The wow factor is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in the gemlike exhibit “From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith.” A tiny show, comprising 21 pieces by Art Smith (1917‱982) and supplemented by 30 other works by his contemporaries, it has been drawing crowds on a daily basis. The reason: Smith’s grand and sensuous aesthetic that characterizes his creations.
For Smith, a piece of jewelry was not complete in itself until it related to the body. He viewed the human body as a component of the design, as integral to the form of the object as air and space. At the same time, his designs are so dazzling that each piece can be displayed on its own as a work of art. Scale here is impressive and form is paramount; the interplay of light and shadow is kinetic. The artist was a highly skilled exploiter of the dynamic between positive and negative space, rendering his work dramatic.
Smith was a master among the Modernist jewelers, drawing from such traditions as surrealism, biomorphism and primitivism. But it is his talent as a sculptor that governed his work. His work, and that of his contemporaries, like Sam Kramer, Frank Rebajes and Ed Weiner, drew much from that of Alexander Calder. They worked in copper, brass, hard stone, glass and ceramics, leaving diamonds and rubies, gold and platinum to the traditional uptown jewelers.
While Smith worked primarily in copper and brass, reserving silver for commissioned pieces, the objects on view are all made from silver, with one gold exception. These are exemplary examples that Smith retained for his own collection throughout his life.
Smith and his contemporaries were a de facto design community in Greenwich Village, very much the products of post-World War II New York. Smith himself was born in Cuba of Jamaican parents, but was a New Yorker through and through. Raised in Brooklyn, he studied sculpture at the Cooper Union. He later studied under jewelry designer Winifred Mason, said to be the first African American professional jewelry designer, and worked in her shop in the Village for several years.
In 1946, he opened his own shop in the Village, where he lived and worked for the rest of his career. Like most of his contemporaries, Smith created and sold his designs in his shop. His was essentially a solo operation, with the assistance of some design graduate students. His colleague Rebajes took a different tack: he employed several hundred workers in his enterprise.
Modernist jewelry gained national attention after two exhibits during the 1940s, the 1946 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the 1948 exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn. Smith’s work, although still considered avant-garde in some circles, attracted mainstream attention as a result and began to be sold in some uptown establishments. His work was also sold at certain galleries across the country. For many years he regularly ran an ad in The New Yorker .
During this period, New York City, essentially Greenwich Village, was the center of explosive developments and profound contradictions in the arts, politics, science and commerce. Smith was in the middle of it all, an artistic, political and social progressive. He maintained a strong connection to the black cultural community in New York and numbered Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Billy Strayhorn, James Baldwin and Brock Peters among his friends and associates. He was a jazz aficionado at a very young age; one of the objects in the collection is a gouache and watercolor maquette he created as a student for an album cover of a Duke Ellington recording, well before he met his hero. He later made a pair of cufflinks for “The Duke” that incorporated the first notes of “Mood Indigo.”
As a political activist, following in the footsteps of his parents, he was a vocal proponent of the pursuit of racial equality and of gay rights. This was the era of McCarthyism, the Cold War and the threat of atomic annihilation and the handsome and urbane Smith was a stunning figure.
Smith’s interest in the arts, particularly theater, pervades his jewelry designs. He was much taken with the work of several African American avant-garde dance companies, and he designed stage jewelry for the dancers, which by necessity needed to be larger than life. Flamboyant, like the artist, the pieces were greatly appealing, large in scale and compelling in form.
His clientele, according to Barry Harwood, curator of decorative arts at the Brooklyn Museum, who organized the exhibition, tended to be the same liberal-minded buyers who had Eva Zeisel and Russel Wright tableware at home. His contemporary, designer Sam Kramer, described his work as “fantastic jewelry for people who are slightly mad.” Edgy, certainly, but hardly mad.
The jewelry on view is representative of the span of Smith’s career. Each piece is a statement; each is an object of wearable art. In a twist of serendipity, the black turtleneck sweaters that were de rigueur in the 1940s and 1950s provided the perfect setting for Smith’s jewelry. The pieces are so spectacular that one would be hard pressed to choose the “most” or the “best.” Because they were executed in silver, the counterpoint of light and dark is especially profound.
Smith’s total output is unknown, despite the accuracy of the account books he left. Since his designs remained essentially unchanged over the decades, determining the exact date of each piece is also problematic. Harwood writes in the accompanying catalog that pieces have been dated based on catalogs, accounts and Charles L. Russell’s recall of them. Russell was Smith’s companion and heir.
The largest is also the earliest, the circa 1946 “Lava” bracelet, made with two sheets of metal superimposed on each other and soldered. The shading resulting from the soldering process merely adds to the patina; at the same time, it deepens the form. The bracelet is designed to cover much of the forearm of the wearer.
The necklace “Half and Half” was made in 1948, the year Smith was the subject of a solo show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. One half is a biomorphic form and the other a free-flowing length of silver. It was the gift of Modernist dealer and midcentury jewelry specialist Mark McDonald.
A bauble necklace of about 1953 is a large stylized question mark with an encased colorless quartz stone at either end. It is stagy, but extremely attractive. The circa 1959 “Patina” necklace appears to have been inspired by Calder’s mobiles.
Several pieces on view allude to his musical interests. The circa 1962 “Ellington” necklace has stylized colored stone notes, like the eyes of peacock feathers. His circa 1948 “Modern Cuff” embodies elements of a musical score.
The circa 1972 “Encaged Marble” necklace is playful with a coiled section that enclosed a carnelian. Another creation that looks like fun is “Cluster Knuckles,” a ring that covers three fingers and comprises stones of jade, turquoise, rhodochrosite and zoisite.
The single gold object by Smith is the 1974 brooch “Autumn Leaves,” a scattering of leaflike elements anchored by an oval jade stone.
The most recent is his “Last” necklace, an architectural standalone necklace, which is a departure from much of his prior work. Late in his career, Smith had begun constructing small tabletop sculptures from wire, returning to his roots as a sculptor. The 1979 silver “Last” is closely related to those compositions.
The “Galaxy” necklace from about 1962 acknowledges the space program, then newly emerging. It wraps the neck in a collar of delicate lines and orbs.
The exhibit “From the Village to Vogue” was born of the 2007 gift of 21 pieces of Smith’s art from Charles Russell, who inherited them from Smith’s sister. It is a grand acknowledgement of that gift.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art was determined to be the ideal repository for Smith’s jewelry because of its significant Twentieth Century design holdings and because of Smith’s deep connections with Brooklyn. A major component of the gift is the Smith archives, which include some 250 pieces that range from his design drawings, several unfinished pieces, his original shop sign, catalogs of exhibits of his work, his account books and detailed correspondence. While they are not on view, they are available to scholars at the museum. Photographs of models wearing his jewelry are also included.
Smith’s jewelry is complemented by 30 works by other Modernist artists from the museum’s permanent collection. Those artists include such masters as Elsa Freund, Claire Falkenstein, Ed Weiner, William Spratling, Eva Eisler, Jung-Hoo Kim and Frank Rebajes.
“From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith” is on view through May 17 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway. While plans have not been finalized, it is hoped that the show will travel. For information, 718-638-5000 or www.brooklynmuseum.org .
