31 Jan
Sparkling through the centuries There’s a lot to marvel at in two exhibitions celebrating Tiffany’s special contribution to jewellery
When Holly Golightly was hit by the “mean reds”, she hopped in a cab and headed for Tiffany’s. “The kind men in their nice suits and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets”, and maybe all the diamonds, too, cured the panic attacks from which Truman Capote’s engagingly wayward heroine suffered. Today, Tiffany’s seems to have much the same soothing affect on museum directors.
In November, Laurelton Hall, the country house designed inside and out by Louis Comfort valentines jewelry, will be the subject of a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition. The son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, the company’s founder and his successor, Louis Comfort was also a leading figure in America’s Arts & Crafts movement, most famous now for his luminous stained glass windows and lamps.
Fernanda Kellogg, head of public relations at Tiffany says that, when the Met’s director Phillippe de Montebello suggested the company might be backers, “he said that for us to sponsor the show seemed the most natural thing in the world.” Tiffany thought so, too, to the tune of half a million dollars.
But even before that, another Tiffany-sponsored Tiffany exhibition opens in London. Bejewelled by Tiffany at the Gilbert Collection, traces the company’s history through its jewels. (Timothy Stevens, the collection’s director, chooses to not reveal the size of Tiffany’s donation, explaining that that is “the British way”.)
When a brand moves from shop to museum it is, as Kellogg freely admits, “enormously prestigious” for the brand. Whatever sponsors spend, they are getting a bargain. Suddenly their product is no longer merely merchandise, it’s art.
Bejewelled promises to be a dazzling and revealing show. And Tiffany certainly doesn’t donate only when its name appears in big letters. They contributed Dollars 100,000 to the American Folk Art Museum’s Masterpieces of American Jewellery for example.
But the rise of single-brand-sponsored shows raises the troubling question: what will happen to museums and galleries if they go on taking large amounts of corporate and private money? And such sponsorship is a growth industry. In Britain during the last 30 years, private investment in the arts has gone from Pounds 600,000 to Pounds 450m a year. Governments applaud. But should we?
Will museums become ever more tempted to mount only, or mainly, those shows that easily attract such sponsorship? Will donors start calling the shots, determining a show’s content – or interpretation? Have they already?
In 2001, the Smithsonian Institution accepted Dollars 38m from the Catherine B Reynolds valentines day jewelry to create a Hall of Achievers, giving the donor the contractual right to choose its advisory committee and much of its content. After 70 curators and scholars made public their outrage, Reynolds eventually withdrew her gift. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, bewildered by the carrying-on, explained his puzzlement: “The Smithsonian takes a lot of money from big corporations who have certain strings attached to their exhibitions,” he observed.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the lines between art and advertising (corporate and individual) are becoming blurred. Cartier has backed Cartier at the British Museum and the Met, Armani sponsored Armani at the Guggenheim and the Royal Academy (RA) in London, collector/dealer Charles Saatchi bankrolled Sensation, which promoted his artists, at the RA and the Brooklyn Museum.
Pressure is on museums from governments that measure an institution’s success by how many people visit. Museums, therefore, feel they have no choice but to pull in coachloads. Top brands and hot artists are a logical next step; like top fashion models and pop stars, they now have the kind of glamour that once belonged only to movie stars. But does this mean that such exhibitions are the best museums could offer?
An exhibition devoted to, say, French Belle Epoque Jewels rather than Cartier might have been just as popular. Ditto, A Millennial Survey of Great Italian Fashion Design. Such shows, in casting a wider net, might have greater aesthetic scope and had more to reveal about social history. But of course, those shows might never have been mounted – even if they had been dreamed of – because the museums might not have found the money to put them on.
“I’m old enough to remember when museum exhibitions were not sponsored and we didn’t look for sponsors,” says the Gilbert’s Timothy Stevens. But in those days, he continues, “exhibitions were publicly funded.”
