Artists or Artisans?

Renaissance artists freely mixed painting, sculpture and jewelry making, largely because they depended on patrons for a living and their patrons wanted all three. Today's painters and sculptors, free of that pressure, largely shun jewelry making, uncertain whether it is an art, a trade, or merely a manner of preserving precious stones. To combat the notion that jewelry makers are not artists but artisans, London's 800-year-old Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths this month is showing the largest recent collection of fine jewelry. For every piece from Boucheron and Cartier, Harry Winston and Tiffany, there is a Calder, a Jean Arp, a Giacometti or a Picasso.

The vogue for diamonds, starting about 1890, has been the major hobble on art in jewelry: it dictated a rule that great stones should be placed in self-effacing settings. And because jewelry complements fashion, it is a fickle medium; when designs become outmoded, they are melted down and the stones reset. The result is that jewelry settings strive mainly to secure a gem to a finger, a wrist, a neck or an ear--no great challenge for the creative artist. Says Graham Hughes, art director and organizing secretary of the goldsmiths' show: "Wars, taxes, burglars and fashion have all conspired against the serious jeweler."

An Act of Satire. The two dozen sculptors and painters exhibiting in the goldsmiths' 800-piece show have skirted this difficulty. They have ignored diamonds, sapphires and rubies, and in their place found quartz, jade and pebbles to set in hammered or cast gold, silver or bronze. Painter Jean Dubuffet, for example, sets a lump of coal in a ring as an act of intentional satire.

For many of the artists, their only adventures with jewels have been for the sake of a gift, and for most, jewelry is a diversion. Says Jean Cocteau, who is represented by gold pendants and a circular medal, "I entered poetry as one enters religion, and if I happen to work at something beside writing, it is like the monks who make liqueurs or figurines for the creche." Picasso's fascination with gold in jewelry was born in the dentist's chair; seeing gold being cast for his teeth, he bought a set of dentist's drills and tools and made a necklace. He says that the gold content is unimportant: his jewelry would have the same worth cast in chocolate.

This theme of embarrassment with jewelry making is one that artists revel in. Jean Arp says: "I made my first 'jewel' in 1914. I wore it myself as a tiepin. It was my period of dandyism." Giacometti says his first clips and buttons were made "to earn some money" and that, in recent years, he has refused invitations to make some jewelry because he has not been able to "summon up enough interest to say yes."

Sculptures Made Small. Many of the most successful pieces in the show are miniatures of ideas conceived on the grand scale. Lynn Chadwick's rings are small, precious-metal versions of bronze sculpture already in existence. Henri Laurens sculpted bird shapes in plaster, then cast them in gold and presented them to his family as pendants and brooches. Many of the cast-metal pieces were cast by French Goldsmith Franc,ois Hugo from wax or plaster molds made by French artists.

Calder is perhaps the most at home with jewelry. His strange, twisted wire brooches and earrings are intriguing parallels to his spinning mobiles, and his spiky, formidable necklaces are often wrought from scrap iron. His best work, though, is in hammered silver. American Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz shows a gold-plated necklet cast with an antique turquoise.

Much as the goldsmiths have set out to introduce jewelry as "a lively art form" and jewelers as "true artists," their own catalogue says that the value of the pieces range from a bejeweled necklace worth $896,000 to "productions by painters and sculptors of no intrinsic worth." If art is to be art, this is a subversive thought. As Graham Hughes says: "The prestige of modern jewelry has suffered by being associated too closely with money."

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