Three Pieces of Jewellery

CHRISTOPHER COOK: When is jewellery art and when is it a portable investment? Something to run with when the revolution or indeed, the police, are snapping at your heels. That's a question provoked by the three pieces of jewellery in front of us today here at the Victoria and Albert Museum taken from the magnificent collection of jewellery here in the museum, which alas is currently off-limits as they redesign the jewellery galleries.

Now, Slutzky a graduate of Weiner Werkstatte and then in the 1920s at the Bauhaus, that group of practical visionaries who rewrote the history of art and design, made a bracelet in Hamburg in 1929, chromium plated brass set with a chunk of haematite. 30 years later, Arthur Fleischmann, who'd also studied in Vienna broke most of the rules about traditional jewellery and carved a crab out of Perspex and had it set in silver as a present for his wife. Then lastly, there's Giovanni Corvaja's brooch in platinum and gold made in Padua last year. Portable wealth perhaps, but like Fleischmann and Slutzky's jewellery, work that really lifts the aesthetic spirits, that challenges our idea of what jewellery ought to be.

To discuss these three fine pieces, I'm joined by Clare Phillips, who's the curator in the metalwork collections here at the V&A.

Clare, let's start by having a look in detail at each of these pieces. Let's start withy the earliest piece which is the Slutzky piece.

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, here, as we've just said is apiece made of chromium plated brass, a very grey, you'll perhaps see it glinting, but it's a rather steely dark colour and a very angular geometric piece. It's made from thin sections, quite long sections, narrow sections of tubing which are then bound together with wire to make the flexible strap that would go round the wrist. And these, very much the sort of interest in industrial techniques and repeated units that were available in mass produced form being transformed into a piece of jewellery and very much challenging our idea of jewellery as something that is very decorative or very glittery. It's a very minimal, very stark piece, in some ways quite similar to work that was being produced at a similar date in Paris by the most radical of the Art Deco jewellers.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: It does have an Art Deco feel to it, doesn't it?

CLARE PHILLIPS: It does. It's very much that machine aesthetic, but here, whereas most of the French jewellers had been working in white gold and platinum, here you've got the very unusual material, chromium plated steel, which of course we are familiar with from the furniture and the interior decoration that the Bauhaus were working on - the wonderful Marcel Breuer chairs or the light fittings, but here, to sort of transfer it into jewellery, a very, very different… a very, very different approach to materials.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: And Arthur Fleischmann's approach couldn't be more radical. Fancy carving in Perspex, which is what he did for most of his career.

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, many jewellers from the '70s would think that Perspex, well, acrylic, as they would call it, was a very, very… was probably the best and the most accessible material to be working in but in the late '50s, this was a completely different matter. Perspex, the chemical formula that had been developed by ICI was patented in the mid 1930s and was available commercially in '36, I think, but it had been used in the war for… as an alternative to glass because it didn't shatter so it was ideal for cockpit covers or things to do with armaments and machine guns and it really hadn't been explored as a decorative medium at all and Fleischmann's widow explained to me that very fortuitously, on the boat he arrived in England on, from Australia, a long voyage, he'd actually met the director of the plastics division of ICI…

CHRISTOPHER COOK: As one does. (Laughs)

[Audience laugh]

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, I think we have a great deal to be thankful for that he was on that particular boat, but certainly when he arrived in England he made contact with ICI very quickly and was really the first person to explore the decorative potential of Perspex and so, although it's not the earliest piece of plastic jewellery in the collection, because of course plastic was used through a large chunk of the 19th century to imitate precious materials, it's the first time really that plastic's been used in its own right and certainly the larger work that Fleischmann did explores much more the translucence of this very beautiful material.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: And it's set in silver, by another jeweller?

CLARE PHILLIPS: It's set in silver by a working jeweller. Fleischmann was a sculptor. He worked in a wide variety of materials from bronze, clay, wax, wood, ivory. Perspex, apparently is a rather hard material to carve. It blunts the tools and he was using the same tools he would've used for wood or stone to carve the Perspex and I think when you come up and look at the piece afterwards, the fineness of the detail he's achieved using these really rather large tools is absolutely incredible.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: It's the fineness of the detail that perhaps distinguishes the third of the three pieces, the Giovanni Corvaja brooch, which is just… it's magical isn't it, just magical?

