NEW YORK CITY -- His name synonymous with the brilliance of fin de siecle Paris, Rene Lalique (1860-1945) created jewelry of unsurpassed beauty, even before embarking on a second career as a glass maker. He revolutionized jewelry design by emphasizing wit, imagination and technical virtuosity over the sheer costliness of precious materials such as diamonds, rubies and sapphires.

The jewelry of master artisan Rene Lalique is the subject of a comprehensive exhibition in New York at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, the country's only museum devoted exclusively to historical and contemporary design. "The Jewels of Lalique" remains on view there through April 12, before traveling to the Smithsonian International Gallery in Washington, D.C., (May 15 through August 15) and the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas (September 13 through January 10, 1999).

Featuring 230 objects made by Lalique - including 120 works of jewelry, 40 works of glass, and 50 drawings - the exhibition focuses on the two decades from 1889 to 1909. These were the crucial years during which Lalique created ornaments that were worn on stage by Sarah Bernhardt, mounted a sensation-causing exhibit at the 1900 World's Fair, and brought the international movement of Art Nouveau into the realm of wearable design.

"The Jewels of Lalique" also includes many works from private collections, including important American holdings that have never before been represented in an exhibition of Lalique design, and from the Lalique collection in Paris. With galleries temporarily closed for renovation, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris has extended a number of unprecedented loans to the exhibition, including important pieces of jewelry acquired in the 1890s directly from the artist at the yearly salons.

The Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Walters Art Gallery have all contributed to the show.

"The Jewels of Lalique" has been organized by Exhibitions International, a New York-based, not-for-profit traveling exhibitions service for museums, with Yvonne Brunhammer, the former director of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, as curator.

"Although this exhibition offers as much extravagant beauty as anyone could desire, this is far more than an assemblage of rare and exquisite objects," said Dianne H. Pilgrim, director of Copper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. "With his emphasis on freshness of conception rather than imitation of past styles and his use of innovative, non-precious materials, Lalique radically transformed the design of jewelry, infusing ornament with the modern spirit of the early Twentieth Century. "The Jewels of Lalique" extends the National Design Museum's tradition of exploring design as a social and intellectual force in the world."

Born in the Marne region of France and apprenticed to a Parisian jeweler at age 16, Rene Lalique won the support of a small but influential clientele in the 1890s. Among his patrons were Sara Bernhardt, who wore his designs on stage, and Robert de Montesquiou, the aesthete-aristocrat who was the model for Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Having established himself in this elite avant-garde, Lalique then burst onto the public stage with his highly successful display at the Paris Exhibition of 1900.

Crowds of curious Parisians gathered daily around Lalique's unprecedented display case. He exhibited a corsage ornament in the form of a knot of writhing snakes, each one dangling a string of pearls from its open jaws; a wide choker necklace representing a forest in winter with a mother-of-pearl lake, diamond snow, and green enamel ivy on the trees; a diadem in the form of a rooster's head, fiercely gripping a huge yellow diamond in its beak; and a dazzlingly multicolored corsage ornament in gold, enamel, chrysoprase, moonstones, and diamonds - the lower part formed like a dragonfly, the upper part a female nude.

According to exhibition curator Yvonne Brunhammer, the 1890s were the moment when "Rene Lalique embarked on a period that saw an explosion of creative genius nurtured by years of assiduous work. Its strength had grown out of his vast experience in designing jewelry before he began to make it himself, and in inventing techniques and combinations of materials that led to the birth of modern jewelry. In a departure from traditional jewelry, where the setting was concealed by the brilliance of precious stones, Lalique used structure itself as a decorative element. It should be said again and again that Lalique overthrew all traditions in pursuit of his own path in the extraordinary aesthetic climate of the close of the century. He gradually became one of its major figures."

Of equal importance to Lalique's innovations in form and materials was his growing interest in industrial production techniques. Convinced that an object was no less beautiful for being machine made, Lalique moved definitively into serial production in 1908, when Francois Coty asked him to create a bottle for a specific perfume. Although Lalique had designed one-of-a-kind glass objects before, this was his first design for industrial reproduction. The perfume flacon's tremendous success encouraged Lalique to design mold-made glass for lighting fixtures, desk and toilet accessories, vases, and tableware. It is at this point in Lalique's career - when he begins to focus exclusively on glass and turns his attention from craft to industry - that "The Jewels of Lalique" ends.

Lalique, the company founded by Rene Lalique nearly a century ago, still operates today with international headquarters in Paris. "The Jewels of Lalique" is made possible through the support of Lalique North America.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Paris-based publishing house Flammarion has published The Jewels of Lalique ($50 hardcover), a scholarly account of the Art Nouveau period and a chronicle of the pieces on display in the exhibition. Available in both English and French editions, the 224-page catalogue features 220 color illustrations, with essays by Yvonne Brunhammer; Gabriel Weisberg, professor at the University of Minnesota and author of Art Nouveau Bing; Marie-Odile Briot, curator of the Musee Galliera, Paris; Evelyne Posseme, curator of Nineteenth-Century Decorative Arts at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; fashion historian Florence Muller; Jean-Luc Olivie, curator of the Centre du Verre of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; and Sigrid Barten, Musee Bellevue, Zurich.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, is open Tuesdays, 10 am-9 pm; Wednesdays to Saturdays, 10 am-5 pm; Sundays, noon-5 pm. On Mondays, the museum is closed.