This volume presents almost 800 illustrations with text celebrating the achievements of Art Decon jewelry. The author's text covers the creations of the Haute Joaillererie and the avant-garde designers. There is also a range of accessories such as vanity cases, cigarette cases and clocks.

Jewelry was one of the purest and most successful expressions of the Art Nouveau movement. Fresh designs and motifs created intense excitement as organic forms surged with new life, and the female form struggled towards freedom, suggesting a long-hidden eroticism. The artists and goldsmiths who created this jewelry were trained in the nineteenth-century disciplines; their technical mastery allowed them to experiment with new materials and enameling processes to indulge their fantasies. This combination - an atmosphere of ideas for a new art and the unrivaled technical skill of the makers - produced some of the most evocative jewelry of modern times. The book deals with major makers in France, and follows the parallel modern movement that spread through Europe and the United States, acquiring different decorative characteristics, from Great Britain, Germany and Austria, to Belgium, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Comprehensive biographies of over 300 designers are included, as well as a Guide to Identification, with over 200 makers' marks and signatures.

Meticulous reproduction of rare portfolio (1925-30) contains over 700 dazzling designs and motifs for buckles, clips, belts, mirrors, pendants, cigarette cases, rings, chains, necklaces, watchbands, brooches, studs, and charms.

ART DECO. An authoritative, comprehensive, and beautifully illustrated selection of jewelry that will appeal to specialists and general readers alike; published with the Musee des Arts Decoratifs.

An absorbing history of the evolution of the Art Deco style in

After the extravagant forms of Art Nouveau, the Art Deco movement represented a return to simplicity and severity. As this book richly demonstrates, in that period jewelry found a virtually unlimited source of renewal. Designers drew inspiration from the entire vivid spectrum of the plastic arts: riotous colors in explosive combinations from the Ballets Russes and the Fauves, geometric shapes from Cubism and Suprematism, the contrast of black and white from Neo-Plasticism, and a fascination with the mechanical world from Futurism. Nor were its exponents confined to the modern European world: an Egyptian vogue was prompted by the 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, while other themes were borrowed from the Far East, Persia, and Africa. Art Deco Jewelry displays through sumptuous illustrations, coupled with a lucid and informative text, the creations of the haute joaillerie (jewelers such as Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels) and of the avant-garde designers -- Jean Fouquet, Raymond Templier, Gerard Sandoz, Jean Durand, and Paul Brandt -- to whom we owe some of the most daring and brilliant jewels of the period. There is also an exquisite range of accessories: dainty vanity cases fashioned with the maximum of detail in the minimum of space, boxes and cigarette cases, and a spectacular array of clocks. With the addition of succinct biographies of the most innovative and influential jewelers of the day, a select bibliography, and a glossary, this book serves as an essential reference for anyone interested in the period or in superb examples of the jeweler's art.

Over 300 spectacular pendants, combs, buckles, rings, bracelets, brooches, umbrella handles, penknives, buttons, clasps, and scissors in detailed photographs reprinted from rare, turn-of-the-century folios.