CLARE PHILLIPS: It is a magical piece. It sort of dances before your eyes, which, given it's very rigid geometric structure, it's based on a six-pointed star which is made out of narrow rectangular bars of gold. But the six points, it's actually a 12-pointed star, it's a six-pointed star that curves upwards and downwards and then this wonderful lattice of bars that creates the geometry around the outside edge.

Corvaja's parents were both chemists and he describes how they were atomic molecular structures lying around the house and they obviously formed a part of his visual language as a child and he's managed to translate this sort of interest with the structures underlying the universe into this absolutely incredible piece where the geometric structure is filled with this mesh of hair-like threads of… I mean, threads is too thick a word, they're like the finest of hairs, which are drawn to…

He couldn't find these wires at this narrow, narrow gauge at all, so he invented and designed and made the machine that's created this wonderful… And it looks like a tangle but every piece is absolutely in place and onto it, floating rather like planets in the, in the sort of… in the atmosphere. There are these tiny golden granules applied, melted onto the platinum wire. It's an incredible piece that I think unites technical, incredible technical skills with a very sort of scientific or very much an academic curiosity.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: It does look as if there's a whole universe here. To see the universe in a grain of sand to misquote William Blake, doesn't it?

CLARE PHILLIPS: It's a little bit larger than a grain of sand of course.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: The question that all these three pieces raises for me is: what exactly is jewellery, what is it's function? We've moved a long way from the notion of precious stones and portable wealth, haven't we, when we look at this?

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, I think, the Bauhaus piece or the piece by Slutzky, he wasn't actually at the Bauhaus when he made this but it was a very formative time in his development. I think that must challenge our perceptions of jewellery most radically and certainly when we consider it was made in 1929. But we must bear in mind that in Germany at this date there was incredible hardship and precious materials were very difficult to find.

Slutzky's work, in terms of wearability, it certainly does fit what we would think of as jewellery, perhaps amongst a very select group, admittedly, but amongst that group it was very highly regarded and we know that Paul Klee, who was teaching at the Bauhaus at the same time actually exchanged watercolours for pieces of jewellery, so it was official covetable for Paul Klee to exchange the odd watercolour. And also sufficiently in demand for Gropius, who was the director of the Bauhaus, slightly falling out with Slutzky at one point because he claimed that Slutzky was putting orders for pendants through without entering them in the account books for the Bauhaus who ought to take a cut.

So, it did have its market. I think we know a little bit less than we might, because of the Holocaust. A lot of Slutzky's patrons were Jewish and a lot was lost at that point. The Fleischmann ring, this is a very personal piece.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: Therefore in a tradition of giving jewellery personally.

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, making and giving, not just giving, but making the piece and also very much the tradition of the artist as jeweller. In the '50s, jewellery design was, what it now acknowledges from within, at a very low ebb. Jewellery design was at a very low ebb and design was… was a skill that was really… the jewellery industry as a whole was suffering terribly and a lot of fine artists, Picasso and later Braque, did turn to making jewellery and we've got pieces by Elizabeth Frink and Bernard Meadows and Terry Frost in the V&A's collection that were made in about 1960/1961 to try and breathe new life into the jewellery design in the UK. I think this fits very much into that individual artistic vision, being brought into jewellery and design.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: Corvaja's brooch presumably comes out of a great Paduan tradition of goldsmithing out of a longer tradition which I guess could stretch back to the renaissance?

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, I suppose the renaissance, the goldsmith we've all heard of from the renaissance is Cellini, so the Italian link is very strong. Padua certainly, from the 1960s has managed to establish the most incredible goldsmithing school. Corvaja, who made this brooch, started training as a goldsmith at 14 in a special school in Padua where you could learn the crafts as a trade alongside your academic schooling. And, from Francesco Pavan in the '60s, this wonderful manipulation and way with gold has become the hallmark of this school in Padua. They manage to transform gold into these amazing abstract forms with beautiful textures that are quite unlike how we perceive the brightly polished gold that we think of as being the typical gold we see in jewellery.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: If I look for a link between these three pieces, then the most obvious one is that each of the three makers is interested in the potential of the materials they've chosen. In a sense, each piece begins with materials.

