The circa 1964 "Boa” necklace is also suggestive of a sea horse. The spikes emanating from the curved spine are decorated with eight bezel-set hard stones.
: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 (1917–1982) 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.
The circa 1959 "Baker” bracelet is made of a sheet of silver overlaid with thick silver wire. The interplay of light and dark gives it a particularly dramatic aspect.
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
.