His earlier experience of museums may have led Stevens to choose a cut-off date of 1987 (Tiffany’s 150th birthday), for Bejewelled. This cordon sanitaire is meant to act as a barrier between Tiffany’s historical production and its current output, keeping the show from looking like a retail promotion. But of course Bejewelled is very likely to lend an extra glow to current stock.
Were the Tiffany show to spark off renewed discussion and consideration of the problems, actual and potential, of single- brand exhibitions it would be enough reason to praise it. But while an exhibition focusing on, say, three great American business success stories (of which Tiffany is certainly one), might have given us more to think about, Bejewelled is both engaging and educational.
The exhibition is curated by the V&A’s esteemed jewellery historian Clare Phillips who, scrupulously, will talk Tiffany only on the days she is not working at the V&A.
The more than 180 pieces Phillips has chosen (all but half a dozen from the corporation archives) tell quite a story about American design, visual imagination and merchandising techniques too. On the second count alone it is a big plus. The National Gallery, after all, owns not a single American painting; the Louvre has only three.
When Tiffany opened its doors in 1837, it was a fancy-goods shop importing almost anything its clients desired, from yards of Canton silk to stacks of Guerlain soaps. Jewellery was only a small part of the business. But soon there was a representative in Paris shipping over fashionable jewels. Tiffany’s swiftly moved to making jewellery in New York, even opening its own training school, and by the end of the Civil War (1865), Tiffany-made jewels were decorating some of the Gilded Age’s richest necks and bosoms. The Tiffany diamond cut, created in 1886, released an extra degree of brilliance. To this day, Tiffany still means”diamond engagement rings” to many.
Phillips cites 1889 as a “landmark” for Tiffany. That year Le Figaro illustrated its story about the Paris Exposition with three Tiffany pieces, calling its 24 exquisite enamelled orchid brooches the exhibition’s “iconic” jewels. As visitors to this show will see, they are covetable still.
Once established as an international name in jewellery design, Tiffany chose to make the most of what set it apart. “By 1900,” Phillips says, “almost everything was from an American source. They were using Montana sapphires, turquoise and fire opals from Mexico, tourmaline from Maine, pearls from America’s rivers. Louis Comfort Tiffany was inspired by indigenous plants like Virginia Creeper and Boston Ivy.” (A whole section of Bejewelled is devoted to his sinuous pieces.)
It was gemologist George Frederick Kunz who led Tiffany out into the wider world once again. “Kunz travelled all over,” Phillips recounts. Demantoid garnets from Russia were only one of the stones Tiffany jewellers began to work with as a result. The Tiffany yellow diamond, cut in 1878, was another. At 128.54 carats it was the largest in the world.
Exhibitions of gems put together by Kunz won Tiffany a Gold Medal in 1889 at the International valentine’s day jewelry gifts for North American gemstones and another one for North American pearls, as well as the one for jewellery. Ever since, Tiffany has been known for its impressive gems as well as its jewellery.
There have been dips in creativity during its long history. During the deco years, for example, Cartier outshone Tiffany in the inventiveness and wit of its designs. But in 1956, Tiffany, under the direction of Walter Hoving (whose flamboyant son Thomas later became director of the Metropolitan Museum), had the inspired idea to give artist/designer Jean Schlumberger an in-house boutique. Schlumberger, who’d worked with Schiaparelli in Paris, was as bold as he was imaginative. On view in the exhibition is one of his brooches, which consists of a jaunty diamond-encrusted bird nonchalantly tip-toeing along the top of the legendary Tiffany yellow diamond..
One of the surprises in Bejewelled is evidence of the founder’s marketing strategy, which remains unchanged today. From the first, Tiffany catered not only for the very, or even the just plain, rich. On display is a length of steel and brass which was part of the first transatlantic cable successfully laid in 1858.
“Tiffany had the foresight to buy up the residue and get a signed affidavit saying he was the sole owner,” Phillips explains. “Then he chopped it in little pieces and sold it at 50 cents apiece.” Souvenir seekers mobbed the shop.