CLARE PHILLIPS: In each case they're pushing the materials beyond the conventional use of them, that's absolutely right. And they're fascinated, I mean Corvaja is fascinated by the techniques. He has, in some ways, a very scientific approach to what he's doing. I mean, it's rather marvellous that after however many thousands of years man has worked with gold, he can still do completely new things with it.

But, yes, in each case, it's the materials pushing beyond the conventional use and giving us a startling new idea of how jewellery can…

CHRISTOPHER COOK: And if it's also materials, it's also process - it's what you can do and how far you can go. I mean,. that's clearly true of the Corvaja. It seems to me also true of Slutzky's piece, it's to see how far, to use Klee's great phrase, you can take a line for a walk .

CLARE PHILLIPS: (Laughs) Yes, I think that's absolutely right and to go again to the Fleischmann piece, it is, it's a completely… in some ways the technique is much the same but nobody had applied it to Perspex and I think it was Philip Ward-Jackson who referred to these Perspex pieces saying that he treated his materials quixotically as though they were a translucent wood and certainly, you know, every little chisel mark is there.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: But you have to get so close to see it.

CLARE PHILLIPS: That's always the case with jewellery. (Laughs) Almost always.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: There is another fascinating link between these three pieces which has to do with the circumstances of each of the three maker's lives. Corvaja was a student here eventually, at the Royal College of Art but both Slutzky and Fleischmann, were refugees from the German-speaking world. Slutzky came and worked in England, Fleischmann went to Australia but then came to England. But there is a kind of English connection that binds all three.

Now, I'm going to ask you the impossible question for a historian, a design historian: can you see an English link between these three pieces?

CLARE PHILLIPS: I have to say, this isn't a rehearsed question you've dropped on me here.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: Oh, perish the thought.

CLARE PHILLIPS: An English link - yes(!) Well… An English link, that's very hard, that's very hard.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: We can turn the question round the other way and ask: is there something about English tradition in design but perhaps also in jewellery that is wonderful at plundering the skills and gifts of others who wash up on its shores?

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, certainly, in all the art forms I think we've been marvellous at capitalising on that. I think with a piece that's made in Germany in 1929 and a piece that was made in Italy in 2003, it's rather hard to necessarily draw out the essentially English nature of it perhaps. Yes.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: But is there a kind of willingness that these three pieces represent, except within an English context that there is generally you might buy in the high street, grand or ordinary high street, but there is also a great tradition of art jewellery, to go back to my original question?

CLARE PHILLIPS: Yes, yes, I think that is an interesting point, whether that's distinctively English or whether that's distinctively 20th century, I'm not sure. I think the acceptance of all materials within the sort of field of jewellery is something that you can see across… beyond Europe to America and the Far East, the whole debate about what jewellery is and what it should be made of is really very much an international one.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: And when you look at these three pieces, in your own mind do you settle another of the questions I suggested at the beginning - whether this is art or whether it's money you can put in your back pocket and run with quickly?

CLARE PHILLIPS: I think if I was given a choice from the V&A's collection and told I had to run quickly, I probably, if I was being sound and I wanted to live for the next ten years, I probably wouldn't choose any of these. I think they all explore what can be done in different materials but if you really want jewellery that converts instantly to the maximum amount of money, I think you have to look at the raw materials. Although we have a piece made of gold and platinum, I think if you melted it down you'd find a lot of it was air.

CLARE PHILLIPS: (Laughs) You'd get a rather small block of platinum which I think… Jewellery as portable wealth is very tricky. The links are there from centuries ago when people used to be given their wonderful chain of office in the early renaissance and the used to melt it down to make whatever they wanted and jewellery's always sort of had that role but I suspect that's a role that 20th century jewellery finds it doesn't quite accommodate.

CHRISTOPHER COOK: I love your honesty about what you'd run with.

CLARE PHILLIPS: Well, I think if I was assured of a crust of bread every day, I'd probably take the Corvaja. (Laughs)

CHRISTOPHER COOK: Clare Phillips, thank you very much indeed.

CLARE PHILLIPS: Thank you very much.

[Applause]