An Anish Kapoor on your finger? A Louise Bourgeois hanging on the lapel of a jacket? A François Morellet around your neck? Artists sometimes find themselves competing with jewelers. Except that their creations are as much adornment as miniature sculpture. “Architects think in terms of volume, bring audacity, monumentality, renew the genre”praises Esther de Beaucé, founder of the Parisian gallery MiniMasterpiece.
Artists sometimes resort to poor materials, gestures forbidden in the eyes of fine jewelry and heretical techniques, like Jacqueline de Jong’s dried potato and yellow gold necklace, offered for 10,000 euros at MiniMasterpiece.
There is nothing minor or marginal about this tiny art. Modern artists have always made jewelry for their companions and friends, before collaborating on a more sophisticated scale with goldsmiths such as François Hugo or Giancarlo Montebello. Picasso thus converted his earthenware dishes into sumptuous jewelry, Salvador Dali declined his soft watches and other obsessions into minis.
Artist’s jewelry has managed to escape the opprobrium that has long hit jewelry, depreciated by moralists who saw in it only base coquetry and artifice, if not vice. “An artist’s jewel is not ostentatious like a river of diamonds, we cannot necessarily guess its value”, insists Esther de Beaucé. The “Medusa” exhibition, organized in 2017 at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, demolished clichés, reminding us that contemporary artist jewelry is ambiguous and often transgressive.
A quality claimed by the publishing house Le Buisson, which offers, online and at the Parisian gallery Loeve & Co, creations by Théo Mercier, Julien Carreyn, Jean-Luc Verna and Mrzyk & Moriceau, between 290 and 6,500 euros. . “Our particularity is that we do not publish icons of an artist in reduction, as one could have a reduction of a child’s chair, but independent proposals which constitute a work, therefore the name of the artist does not stand out like a neon sign displaying a brand”, specifies Francis Fichot, co-founder of the house, with the late Michèle Monory.
Soaring for the big names
More exclusive than a work of art, artist jewelry is also much more accessible, between 650 and 38,000 euros at MiniMasterpiece. At her fellow Londoner Louisa Guinnessit costs 3,200 pounds sterling excluding tax (3,687 euros) for a unique earring from the very facetious David Shrigley.
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