Most of us know by now that Dali, Calder, even Picasso designed jewelry at some point. But Frank Stella?
The artist who passed away on May 4, 2024, was known for painting, sculpting and printmaking. Jewelry making, not so much. Before Picasso to Koons went up at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2011, most people didn’t know he designed jewelry. They probably didn’t know Damien Hirst and Yoko Ono tried their hands at jewelry design either.
But Diane Venet knew. Wife of sculptor Bernar Venet, Diane Venet frequently found herself in the company of contemporary art icons. When she discovered some of them had designed jewelry, she began to collect it, passionately. If she came across an artist who had never created jewelry, she attempted to convince them to try.
Much of the jewelry that resulted from this was a delight and a surprise. Some was forgettable. Some was the kind of jewelry made by conceptual artists who don’t respect the medium as an end in itself.
As Audrey Friedman, owner of Primavera Gallery and collector of jewelry by Dalí and Calder, once told me: “A lot of artists have the idea that because they’re artists, because they’re sculptors, they should do things that are weird, difficult to wear, outsized. I say, if you’re going to make jewelry, make jewelry that can be worn and that doesn’t make the wearer look absurd.”
It’s true that some of the jewelry in Venet’s collection could be called a failure of the form-follows-function rule. The Frank Stella pieces in the exhibit were an interesting case in point – a solid effort, recognizably Stella, visually provocative. But did they work as jewelry?
Before Venet showed up to take me through the exhibition, I was staring at this 11-inch-wide neck piece from different angles, trying to figure out how it was worn. It’s a giant bow with no visible means of securing to the neck. At first, it looked like it might have been assembled as a choker, like if you pulled those curved wires free on both sides, it might hook behind the neck, but then at the last minute, the artist turned it into a bow. (It would have made a stunning pendant on a choker wire.)
So I asked Venet. Her answer was that it was what it appeared to be: a wire sculpture with no means of attachment. But it didn’t sound like Stella approached the project casually. And it didn’t really look that way either.
Viewers familiar with Stella’s sculpture will recognize the curves formed by the wire from full-size pieces like Memantra in the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In the end, maybe Stella was more interested in creating a small version of his iconic sculpture than in producing easily-worn jewelry.
Venet says she begged him for years to make a piece for her collection, first directly and then through her husband, fellow sculptor and a friend of Stella’s.
The artist was, she says, flat out not interested. Then one day when the Venets were visiting, he produced this piece from a drawer and presented it to Diane Venet as a gift. She was thrilled.
Diane Venet is a beautiful woman with that Parisian instinct that allows her to pull off just about anything and make it look chic. I’m sure the Stella neck piece is no exception. But when she told me she wears it on a black turtleneck, the image that came to mind was the oversized bowtie of a clown. Was Stella being tongue-in-cheek? Yet the central motif, viewed up close, is not at all casually done: a lovely piece of three-dimensional sculpture made sparkly by painting metal with gold.
The bottom line is that when you convince Frank Stella to make a piece of wearable art, you take what you get. And, in Venet’s case, you wear it with pride.
A second piece by Stella is a polished gold ring, of which five were produced. I had seen photos but was surprised to see how enormous it was firsthand, more than three inches long and quite bulky.
When I asked Venet if it was wearable, I could tell by her smile that it falls into the category of wearable in the loose sense. As in, yes, she manages to lug it through an evening on her finger. And I’m sure it makes an excellent conversation starter.
“You wear nothing else,” she said, in her Parisian accent. “Maybe just a simple black dress. And you keep your hand here.” She put her left hand on her right shoulder, and posed for a moment gazing sideways, then laughed.
Obviously, half the fun for Venet was finding a way to wear these pieces – and then wearing them with aplomb. It’s not so different from what Peggy Guggenheim did with Alexander Calder’s jewelry a few decades earlier.
Picasso to Koons: The Artist as Jeweler was on display through January 8, 2012, at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City.
Related posts:
Jewelry by Picasso: the secret stash of Dora Maar