MAD About Jewelry – The Beauty of Art Nouveau
The most outstanding collection of jewelry in French museums can be found in the Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD) in Paris. Of the 7000 pieces in the collection, ranging from Antiquity to the Present, including photographic archives and drawings, about 1200 pieces are on display.
Noted jewelry historian and expert on vintage jewelry, Marie-Laure Cassius-Duranton takes us on a tour of the Art Nouveau section of MAD’s Galerie des Bijoux. She shares her expertise on this colorful period and some of the creators who fashioned these remarkable works of jewelry art.
Noted jewelry historian and expert on vintage jewelry, Marie-Laure Cassius-Duranton takes us on a tour of the Art Nouveau section of MAD’s Galerie des Bijoux. She shares her expertise on this colorful period and some of the creators who fashioned these remarkable works of jewelry art.
The Remarkable Henri Vever
Evelyne Possémé, curator-in-chief of the MAD collection, affirms that the most important contributor of jewels to the Galerie des Bijoux was Henri Vever. He was also one of the main leaders of the Art Nouveau movement, in which Paris played a major role. Vever belonged to a family of jewelers from Germany, who settled in France in 1871. Ten years later, along with his brother Paul, he opened a jewelry store on the Rue de La Paix. Henri was mainly a jeweler and a collector, with many artistic passions, especially for Japanese and Persian art. He was also an art critic and historian and between 1906 and 1908, he wrote the history of French Jewelry of the Nineteenth Century, which remains to this day one of the most indispensable references of French jewelry history. In 1924, Henri Vever offered his entire collection of 19th century French jewelry to the MAD. More than 350 pieces from the First Empire to Art Nouveau—of which 60 were made by the maison Vever itself—represented the crème de la crème of great jewelers such as Morel, Froment-Meurice, Fontenay, Falize, Boucheron, Beaugrand, Wiese and Lalique. Highly representative of the excellence of French jewelry of his time, his collection is the most relevant part of the Galerie des Bijoux collection. Vever’s Sylvia pendant, a spectacular 12-cm high piece, is one of the most famous pieces showcased at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris, winning a “Grand Prix.” The arabesques and hybridization between the insect and the female figure are typical of the Art Nouveau aesthetic. For this Universal Exhibition, the maison Vever also manufactured several highly modern pieces designed by Eugène Grasset such as his impressive and poetic “Daisy” brooch. Lucien Gaillard and Georges Fouquet Lucien Gaillard was particularly involved in Japanese arts both in terms of his subjects and in techniques. This cane pommel featuring a koi carp was carved in wood and enhanced with red and black lacquer. It was offered to the museum in 2018 by L’Ecole, the School of Jewelry Arts with the support of Van Cleef & Arpels. Like Vever, Fouquet commissioned drawings from the best designers of his time, among them Alphonse Mucha and Charles Desrosiers. One of his rings was showcased at the 1900 Universal Exhibition. Fouquet’s jewels are remarkable for their technical perfection, especially in their enamel work thanks to Etienne Tourette, an independent enameler who also worked for Vever. Tourette introduced silvery foils into the last enamel layer before firing the piece. It produces light phenomena comparable to the opal play-of-color, as we see in his Chestnut pendant. Lalique: The Greatest Artist of His Time The major Art Nouveau jeweler—and one of the greatest artists of his time—was René Lalique (1860-1945). The MAD owns the largest collection of Lalique jewelry pieces after the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. Some pieces were acquired by the museum directly from Lalique, while others were donated by various collections including Henri Vever, who admired Lalique greatly. Among his donations, was Lalique’s collection of Japanese art (combs, tsuba, inro). Showcased beside his jewels, these pieces help to understand their importance for his art. He was particularly sensitive to the way Japanese artists represented Nature and their aesthetic principles for composition, space, frame and calligraphy, as in the example of the Facing Roosters pendant, which was inspired by a Japanese tsuba. Lalique was not interested in the value per se of gemstones. Rather, he used them for their visual and artistic qualities, i.e. color, translucency, brightness and texture. He was attracted by light phenomena in gemstones and was particularly fond of opal’s play-of-color, moonstone’s adularescence and star sapphire’s asterism. The artist was also deeply involved in the technical aspects, working out new processes for enamel and glass paste. The “Hazelnut” necklace acquired by MAD at the 1900 Universal Exhibition is probably one of his most outstanding examples. It evokes a nocturnal sky lit by moonlight and seen through the branches of a hazelnut tree. The sky is made of blue glass cabochon; the leaves are in plique-à-jour enamel; and a new technique of mat enamel for the fibrous husk texture, which was invented by