Lalique and Picasso were one of the early makers, and now many contemporary designers are creating their own versions.
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In November 2020, Emily Waterfall, head of Bonhams' Los Angeles jewelry department, knew she was dealing with something special when she found herself in a private storage room surrounded by Byron (Byron) and local couple Jill Crawford (Jill Crawford) own thousands of jewels who have been dedicated to collecting for 40 years.
"The first work I opened was Picasso's Great Beast," Ms. Waterfall said.
Like his artists Alexander Calder, Salvador Dali and Man Ray, Pablo Picasso also ventured into the field of jewelry. To make the Grand Faune pendant, Picasso collaborated with goldsmith François Hugo, who immortalized the naughty face of half man and half goat with 23 carats of gold. These people produced 20 works, one of which (No. 7) belonged to Crawfords.
In mid-October, the pendant was sold for $62,813 in "Wearable Art: Jewels from the Crawford Collection". This is a noteworthy Bonhams auction featuring 314 pieces of some of the most important 20th century Jewelry from various manufacturers, including modernists Art Smith and Margaret De Patta, Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, and American-born Mexican silver jeweler William Spratling. The auction totaled US$1.7 million, and it was the first single owner collection of the artist’s jewelry exhibited at the auction. Bonhams is already planning to hold its second art jewelry auction next fall.
"I was taken aback by the response I got," Ms. Waterfall said. "But we have just begun."
Ms. Waterfall refers to a growing segment of the jewelry market—sometimes called "art jewelry"—focusing on unique pieces that often (but not always) use non-precious materials to convey meaning .
This category can be traced back at least to the turn of the 20th century, when Art Nouveau master René Lalique challenged the traditional concept of preciousness by incorporating glass and speakers into his works. In recent years, the wave of interest from museum curators, collectors and gallerists, not to mention the ever-growing secondary market, has set its sights on this esoteric niche market.
Sienna Patti, the founder of a contemporary jewelry gallery of the same name in Lenox, Massachusetts, explained part of the motivation behind art jewelry as a collective pursuit of authenticity. "The younger generation wants something that feels real," she said. "Buying mass-produced things doesn't feel very appealing."
Recently, cultural arbitrators have stimulated this interest, such as the producer of "American Craft", the new episode of the PBS series began airing on November 4, and institutions such as the Cincinnati Museum of Art, where an exhibition titled Great: Artists and Jewelers of the 1960s and 1970s" exhibition will last until February 6.
The easiest way for art lovers to understand this category may be through works like "The Great Beast", which is a classic example of how good artists "use different media to express themselves", said Louisa Guinness, who is in London Representatives of the gallery, as she described, “painters and sculptors involved in the jewelry field” include 20th-century artists such as Picasso, Calder and Max Ernst, as well as Anish Kapoor and Anthony Ge Contemporary manufacturers such as Murray and Ed Rusha.
"Calder is'get' in this world," Ms. Guinness said. She specifically pointed out that the American sculptor is a rare artist who makes jewelry by himself, rather than outsourcing the manufacturing work to a workshop.
"He always has a pair of pliers in his pocket," she said. "You will stay at his house, he will attack the silver drawer, and there will be a beautiful brooch waiting for you, with his initials on it. He made 1,800 pieces of silver or brass, all of which are It is well archived by his foundation."
Ms. Guinness said that when she opened her own gallery in 2003, she made a conscious decision to focus on outstanding artists who crossed into the jewelry industry, albeit in a short time. "I want to be famous for one thing," she said.
"That being said, I am now almost 20 years old, and I have changed a little bit," she added. "I hold an exhibition every Christmas, I will choose the artist's jeweler, not the jeweler's artist. But I will only buy or represent people who make one-off or limited editions."
Ms. Guinness is not the only one who has a new open mind to the concept that jewelers are artists.
Cynthia Amnéus, chief curator of the Cincinnati Museum of Art and curator of fashion, art and textiles, said: “The museum has just realized the artistry of jewelry making.”
Take the 120 or so items displayed in the museum’s “Simply Brilliant” exhibition as an example. The exhibition is based on Kimberly Klosterman’s 1960s and 1970s jewelry collection. The Cincinnati native said she found out that she was The love of independent jewelers of the era - including Andrew Grima, Gilbert Albert, Arthur King, Jean Vendome and Barbara Anton - at the time she participated in the Soviet Union in London in the mid-1990s. Forby's jewelry course.
"At that time, it was not easy to find jewelry from an artist's jeweler," Ms. Klosterman recalled. "The art fair didn't show it at all. I would find fragmentary parts and buy them from what some dealers called "big and ugly boxes." I tried to rescue them before they were scrapped."
