In Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century the Denver Art Museum has taken a seventy-five-year slice (1900-1975) from the illustrious firm’s 160-plus-year history and illuminated a central paradox of great jewelry: greatness depends upon designs that capture a keen sense of the zeitgeist but do so with enough sheer awesomeness to stand far above it. And so, the exhibition’s vitrines of precious jewelry, clocks, and luxurious accessories are set off by historic film clips, photographs, and period advertising materials. Two world wars, a worldwide depression, a wave of nihilism, and a new aristocracy of celebrities may have made their mark on Cartier’s designs, but in the end, great jewelry just enduringly is, and therein lies much of its fascination.
Above: Crocodile necklace made by Cartier as a special order for Mexican film actress María Félix, 1975. Gold, diamonds, emeralds, rubies. Nick Welsh photograph (c) Cartier.
The exhibition is organized around seven themes such as “Aristocracy and Aspiration,” “Icons of Style,” “Age of Glamour,” “Art of Smoking,” and so forth. Of these one of the most intriguing is “Masculine View.” For most of the twentieth century men may have dressed with all the panache of members of Harry Truman’s cabinet but Cartier was satisfying their suppressed desire for stylishness by producing beautiful cuff links, wristwatches, and cigarette cases and thus anticipating the flourishing of male self-display that burst forth at the end of the 1960s.
The 250 objects in the exhibition have been drawn from the Cartier Collection and Archives, which includes some fifteen hundred items, many of them bought back at auction from museums and private collections by a firm with an eye to its historic stature. The book accompanying the exhibition, Cartier in the 20th Century, contains essays by its curator, Margaret Young-Sánchez, and by other luminaries in the field such as Martin Chapman, Janet Zapata, and Stefano Papi as well as vintage photographs by Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, and Lord Snowden.
Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century • Denver Art Museum • November 16 to March 15, 2015 • denverartmuseum.org
