Van Cleef & Arpels Haute Jewelry Show at the Cooper-Hewitt Extended

The dazzling exhibition, Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels, will extend its run through Monday, July 4, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt design museum announced last week. And with good reason: more than 45,000 visitors have clocked in since the show’s opening in February, and on a recent afternoon pilgrimage the crowd showed no sign of abating.

Well-heeled, Upper East Side ladies mingled with schoolboys in jeans and T-shirts, all eyeing precious jewels encased in glass bubbles at the Carnegie mansion on East 91st Street in Manhattan. Indeed, the setting rivaled the show’s featured works in the shock and awe department.

The exhibit, billed as "the most comprehensive ever organized of Van Cleef & Arpels masterworks," features 350 items drawn from the collection of the famed Parisian jeweler and its international clientele. There are highly stylized necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings, brooches and watches, in addition to finely crafted accessories like clutches, cigarette cases and tobacco lighters. Objets d’art, such as a 1908 butler’s bell push comprised of a model yacht riding a wave fashioned from jasper, drew audible gasps from the crowd. 1908 butler's bell push

The curators aim to explore the 105-year-old firm’s mark on 20th century design and design innovation, with an emphasis on the American market. "This is the first exhibition to approach the work of Van Cleef & Arpels from the perspective of a design museum and focus on the establishment of the design house in New York and the role of American style and taste," says Bill Moggridge, director of the Cooper-Hewitt. The firm was an exhibitor at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and opened shop at Rockefeller Center after the fair closed.

Photos of American style-setters bedecked in precious VC&A gems — picture First Lady Jackie Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco (Grace Kelly), the Duchess of Windsor (Wallis Simpson), and Elizabeth Taylor — line one wall of a gallery, with the real thing on display directly across the room. Princess Grace’s tiara and diamond-and-pearl engagement set — a ring, necklace, bracelet and earrings — are prominently featured. As jewelry historian Ruth Peltason writes in the exhibition’s sumptuously Image from Amazon
illustrated catalog (Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels by Sarah Coffin, Suzy Menkes, Ruth Peltason), "Icy diamonds offset the creamy sensuous pearls, a natural pairing for a young bride and an apt symbol for a woman Alfred Hitchcock described as ‘a snow-covered volcano.'"

Innovation, a central theme of the show, is perhaps best represented by the so-called "Mystery Setting," a technique pioneered by VC&A jewelers in which, as the curators explain, the setting of a piece "does not show between the stones, creating a solid field of color." A video in the show’s first room painstakingly details the process. Matching stones are cut to fit curved surfaces and placed in channels so the setting is hidden.

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Van Cleef & Arpels Haute Jewelry Show at the Cooper-Hewitt Extended

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