The legendary firm of Van Cleef & Arpels looks to the heavens for inspiration.
Somewhere, far over the rainbow, a dark and distant celestial world is becoming ever clearer as thrilling new images regularly beam to Earth from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. These stunning photographs of deep space are constantly redefining our visual and scientific understanding of these faraway worlds and bringing them ever closer to us. Back on earth, at the Museum of Natural History in New York, Cosmic Splendor: Jewelry from the Collections of Van Cleef & Arpelsis the latest exhibition to address our unquenchable fascination with the universe.
Located in the museum’s Melissa and Keith Meister Gallery, and adjacent to its world-class collection of gems and minerals, the exhibition offers a bejeweled companion to the Hayden Planetarium’s thrilling new light show called Encounters in the Milky Way, narrated by Pedro Pascal and sponsored by the jewelry firm. This is the museum’s second exhibition pairing with the legendary jewelry house, following Garden of Green in 2023–2024, which featured a brilliant array of green-colored gemstones appropriate to the jeweler’s palette.
Exhibition co-curators Alexandrine Maviel-Sonet of Van Cleef & Arpels (VCA), and the museum’s gem and mineral specialist, associate curator Kate Kiseeva, organized the show’s themes around celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, stars, planets, and galaxies. With over sixty ornaments, VCA’s substantial patrimonial collection is the foundation of the exhibition, supplemented by selected loans. As Nicolas Bos, president and CEO of Van Cleef &
Arpels, once said, “The Maison has always been interested in the instant where observing nature encounters poetry
and the imagination.”
At least one other New York exhibition in recent memory addressed this heavenly topic. Out of This World: Jewelry in the Space Age, at the Forbes Galleries in 2013, treated deep space as a recurring subject in popular culture. It featured comic books, ray guns, and plastic Sputnik rings alongside important jewels from the early nineteenth century onward, including the fabulous VCA Tampa Necklace of 2010, seen front and center inCosmic Splendor.
The Tampa Necklace anchors the first case in the exhibition, greeting visitors with a design of overlapping orbits, falling stars, and a miniature, bee-shaped rocket ship zooming off into space. In the nearby Moon section, lunar symbols abound, beginning with a slim crescent of diamonds, and a clip titled Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon) depicting a star-studded lapis lazuli sky flanked by a diamond-studded crescent and what could be a meteor or a rocket ship.
Quiet in its loveliness, there’s a softly modulated gold and ruby pendant and related brooch of the moon’s surface, made in 1969 to celebrate the moon landing; examples were made for the astronauts as well as for President Nixon, who welcomed them home. The firm has long fashioned works that reference the stars. In 2010 a line titled Les Voyages Extraordinaires debuted with jewelry that drew inspiration from Jules Verne’s science fiction masterpiece, From the Earth to the Moon. More recently, the Sous les Etoiles (2021) line drew on Camille Flammarion’s 1880 book Astronomie Populaire, including several works in the exhibition such as the pair of elongated Double Galaxy clips, made of mauve and pink sapphires, rubies, and diamonds that appear to rotate dynamically on their axis. And when two shooting stars cross paths, fireworks abound, as seen in Etoile filante (Shooting star).
Standouts from other parts of the exhibition include the Fleur du Soleil (Sunflower) clip that gives the simultaneous impression of a flower and a radiant sun at the blazing heart of the universe. Despite its small size, it bursts with fiery yellow sapphires, vivid orange spessartine garnets, and diamonds. In the large Stars case is the Asterisk clip (1966), a spiky explosion in gold and sapphires.
For watch enthusiasts in search of “poetic astronomy,” a term used by the firm to describe its aspirations, the exhibition offers many delights. A diamond-studded Lady Arpels Heures Filantes watch bears a circular design of shooting stars that rotates once every year. Given mythical names by the ancient Greeks, they are called out on the dial—“Geménides,” “Léonides,” and “Orionides,” among others—and accompanied by their sprays of stars, as a mother-of-pearl cosmic cloud serenely floats below.
For gentlemen, the Midnight Planétarium wristwatch offers a window into deep space: the dark blue aventurine face is set with the five planets visible to the naked eye, each in a different colored stone, that rotate in accord with the universe.
Visitors to the dimly lit gallery will find themselves in an immersive infinity room with mirrored walls filled with twinkly stars.
Meanwhile celestial musical hits, including Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” Audrey Hepburn’s “Moon River,” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” contribute to the galactic mood. As with the previous jewelry exhibitions seen in this gallery, Cosmic Splendor offers visitors the perfect opportunity to combine the study of science with art, and where we are reminded that minerals, the stuff of stars, can be transformed into extravagant ornaments for the human body.
