Monday, May. 02, 1983

The Affable Elegance of Faberg

By Michael Demarest

Works by Russia's master jeweler light up two Manhattan shows

There is little room in today's reckoning for the gorgeous playthings that the royals and the royally rich acquired insatiably in the three or four decades before World War I. The most sumptuous, superbly crafted of these frivolities were made by Peter Carl Faberge, jeweler to the Romanovs, whose establishment in St. Petersburg poured out cascades of baubles and bibelots for nearly 50 years before the Bolsheviks banged on the door in 1918.

That era, in all its extravagance and charm, makes an eye-and heart-catching comeback in two Manhattan exhibitions. The first, at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, runs through July 10; it is a handsomely displayed presentation of 213 objects from the collection of Britain's royal family and other English owners. The second, being held through May 21 by the venerable Fifth Avenue store A la Vieille Russie, is the largest collection of Faberge ever assembled; many of the 560 pieces are being exhibited for the first time.

Faberge, whose Huguenot family fled France in 1685, eventually presided over branches in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and London. He was principally supported by the Romanovs, notably the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna and her son Tsar Nicholas II. The Danish-born Empress introduced the jeweler to her sister Alexandra and Alexandra's husband King Edward VII of England, both of whom became steadfast patrons of Faberge. Most of the Fabergeana at A la Vieille Russie were made for the Russian royal family. Among them are nine imperial Easter eggs, the works with which Faberge is most closely identified. Their design was left entirely to Faberge, and each contained a "surprise," a splendiferous equivalent of the prize in a Cracker Jack box.

The nine include the richly ornamented Peter the Great Egg (1903) and the Mosaic Egg (1914) which is perhaps the most elegant of all. It is in the Cooper-Hewitt show and may be worth $1 million. Presented to his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna by Nicholas II in 1914, the 3 5/8-in.-high egg is made of intertwining gold belts and platinum mesh set with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topaz, quartz and garnets. The surprise inside is an oval plaque of gold, pearl and enamel on which are painted the profiles of the five royal children, all of whom were to be shot, along with their parents, by the Bolsheviks.

What the two exhibitions show above all is Faberge's astonishing diversity. The artifacts range from relatively austere stone boxes and clocks, perfume flacons, letter openers and an art nouveau cigarette case given to Edward VII, to what Faberge called his objets de fantaisie: a windup, tail-wagging silver rhinoceros, a love-sick frog on a silver column, and--in jade, nephrite, agate, chalcedony, quartzite and other gem stones--a dormouse out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a litter of four sleeping piglets, and minimenageries of meticulously observed birds, fish and beasts.

Among the most consummate works are enameled sprays of flowers and fruits; to ensure verisimilitude, Faberge kept a garden on top of his Moscow workshop. Some of these beauties, priceless today, originally sold for less than $1,000 each.

Of some 250,000 Faberge pieces extant, not one was actually made by the master. His genius, while he presided over more than 500 artisans, was to impart an aesthetic that, for all the opulence of the materials, was by and large controlled and even understated.

Inevitably, a few of these more artless trinkets stray into kitsch. But for the most part, suggests A. Kenneth Snowman, jeweler by appointment to the royal family and guest curator for the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition, they should be judged by the affable spirit in which [they] were originally created--an uncomplicated desire to give pleasure, albeit within the framework of an efficiently organized business house." Another scholar, Sir Roy Strong of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, observes that Faberge's work "was almost the last expression of court art within the European tradition, which brings with it a passionate conviction of the importance of craftsmanship and inventiveness of design, aligned to a celebration of the virtues of wit and fantasy applied to everyday objects that still has a relevance to the design of today." --By Michael Demarest.

Reported by Kathryn Jackson Fallon/ New York

With reporting by Kathryn Jackson Fallon/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.