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| Passion Investments: Gems & Jewelry |
Retro Rockets
Marisa Bartolucci
03/01/2005
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The matching necklace and cuff bracelets sold within their estimate, probably because they are too small for most women to wear. The duchess was petite, as were many of Belperron’s clients, making some of her jewelry hard to sell.
Yet the crux of what makes collecting period jewelry so compelling lies in the very dilemma of Belperron’s dainty bracelets. These pieces are not just extraordinary works of art, but someone’s intimate adornments—works often custom-made to be, as Jean Schlumberger once mused, “the bearer of a woman’s desire.” When purchasing works by these midcentury designers in particular, you are acquiring jewelry that adorned some of the 20th century’s most stylish women—women who were defining what it meant to be modern and distinct.
Verdura was another favorite jeweler of the Duchess of Windsor. A Sicilian count by birth, he began his career as a jewelry designer in the 1920s working for Coco Chanel. An iconoclast from the start, he conceived an 18-karat gold Maltese cross studded with precious jewels for Chanel, at a time when setting colored stones in gold was just not done. It caused a sensation. Chic, showy, redolent of history, the bejeweled cross epitomized Verdura’s style.
The fashion empress Diana Vreeland owned a pair of the Maltese cross brooches, made in 1930, which were later acquired by Leighton. When Leighton’s collection was auctioned, the pair was put on the block. The estimate was $80,000 to $120,000; they sold for $192,300, an indication of the power of Chanel, Verdura and Vreeland intersecting in a piece.
VALUE JUDGEMENT
Retro jewelry of the late 1930s through the 1950s is on the verge of becoming de rigueur for collectors. Characterized by sculptural forms and a colorful abundance of stones and gold, these pieces reflect the birth of the modern age. While values are on the rise, investors should expect more aesthetic pleasure than outstanding profits. |
In 1939, Verdura opened his own shop in New York, and he soon turned the jewelry world on its head again with a brooch made from a scallop shell, encrusted with precious and semiprecious stones. The effect was startling and sumptuous. Other houses, from Cartier to Seaman Schepps, soon copied him, crafting assemblages of luxe and low elements into exquisite adornments. The originals of these Verdura brooches are among the most hotly sought-after pieces today. In the rare occurrence one comes on the market, it can command prices of between $38,000 and $75,000, depending on the quality of the stones.
For the next 30 years, Verdura fashioned jewelry that was fanciful, witty and luscious: a pomegranate-shaped brooch with seeds of rubies; a gold necklace that wrapped itself about the throat like a vine, with a garland of citrines dripping from each end. Having grown up near the sea, Verdura was constantly exploring marine motifs. His mermaid brooch, circa 1945, featuring a golden siren aloft a rock crystal wave with a blue sapphire and diamond spume at her tail, sold at auction two years ago at Sotheby’s for $42,000. Its estimate had been $10,000 to $15,000.
Like Verdura, Schlumberger began his career as a jewelry designer in the 1920s in Paris working for Elsa Schiaparelli, a couturier. In those early years, he fashioned beguiling adornments out of unlikely materials: glass beads, buttons, plastic trinkets. When he set up shop in New York in the 1930s, he brought that same whimsy to the fantastical flora and fauna he now designed exclusively out of precious metals and stones. Schlumberger’s lush yet deft handling of these stones—the more colorful the better—within tendrily gold forms endowed his designs with what he liked to call “verve,” a quality almost unique to his work. Signature works by Schlumberger can, depending on their stones, fetch prices from the tens of thousands to the low hundreds of thousands.
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