Ln October 20, 1942, Peggy Guggenheim inaugurated her gallery in New York called Art of this Century. This pioneer, collector and patron who left her mark on 20th century arte century, chose to wear mismatched earrings to “manifest [s]on impartiality between surrealism and abstract art”. On one side, an oil as mysterious as it is microscopic painted by Yves Tanguy. On the other, a small 8 cm × 16 cm mobile made of brass and silver threads, signed Alexander Calder.
Calder’s pair, Peggy Guggenheim will wear it often. In the photos taken in Venice, New York or London, it is not uncommon to see his face framed by these two mobiles playing with light and movement. The art of recycling, the play of balances, the pleasure of curves and rounded shapes: Calder’s jewelery – 1,800 pieces, the vast majority of which are offered to his relatives – is part of the same plastic vocabulary as his sculpted work.
Silversmithing and artistic creation have long been intertwined until the 16the century painters and sculptors began to be considered as artists, while goldsmiths remained craftsmen. In the XXe century, a rapprochement takes place at the same time as art and fashion are linked, notably through Elsa Schiaparelli. Close to the surrealists, the Italian gives all her fantasy to jewellery, in particular launching Plexiglas earrings and collaborating with Cocteau, Dalí or Man Ray…
vehicle of emotion
But, in the department of artists’ jewelry, it is another of his collaborators who plays a decisive role. Self-taught goldsmith, François Hugo (great-grandson of Victor) will create for the greatest – Max Ernst, Derain, Picasso… Often unique pieces, intended for their loved ones and sometimes, more rarely, very limited editions (those that do not are not out of print and are still stamped with the name Ateliers Hugo).
With these jewels, then, sculptures are invented to wear where the carats and the stones are less important than the creative gesture and the form, vehicle of emotion. In 1919, legend has it that Man Ray took out of a dustbin a large strip of turned paper, the shape of which pleased him. This “object of affection”, accredited by some as the first mobile sculpture, will become the subject of a photograph (lampshade, 1920), then the prototype of a suspension in corrugated iron produced in several copies in the 1960s and, finally, by changing scale, earrings.
It is these brushed gold spirals that we find worn by Catherine Deneuve in a series of photographs taken in the artist’s studio in Paris in 1968. We see the face of the actress framed by these massive pendants pending. On the chessboard table, in the foreground, Deneuve looks pensively at a very large old book transformed by Man Ray into a jewelry box. The opportunity to recall what could be an advertising slogan, but is also, oddly, a truth: each jewel tells a story. In this case, here, an unknown part of the history of art.
