Cultured Magazine

December 2011

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"Sometimes if you invited Alexander Calder over for dinner, he would show up with your initials as a pin." —Diane Venet Clockwise from top left: Art Smith's brass and copper Modern cuff, from Mark Mc- Donald; Salvador Dalí's Perfume pendant necklace from Didier Antiques; A necklace by Anish Kapoor on view at "The Artist as Jeweler" at MAD; Jantje Fleischhut's neck- laces from Ornamentum. Artist-designed jewelry is, of course, smaller, daintier, and infinitely more wearable than its painted and sculpted counterparts. But the historically underappreciated niche tends to have conventional media beat in one other area as well: intimacy. "So many artists made pieces for their families, their wives, their close friends, their mistresses," says jewelry collector Diane Venet, the curator of "Picasso to Koons: The Artist As Jeweler," on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York through January 8. "Sometimes if you invited Alexan- der Calder over for dinner, he would show up with your initials as a pin." With jewelry getting top billing at many museums this year (a Van Cleef & Arpels retrospective at the Cooper-Hewitt; a new gallery dedicated exclusively to the field at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), such pieces have become increasingly popular with collectors as works of art in and of themselves. "We are pleased to include in Design Miami/ a new dimension of de- sign that has gone relatively undiscussed in the course of design history: artists' and designers' jewelry," says Design Miami/ director Marianne Goebl. "With four galleries representing a large spectrum of historic and contemporary jewelry, we will discover eclectic wearable sculptures, which will demonstrate how varied the creative expression in this field can be." To wit, Caroline Van Hoek brings StudyOPortable's "Quartz Mirrors," which are made from Quartz crystal, a material often associated with media devices. London's Didier Antiques—a leading gallery in the field that loaned pieces by Enrico Baj, André Derain, Leonor Fini and Wilfredo Lam to the MAD exhibition—will bring a slew of these wearable artworks to Design Miami/, including standout pieces by Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Louise Nevelson. "It's almost like it's been this little secret for the last 50 years," says Didier's Martine Newby Haspeslagh. "It was often just the wives of the artists or their dealers who collected it. But suddenly people are waking up. In some respects, for the cost of one painting or sculpture, you can buy 50 pieces of artist jewelry. They're sculptures to wear." Hudson, New York-based dealer Mark McDonald will exhibit such work as well, specializing in pieces by those practitioners who trained as artists (primarily in sculpture) but worked almost exclusively in jewelry for much of their lives—the formidable Art Smith and Harry Bertoia among them. While galleries like Didier may advocate for the artist as jeweler, Orna- mentum's Stefan Friedman has long been fighting for contemporary jew- elry's consideration as high design and fine art. The Hudson-based dealer represents some 60 cutting-edge jewelry-makers from around the world, many of whom seek to push the boundaries of the media and techniques themselves. At this year's edition of Design Miami/, Friedman will show jewelry and vessels (jewelers and silversmiths tend to overlap) by about 10 gallery artists. Standout offerings include "Tips of My Finger," a silver basin by German designer Gerd Rothmann that is quite literally impressed with the artist's hand, as well as wearable pieces by David Bielander, John Iverson and Daniel Jocz—whose work has included cigarette butts cast in precious metals. CULTURED 95

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