Everything old is new again when it comes to the jewelry on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York. Its exhibition “A View from the Jeweler’s Bench: Ancient Treasures, Contemporary Statements” illustrates the creative line that links the works of 12 modern jewelry artists to antique jewelry motifs and techniques.
Historian and metalsmith Sasha Nixon is the exhibition’s curator. “I find the entire timeline of jewelry history fascinating and intimately interconnected,” she says.
True to its name, the display centers around a jeweler’s bench that showcases the tools of the trade throughout the centuries, including a bronze dapping block that dates to between fourth- and fifth-century Rome. The oldest jewelry is from ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom era, circa 1479 to 1070 BCE.
These historic items and their contemporary counterparts reflect six themes: “The Lure of Ancient Gold,” “Cameos and Memory,” “Value and Fashion,” “La Peregrina,” “Power and Prestige” and “Archetypes and Attachment.” The pieces on view include ancient Etruscan goldwork; a Hellenistic wedding vase; a gold brooch by 19th-century jewelry firm Castellani; and Tiffany & Co.’s diamond and platinum Wade necklace, circa 1900. The most recent of the contemporary pieces are Jeanette K. Caines’s Bird earrings, which the artist completed a few months ago specifically for the exhibition.
Cameo appearances
The items in each category show how the creations of the past inform contemporary jewelers. For example, notes Nixon, the “Cameos and Memory” section “includes an ancient Roman glass cameo ring; a print of the painting
Idealized Portrait of a Lady by [Italian artist] Sandro Botticelli, circa 1475; a Renaissance cameo set in a 19th-century frame; and Nicole Jacquard’s contemporary cameos. All of these pieces together tell the story of cameos.”
The Roman glass cameo is an example of a piece that would have been widely distributed in antiquity, according to Nixon, who points out the sophisticated technique used to make it: “Each color of glass has a different cooling temperature, making it difficult to layer without cracking.” In the Botticelli portrait,
she continues, the subject is wearing a famous cameo to indicate heightened social standing.
As for the Renaissance cameo in the 19th-century frame, its refitting highlights its value, since “it was saved and remounted after its [original] fitting became unfashionable,” Nixon explains. A depiction of the Madonna and Child, it “is also indicative of the transition from political, classical and pagan themes to Christian iconography.”
Then there is Jacquard’s work, which “transformed the cameo form into something very personal,” the curator relates. “She laser-engraved photographs of her family members onto clear mica. The shadows on the wall created by these laser engravings result in a clearer image than seen in the contemporary cameo. The result is ghostly representations of the ephemerality of memory.”
Link to the past
The contemporary artists in each thematic category use the historic pieces as a jumping-off point, says Nixon — a frame of reference “from which to explore the nature of jewelry history. In the process, they create some very thought-provoking work. In some cases, the historical references are obvious. In others, they are hidden and require a deeper look.”
In the cameo group, for instance, “the commonality was a reference to the form,” explains the curator. The same is true of Kiff Slemmons’s contemporary Little Egypt necklace, which recalls Egyptian stone-setting techniques and imagery but uses pieces of wooden rulers in place of gems. Modern artists Caines and Giovanni Corvaja, whose work appears in “The Lure of Ancient Gold” area of the exhibition, “access the techniques of ancient Greece and Etruria,” Nixon continues, while Lin Cheung helps illustrate sentimental jewelry in the “Archetypes and Attachment” section by using “familiar materials like gold, pearls and rock crystal in unexpected ways.”
This duality of old and new lets visitors explore how jewelry is made and encounter something intriguing, Nixon says. “I would like them to come away with a greater understanding of the relevance of connections between historic jewelry and jewelry today. I also hope they gain a bit more knowledge about the conceptual nature of contemporary art jewelry and the importance of the artist’s perspective.”
Image: Bruce White; The Metropolitan Museum of Art Article from the Rapaport Magazine - April 2019. To subscribe click here.