Lalique. One of Evelyne Possémé’s favorite Lalique pieces is the “Peacock” brooch acquired by the museum in 1899 from the artist at the “Salon des artistes français.” One reason is that “the artist provided the possibility to unscrew the brooch fastening system allowing the jewel to exist without the body, to be showcased as a work of art in itself,” comments the curator. Lalique’s jewels are not only admirable because of their strong design, but also because of their symbolism and sometimes personal meaning. The bat ring is an interesting example. Donated to the MAD in 1966 by Laura Dreyfus-Barney, his "Bat" ring was a love gift from Liane de Pougy to Laura’s sister Natalie. Liane de Pougy, a famous dancer and courtesan of the Belle Epoque, fell in love with Natalie Clifford-Barney, an openly gay American poetess. Inside the ring, Liane de Pougy had engraved an intimate love message to Natalie, who was a great admirer of Sappho's poetry. The choice of the bat and the moonstone is particularly relevant in relation to the poetess character as Natalie was reputed to live at night, causing Liane to nickname her “Moonbeam.” Fascinating Bats
The bat is an intriguing animal that evokes many meanings. In China, it is a symbol of happiness (it’s the same word), of carnal love and longevity. In the Western world, its significance is more ambiguous. In the Middle Ages, the small mammal was part of the Devil's iconography. At the end of the 19th century, largely due to Bram Stocker's successful novel Dracula (1897), the bat became the symbol of vampires. Like the vampire, the bat is awake at night, sleeps during the day and some species feed on blood. The bat is also the symbol of melancholy. Starting with the Renaissance, the meaning of melancholy was ambivalent. A mental disorder that could lead to depression, it was also the source of creative genius. The greatest artists were melancholic. In 1892, Robert de Montesquiou, the famous dandy who inspired the character of the Baron de Charlus in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, published a collection of poems called Bats in reference to melancholy and the night, an engine of poetic fantasy. The association of the bat with blue enamel (blue is also the color of melancholy) and a heart-shaped moonstone on Lalique’s bat ring makes perfect sense. On a grander scale, Lalique designed a bat-inspired decoration in 1900 for his showcase at the Universal Exhibition. A truly great jeweler, Lalique decided at the zenith of his career to dedicate himself to glass work, for which he would become equally famous. For a more detailed article on the MAD by Marie-Laure Cassius-Duranton, which appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of InColor, click here. All photos are by Jean Tholance,
courtesy of the MAD. |
In France in the late 1890s, the ideological fight between Fine Arts and Decorative Arts reached its climax. The Academy of Fine Arts traditionally considered Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as the “Major Arts.” Decorative Arts were considered as “Minor Arts” because of their association with industry and their practical and useful aspects. They were thus relegated to the bottom of the Art hierarchical scale.
One of the main proponents of appreciating the importance of the decorative arts was Henri Vever (1854-1942), who fought tirelessly against these “ridiculous classifications of the Art hierarchy” and for the recognition of “Industrial Art.” This “fight” soon involved the support of not only artists, but also collectors, politicians, curators, critics and art historians, who deeply believed in having beauty in everyday life and in the intrinsic bond between art and function. Gradually, they won the battle. In 1891, Applied Arts were admitted to the “Salon” of the “Société nationale des Beaux-Arts” and, in 1895, to the “Salon” of the “Société des artistes français.” And, thanks to the efforts of Léonce Bénédite and Emile Molinier, a part of the Louvre, the most iconic museum in France, was dedicated in 1893 to MAD collections. It was a bold decision for the time. The MAD Galerie des Bijoux houses the largest collection of French Art Nouveau jewels. The term Art Nouveau came from Siegfried-Samuel Bing, an art dealer of German origin, who spent time in China and Japan. In 1895, he opened a gallery in Paris and called it La Maison de l’Art Nouveau, in keeping with the new taste of the era that mixed Chinese and Japanese works of art with Western contemporary pieces. Between 1888 and 1891, Bing published Le Japon artistique, a highly important revue that was a main inspiration for the new art. Although the Art Nouveau period occupied a very short time in art history, it was one of the most fruitful for French jewelry and decorative arts. References
-https://madparis.fr/francais/musees/musee-des-arts-decoratifs/parcours/galerie-thematique/galerie-des-bijoux/ -Evelyne Possémé, Vever, in Kenneth Snowman (edited by), Master Jewelers, Thames & Hudson, 1990 -Evelyne Possémé & Dominique Forest, La Collection de bijoux du MAD Paris, ADAGP, 2004 -Evelyne Possémé & Patrick Mauriès, Flora, the Art of Jewelry, published with the support of L’Ecole the School of Jewelry Arts (Van Cleef & Arpels), Thames & Hudson, 2017. |