $47,500, on an estimate of $10-15,000, and a set of ruby- and diamond-encrusted bleeding heart brooch and earrings (above right) were estimated at $200,000 at Sotheby’s in 2006.

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Dali's 1950 "Etoile de Mer" design sold at Christie's 2009 Rare Jewels and Objets d'Art sale for $47,500.

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Woman of the Oulid Nails, ca. 1880, wearing jewels and a "khamsa" pendant (Etienne and Louis Neurdein, Algeria)

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 is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Surrounding the jewelry cases are textiles from the region and photographs of the characters who inhabited it in the late 19th and early 20th century. Don’t expect much jewelry in these shots, beyond a couple portraits of women in headdresses, belts and necklaces. But the photos lend a sense of place for the jewelry, most of it displayed for the first time.

One case is devoted to jeweled headbands worn with veils. Nearby are elaborately beaded necklaces bulky enough to double as body armor.

20th-century necklace of silver, coral, enamel, glass, coins, shell, cotton, plastic, buttons from Draa Valley, Morocco

With the exception of a few gold fibulae, most of the jewels are of silver and not-so-precious beads. What stands out are the flamboyant colors and textures – chunky coral and amber beads layered with green-and-gold enamel work and engraved silver from Tiznit, glass, coins, buttons, shells, a few faux rubies.

A lot of what North African women wore, they made themselves. “All kinds of materials were mixed together in these amazing compositions, mostly self-made,” says Enid Schildkrout, curator for the Museum for African Art. “There are specialist silversmiths and goldsmiths but people would often remake the jewelry. If you look closely, you can see these pieces could be taken apart and recombined, the same way people would unravel old textiles and reweave them into something else.

Young girl of North Africa, c. 1870, by unknown photographer

“We tend to think of jewelry as something fixed the way you bought it, but these are very rich assemblages that can be taken apart so even the elements could be traded and valued separately.”

Jewelry has always been the ultimate form of portable wealth, after all. “Jewelry was worn in North Africa for a lot of reasons,” says Schildkrout. “It was worn as a sign of beauty, wealth, status, demarcating whether a woman was married or not married.” (Some things haven’t changed.)

“Women would collect jewelry and wear it but it was also a form of stored wealth because a woman could sell her own jewelry.” A woman’s jewels were a form of protection, she says, both from the poverty of divorce and the ever-present Evil Eye.

An especially potent, protective symbol in North Africa was the hand. One case in the exhibit is filled with jewelry designed around hand-shaped pendants and charms known as khamsa.

Moroccon hand pendant (khamsa) of silver and copper with six-pointed star

“In the image of the hand, or  khamsa, the five fingers relate to the five pillars of Islam,” Schildkrout says. “That made it a protective amulet or charm.”

And yet, at least one silver khamsa pendant here is covered with Hebrew inscriptions. A lot of the silversmiths who made these jewels were Jews, Schildkrout explains, many of whom came to Morocco during the period when the Muslims ruled Spain.

It’s just one example of the merging of cultures that makes North Africa such an exotic and mysterious place. Kind of makes sense that a Hermès would find this stuff so inspiring, doesn’t it?

Fibula, c. late 19th century, of silver, enamel and coral from Algeria

Desert Jewels: North African Jewelry and Photography from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermès Collection, organized by the Museum for African Art in New York, opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on September 4 and runs through December 5.

All images here are courtesy of Karen L. Willis/Museum for African Art

                          

You’ll also get a chance to meet and greet Cornelia Goldsmith who will be showing luscious new pieces like this necklace:

…and these earrings:

Other jewelry artists who will be showing: Davide Bigazzi, Lukasz Bogucki, and Ann Marie Cianciolo. If that’s not reason enough to head over – and how could it not be? – there will be live entertainment by The Bangles, Modern English, Dave Mason, and Jefferson Starship. (Now there’s a lineup I haven’t seen in a while!) More info on the festival site.

                          

Eva Mendes arrives at the Golden Globe Awards wearing a 1974 Van Cleef & Arpels necklace (photo by Steve Granitz, Getty Images)

Turquoise never looked as glamorous as in the Van Cleef & Arpels “Panka” necklace Eva Mendes wore to this year’s Golden Globe Awards. In 1974, when this necklace was made, the trend for exotic Indian-style jewelry was in full force – and it still looks stunning with a simple white strapless and a really good tan.

What I covet most are those simple gold bracelets made during WWII, when precious gems and metals were in short supply. Limited to 18kt gold – platinum was going to the war effort – and a sharply reduced supply of gems, Van Cleef & Arpels came up with machine-like flexible gold bracelets that reflected the wartime fascination with assembly lines, rods, pistons and tank tracks. They epitomize Retro style and yet look completely contemporary.

If you’ve ever tried on one of Van Cleef & Arpels’ glittering Deco bracelets or examined the invisibly-set gemstone pieces produced during flusher times – well,  you have to give this house props for technical ability (not to mention lavish indulgence). But I’m not a big fan of the big, glitzy floral jewelry that makes up much of Van Cleef & Arpels repertoire, even though it’s very impressive in its way.

You’ll find much of that on display at Tokyo’s Mori Arts Center through January 17th in the Van Cleef & Arpels retrospective, The Spirit of Beauty. Heaven knows, those pieces influenced a lot of fine jewelry design.

Among the gemmier offerings, the multi-purpose pieces are most appealing. An Indian-style emerald-and-diamond necklace in the Tokyo exhibit is a great example.

Made around the same time as the necklace Eva Mende wears above, this one is the kind of thing Elizabeth Taylor would have worn in the late sixties and early seventies, draped over her impressive decolletage. (It actually belonged to Princess Salimah Aga Khan.)

But even Liz was practical in her way, big on reinventing her jewels each time she wore them. Leaf through Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair with Jewelry, and you’ll discover she even wore her necklaces as headdresses. She would have appreciated the fact that this one separates into two bracelets and a pendant.

After all, if you’re going to invest millions in jewelry like this, you might as well get some wear out of it.

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