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Legacy
And All That Jazz
A look at the creative threads that made up the vibrant pulse and decorative style of the Jazz Age period of early twentieth-century America.
By Phyllis Schiller
An exhibition opening this spring at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City explores the underpinnings of modern design that developed during the 1920s. “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s” was co-organized by Sarah D. Coffin, curator and head of product design and decorative arts at Cooper Hewitt, and Stephen Harrison, curator of decorative art and design at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where the exhibition will travel after its run in New York. With 400-plus prime examples of both personal and decorative arts — jewelry, fashion, furniture, wall coverings, tableware, paintings and more — the exhibition traces the many stylistic threads that came together during that period, organizing the pieces on view under six specific categories: Persistence of Traditional Good Taste, A New Look for Familiar Forms, Bending the Rules, A Smaller World, Abstraction and Reinvention and Towards a Machine Age.
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This is not a history, Coffin says. Things that are shown from the 1930s are included because they were designed in the 1920s or are a variant of what was designed then. “And not all of what is shown was made in America. The French jewelry and fashion or the Austrian pieces are included because they or something exactly like them were owned by an American or shown in this country in the 1920s.” One of the items made in France that particularly inspired Coffin, she says, is a pair of French doors by Séraphin Soudbinine and Jean Dunand for the residence of Solomon R. Guggenheim. Done in Paris and sent to New York, they were part of an ensemble with two screens entitled Fortissimo and Pianissimo and feature winged warriors standing on skyscrapers and throwing thunderbolts.
It’s not only decorative motifs that underwent a metamorphosis. Like the distinctive sounds and colors emanating from the decade’s fast and flashy jazz clubs, Coffin says women’s personal attire started to change dramatically, too, as they went to the nightclubs to hear the new beat. Film clips and jazz music and objects that have connection to jazz music are part of the exhibition. There are a number of stunning pieces of jewelry included. Coffin points out a “knock-the-socks-off” carved ruby and diamond Van Cleef & Arpels necklace and two special Cartier pieces owned by Cole Porter’s wife, Linda — a scarab buckle and tutti frutti bracelet. Also on view: Creations by Mauboussin, Lacloche Frères, Raymond Yard, Tiffany & Co. and Boucheron; a dramatic carved jade, sapphire and diamond bracelet and jewelry owned by Gloria Swanson and Mae West.
Running in tandem with the Jazz Age exhibition, “Jeweled Splendors of the Art Deco Era: The Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan Collection,” presents, says Coffin, one of the “best collections of twentieth-century great objects of vertu, where the word vertu means, in the old sense, the virtuosity of the craftsman. The items feature an incredible use of color, which was hugely important in the 1920s, and minuteness of detail, where every accent is finely implemented.” Dovetailing the Jazz Age exhibition in terms of its Art Deco time frame, the 116 pieces, personal gifts given by the Paris-born Prince Sadruddin Khan (1933–2003) to his wife, Catherine (b. 1938), include vanity cases, called nécessaires, compacts, Mystery Clocks and timepieces, jeweled sautoires and other luxury status symbols. A star attraction says Coffin is a 1925 Cartier vanity case, shown above, with a carved sapphire panther in a scene with turquoise blossoms on the trees and a set-in cabochon ruby sun in a mother-of-pearl inlaid sky.
“The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s” runs from April 7 through August 20, 2017, at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York and from September 30, 2017, through January 14, 2018, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. “Jeweled Splendors of the Art Deco Era: The Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan Collection” runs from April 7 through August 27, 2017, at the Cooper Hewitt.Article from the Rapaport Magazine - April 2017. To subscribe click here.
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