Jewelry

'I Don't Wear Jewelry. I Wear Art' - New York Times

Whether made in brass or the precious gold and platinum of traditional jewelry, such pieces defy the form’s established rules of beauty, deriving their worth not from costly materials but from the cultural value of the concept and reputation of its creator, like art itself.

“You have to recognize the artist’s work in the jewel,” said Ms. Venet, who often collaborates with artists to help them translate their ideas into jewelry. “It doesn’t have to look like jewelry. I’m not asking you to be a jeweler. I’m not asking you to do small what you normally do big, but to take the concept of your work into another medium.”

Other pieces in her collection come from auctions, or from a handful of gallery owners like Elisabetta Cipriani in London and her daughter Esther de Beaucé, who opened Galerie MiniMasterpiece in Paris in 2012.

Ms. Venet’s collection is full of pieces that counter classical jewelry styles. A Yayoi Kusama necklace has soft wool shafts, mirroring the phallus-like appendages that blanket so many of her sculptures; a Damien Hirst bracelet dangles sinister pills rather than charms, and a Louise Bourgeois collar with a rhinestone leash echoes her explorations of female servitude.

There is also a Jenny Holzer snake ring emblazoned with the artist’s capital-lettered meditations on death, a Lucio Fontana piece that presents his canvas-piercing Spatialism as a red enamel signet, and a Mylar balloon rabbit by Jeff Koons rendered as a platinum pendant. Pablo Picasso, Anish Kapoor, Nam June Paik, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Hans Arp, Giacomo Balla, George Braque, Kiki Smith and many, many more artists whose experiments with jewelry have been largely unknown.

Ms. Venet, a former TV and radio journalist from a family of art collectors, is married to the sculptor Bernar Venet, an acclaimed conceptual artist who is among the few artists invited to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles. In 1985, he wrapped a bar of silver around her finger and called the spontaneous sculpture an engagement ring, her first piece of artist’s jewelry.

“I never liked stones — too impersonal,” Ms. Venet said. “Every young girl dreams of having an engagement ring with a diamond, like in advertising, but diamonds are just a question of money.”

Big or little, she added, “they’re all the same, but art is something truly special.”

In 2014 the couple established the Venet Foundation in a vast 18th-century mill near St.-Tropez, showing Mr. Venet’s work alongside creations by the likes of James Turrell, Robert Morris and Frank Stella, a close friend who made several jewels reminiscent of his shaped canvases for Ms. Venet over the years, rendering them as 3-D computer designs to be cast by a foundry.

Few artists have managed to tackle the highly technical work of fabricating jewelry themselves. The best known and certainly most prolific was Alexander Calder, who included more than 1,800 pieces of jewelry among his mobiles and sculptures.

Another artist jeweler, Arnaldo Pomodoro, is now considered Italy’s most consequential living sculptor but began his career making jewels of tiny “indecipherable symbols, like something so archaic that we’ve lost the code to the writing system,” he said last year as Milan was introducing a citywide retrospective of his work. Mr. Pomodoro learned the goldsmith’s craft from his hometown’s artisans before he began casting equally cryptic but massively monolithic sculptures. He continued to produce some jewelry, including a necklace that Ms. Venet now owns, yet said, “Jewelry is an ornament for the human body, but sculpture is something greater, it resonates with something larger.”

So why would artists bother to make jewelry? Giancarlo Montebello runs the Milan-based GEM Montebello, perhaps the most notable workshop in the 1960s and ’70s for the creation of artists’ jewelry. He collaborated with Mr. Pomodoro (for a while, his brother-in-law) as well as artists like Mr. Fontana, Sonia Delaunay, Niki de Saint Phalle and almost 40 others.

“It’s another way for artists to spread their visions,” Mr. Montebello said, linking the desire for creation to a freewheeling, experimental culture during what he called those “years of revolt.”

“Jewelry represented an open vision of art,” he said. “It wasn’t codified, it wasn’t institutional, it wasn’t all about money — just exploration.”

For the exhibition, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs will recreate Mr. Montebello’s studio (and that of a few others who produced artist’s jewelry), alongside many jewels from Ms. Venet’s collection that the atelier fabricated.

The show’s curator, Karine Lacquemant, said she saw the show as a step beyond previous exhibitions of Ms. Venet’s jewelry, as it will pair pieces with paintings, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics and more from the museum’s collection to, as she described it, “cancel hierarchies” — creating a show that will display “the infinitesimal joined with the infinitely big.”

In context with the other artworks, the jewelry, no longer about its material worth, will be valued for revealing the artists’ mind. “It’s art in miniature,” Ms. Venet said. “Art with a capital A.”