Although the jewelers attracted by Ms. Klosterman did enjoy commercial and critic success in their time (for example, Grima was Princess Margaret’s favorite), their use of traditional materials such as gold Their artistic vision is secondary. They often try to evoke nature by texturing the metal and avoiding the use of diamonds, instead using unusual and occasionally primitive gem materials.
“When you read interviews with these artists, they first talk about themselves as artists, and secondly they are jewelers,” Ms. Amnus said.
Melanie C. Grant, a London editor, stylist and author of "Coveted: The Art and Innovation of Fine Jewelry," tells it that the historical gap between the two worlds is narrowing.
"In the 2020s, you will see many outstanding jewelry artists who work with interesting materials," Ms. Grant said. "This has reached a climax. Galleries and collectors, as the vitality of art, actually treat it as art for entertainment."
She mentioned some of the most popular and collectible jewelers on the market, including Joel Arthur Rosenthal, also known as JAR, an American based in Paris, who initially " Things made with colors, proportions and textures have changed the possibilities of many designers," she said.
New York jeweler James Taffin de Givenchy; Hong Kong-based jeweler and jeweler Wallace Chan; Munich-based family brand Hemmerle; Jacqueline Rabun, “a modern minimalist living in Los Angeles ", also topped Ms. Grant's list.
In contrast, contemporary studio jewelers, unlike the high-end jewelers mentioned above, use ready-made objects and mediocre materials to tell stories about themselves and the world around them.
"They will use wood, shells, or many things that have no intrinsic value," said Susan, founder and chairman of the board of directors of the non-profit Art Jewelry Forum and co-author of the book "In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture" published in 2020. Cummins (Susan Cummins) said. . "The value of this work comes from their ideas or the skills to make it. "
She listed the names of several well-received artists, including Gijs Bakker from the Netherlands; Joyce Scott, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, based in Baltimore; Dorothea Prühl He is a talented woodcarver from Germany, famous for his dramatic nature-inspired necklaces.
Many experts in this category also cited Lola Brooks of Atlanta, whose work occupies both the precious world and the conceptual world. "She's playing with the saccharine, nostalgia and sentimentality of the jewelry," Ms. Patty said. "Her works can be very large or very small, and often have a sense of humor, but she uses traditional techniques."
The unifying thread among all these different studio jewelers is that they want to give meaning to their work, which often leads to bold personalized jewelry that ignores traditional aesthetic ideals and sometimes even basic knowledge of wear resistance.
Their jewelry has "political and sociological content-they deal with gender, race, and gender issues," Tony Greenbaum, a New York art historian and author of "The Messenger of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960" Toni Greenbaum) said. "Their jewelry has other meanings besides being used as accessories."
Not surprisingly, the customers of these works are not typical jewelry buyers.
"My clients are not interested in fashion or trends," said Lisa M. Berman, a contemporary art jewelry advocate and gallery owner in Laguna Beach, California, and her Sculpture to Wear reservation showroom is hosting pop-ups across Southern California Shops and events. "They are wealthy and travel a lot. They are interested in using a piece of jewelry to convey nonverbal messages."
Compared with traditional high-end jewelry, the price of art jewelry is much cheaper. "You can buy a very good piece of art jewelry for less than $5,000," Ms. Cummins said. "And you can buy many of the greatest jewelers in the field for between $20,000 and $25,000."
In order to become familiar with this category, experts recommend that newcomers read books, visit the Art Jewelry Forum website, and follow the artist on Instagram. They also suggested participating in art and design fairs, such as Salon Art + Design in New York; European Art Fairs in Maastricht, the Netherlands and New York, better known as TEFAF; and Design Miami.
However, for practical education, nothing can compare to seeing it in person. In the United States, the Ornamentum in Hudson, New York, and Ms. Patty's Massachusetts Gallery are highly regarded. The same is true for Atta Gallery in Bangkok and the Fingers and The National in New Zealand.
In Europe, Galerie Marzee in Nijmegen, a Dutch city about 90 minutes southeast of Amsterdam, is widely regarded as the world's best contemporary art jewelry display place. The gallery was founded by Marie-José van den Hout in 1979 and is distributed over four floors, one of which is dedicated to displaying approximately 2,000 works from the personal collection of Ms. van den Hout.
"It's not commercial. It's hard for you to make a living from this kind of jewelry," Ms. Vandenhout said. "Sometimes people will say,'Why don't you sell simpler jewelry?' But to me, it's not that interesting."