A new art. Metamorphoses of jewelry.

Jewelry occupies a central place in the profound evolution that aesthetics has undergone since the 1880s. Far from being the simple reflection of an art history which is written elsewhere – in the “major” areas of painting, sculpture or architecture – it participates in the radical renewal of an imagination fertilized by the expansion of scientific knowledge and by its diffusion in a widely shared visual culture.
Reflection on the representation of life, on the forces which animate it and the principles which determine its construction takes on an original meaning for artists, craftsmen and manufacturers whose primary source of creation is matter: a changing malleable material which suggests dynamic flows, but also a formidably resistant, sumptuous and phantasmagorical material.
Receptive to historicist inspirations, engaged in symbolist research and Art Nouveau, then sensitive to the new decorative order, the great names of Falize, Boucheron, Vever and Fouquet rub shoulders with those of artists such as René Lalique, Eugène Grasset, Alphonse Mucha , Henry Nocq, Jules Desbois or Édouard Monod-Herzen with the same desire to place jewelry at the heart of the invention of forms.
Accompanied by a glossary of materials and techniques and an extensive bibliography, this work allows us to understand the extraordinary growth of the art of jewelry and jewelry in France between 1880 and 1914.