Editor’s Note
This article highlights a Tokyo exhibition celebrating the centennial of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Art Deco jewelry, framing it as a tribute to the enduring power of design and a testament to global cultural exchange.
An exhibition in Tokyo is dedicated to the Art Deco jewelry of the Parisian house Van Cleef & Arpels from 100 years ago – honoring the timeless relevance of a design movement. The show is conceived as a declaration of love for globalization and cultural exchange.
In fact, it recalls an era in which art, craftsmanship, and design were inspired by a captivating idea: that the world could be shaped and improved. In times of spreading doom and gloom (see, for example, the detour on the journey here), this over-100-year-old way of thinking is more necessary than ever.
First, there are a few facts to clarify and remember. In 1925, an interdisciplinary exhibition took place in Paris, for which a not insignificant part of the city center was paved with temporary buildings. The “Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes,” as it was aptly named, was originally planned for 1914 but had to be postponed several times due to World War I.
Seven years after the end of the war, an international showcase of diverse disciplines opened, ranging from architecture and fashion to jewelry design. Over 16 million visitors attended. Numerous artists were still working through the traumas left by the war, but little of that was visible in Paris – except perhaps in the constructivist pavilion of Russia and the “scandal pavilion” of the magazine “L’Esprit Nouveau,” which featured works by Picasso, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger and where architect Le Corbusier presented his dystopian vision of a car-friendly city.
This mega-show marked the peak of the Art Deco style (an abbreviation of the exhibition title), which, strictly speaking, was a hybrid of various aesthetic currents. The dynamism of Art Nouveau was still recognizable, the asceticism of the Bauhaus, founded in 1919, was noticeably spreading, and Futurism, celebrated especially in Italy, glorified mechanics and dynamics like a hysterical sister of elegance.
And yet, Art Deco is a style that resonated for a long time, influencing architecture as well as automotive design, and perhaps as one of the last aesthetic movements, it managed, in its traditional pursuit of beauty, to brazenly throw itself into the arms of the future.
Among the visitors to the exhibition were the Japanese Princess Nobuko Asaka and her husband Yasuhiko. Upon returning to Tokyo, they had a villa built in the style they had admired in Paris, by architects and interior decorators who had also been involved in the world exhibition. Today, the Teien Museum resides in this house. Here, the French jewelry company Van Cleef & Arpels is displaying historical jewelry pieces – partly from the archive, partly on loan from private collections – which are broadly related to the Art Deco style.
The centerpiece and poster motif is the bracelet for which the brand was awarded the gold medal in jewelry design at the time: a magnificent piece with a minimally angular rose blossom as its central motif.
It’s a detail one encounters repeatedly: how aesthetic effects unfold from technical innovations. Furthermore, the exhibition is a marvel of symbiosis. The museum’s rooms are a design masterpiece in which every radiator cover, every ventilation grille, even the interior of the fireplaces are precisely planned.
Many of the interior details engage in an almost absurd dialogue with the exhibited jewelry. A wallpaper of rectangles in different shades of silver-gray, which looks like a modern metropolis in a silvery mist, and a rectangular grandfather clock that resembles a sturdy skyscraper.