Did You Know Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, and Ettore Sottsass Were Also Jewelry Designers?
“Nobody could believe I got all these Calders for the auction,” says Tiffany Dubin—Sotheby’s artist jewelry specialist and head of sale—of the pieces she procured for Art as Jewelry as Art, the auction house’s first international sale focusing on jewelry by artists. Bidding opens on September 23 for more than 150 lots by 65 artists, including Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Claude Lalanne, Ettore Sottsass, Louise Bourgeois—the list goes on. Prepare your paddle: When measured to the costs and availability of their works of fine art, the prices of these wares are comparatively accessible.
Prior to the announcement of Sotheby’s first-of-its-kind international auction, Dubin curated what she calls “pop-up” sales of artist jewelry, including one with Louisa Guinness (of the famed Louisa Guinness Gallery in London) at the auction house’s East Hampton outpost last year. The experience revealed a growing interest in these miniature and wearable sculptures. “The discerning collector understands that they can own a masterpiece created at a human scale,” Dubin said in a press release at the time.
Today, her confidence in the market remains. “What I’ve found is that the people who buy are contemporary collectors, not jewelry collectors,” Dubin tells AD PRO. “There are people who have their grandmother’s diamonds, but want something a little more offbeat that has a story, a conversation point, and that they can put in their apartment as a miniature sculpture.”
Some of the upcoming sale’s pieces read avant-garde, and others verge on crafty. The aforementioned Alexander Calders, for example, includes a tiara composed of hammered swirl motifs—similar to those in his paintings. (The piece, with an estimated value around $200,000, was gifted by Sir Kenneth Clark to his wife, Lady Kenneth Clark, circa 1938.) Calder, who fashioned his first piece of jewelry at age 8 for his sister’s dolls, was prolific in the category, producing “approximately 1,800 unique pieces of brass, silver, and gold body ornaments, often embellished with found objects such as beach glass, ceramic shards, and wood,” according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sale’s Calder collection also features a fanciful floral headpiece realized in hammered brass, a bracelet and headband fashioned into wave figures, and a coiled pendant.
Similarly, modern furniture designer Harry Bertoia was also a dedicated jewelry designer. He secured a full scholarship to Cranbrook Academy of Art after then director Eliel Saarinen reviewed his portfolio of jewelry designs. He even went on to design and fabricate Ray Eames’s gold wedding band. For the Sotheby’s sale, Dubin secured two brooches—silver abstractions of a crab and a snake, each estimated around $35,000—and a pendant made up of a series of vertically-suspended rods reminiscent of the designer’s kinetic sculptures.
