--- .\ IN THE NEWS
PUBLISHED .\ DECEMBER 9, 2021
BY VICTORIA GOMELSKY
Emily Waterfall, the head of Bonhams’s jewelry department in Los Angeles, knew she was dealing with something special in November 2020, when she found herself inside a private storage facility surrounded by thousands of pieces of jewelry owned by Byron and Jill Crawford, a local couple who had devoted 40 years to collecting.“The first piece I opened was the Picasso Grand Faune,” Ms. Waterfall said. Like his fellow artists Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí and Man Ray, Pablo Picasso dabbled in jewelry. To make the Grand Faune pendant, Picasso worked with the goldsmith François Hugo, who immortalized the impish-looking face of the half human, half goat creature in 23-karat gold. The men made 20 pieces, one of which (No. 7) belonged to the Crawfords.
In mid-October, that pendant sold for $62,813 in “Wearable Art: Jewels From the Crawford Collection,” a noteworthy Bonhams sale that featured 314 lots of jewelry by some of the 20th century’s most important makers — including the modernists Art Smith and Margaret De Patta, the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma and the American-born, Mexico-based silver jeweler William Spratling. Totaling $1.7 million, the sale was the first single-owner collection of artist jewelry ever presented at auction. Bonhams already is planning a second art jewelry sale for next fall.
“I was beyond flabbergasted by the response,” Ms. Waterfall said. “But we’re just at the beginning.”Ms. Waterfall was referring to a growing segment of the jewelry market — sometimes called “art jewelry” — focused on one-of-a-kind pieces that often, but not always, employ non-precious materials to convey meaning.
The category dates from at least the turn of the 20th century, when the Art Nouveau master René Lalique challenged traditional notions of preciousness by incorporating glass and horn into his creations. In recent years, a wave of interest among museum curators, collectors, and gallerists, not to mention a growing secondary market, has cast a spotlight on this esoteric niche.
Sienna Patti, the founder of a namesake contemporary jewelry gallery in Lenox, Mass., explained the momentum behind art jewelry partly as a collective search for authenticity. “Younger generations want something that feels real,” she said. “Buying something mass-produced is less appealing.”
Read the article in NYT here