TOTEMS

Lady Abdy (Iya Grigorievna de Gay) models Cartier 'Pylon' pendant 
Vogue, December 1928 

One can stare at Lady Abdy's Egyptian ornaments in Sotheby's upcoming sale only so long before needing some kind of elixir to ward off envy. Researching Lady Abdy led us back to a Cartier event that took place in the firm's New York salon at 712 Fifth Avenue. Pierre Cartier, whose wife was American, perched there for a few years before he acquired the firm's flagship building across the street, famously swapping a strand of pearls for the deed. On 11 November 1913, Messrs. Cartier previewed a 5-days-only exhibit of refitted gems acquired "...from the Hindoo, Persian, Arab, Russian and Chinese..."  

          

               One of the 50 pieces exhibited in New York by Cartier in November 1913, shown with the cover of the catalogue

Next door to this grand display of exoticism, at 714 Fifth, shoppers seeking the latest scents from Paris entered beneath a 3-story glass window that Francois Coty commissioned from Rene Lalique, his bottle maker, to dress up the store's facade. Lalique obliged with a vertical cascade of poppies and vines parted like an Ice Queen's drapery by one course of clear panes. No doubt Gustav Manz strolled uptown from his workshop on East 28th to view Cartier's first pieces in the "modern" geometric style. And to gander at those titanic glass garlands catching the light over Fifth Avenue. 

Glass act: Lalique windows over entrance at 714 Fifth Avenue, formerly known as the Coty Buildling (currently occupied by the Henri Bendel department store)

At the time, Manz was one of a handful of artisans in New York doing the fine platinum work Cartier's firm would become famous for. His cost books and business correspondence reference sales of his own work to Cartier, and his design inspirations—particularly Egyptian themes—were fed by the same historical sources. 

Assorted Egyptian designs by Gustav Manz; hand-carved gold bust mounted on gem from a private collection; scarab and carved gemstone pendant shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Eighth Annual Industrial Arts exhibit (Jewelers' Circular, January 30, 1924); Manz drawing, Mathews family collection

In his early twenties, Manz had visited the Valley of the Kings and made detailed sketches of artifacts in the Cairo museum; his hand-wrought mountings for F. Walter Lawrence's line of ancient glass shards and tear bottles (an early type of vinaigrette) received admiring notice at the National Arts Club exhibit of "Old, Modern, and Oriental" jewels in 1903; many of those gems went on view at the international exposition in St. Louis the next year. 

  "Sphinx and Pyramid" charm with iridescent Cyprian glass fragment in hand-wrought gold by Gustav Manz, exhibited at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis (The Craftsman, April 1903). Below that, same piece photographed in Manz's studio, circa 1901 (Winterthur Museum)

In the late 1880s, Manz landed in Paris, where Lalique was making his name. By 1913, he'd established his own New York studio and was selling his revivalist designs to Tiffany, Marcus & Company and merchants in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. As a designer/manufacturer supplying mountings for some of the city's most prestigious jewelry houses, he had privileged access to historic artifacts acquired by the Metropolitan Museum and was adapting those motifs into his pieces. In 1924, Manz would exhibit his pieces alongside Cartier's at the museum's 8th annual industrial art show. 

Top: Platinum, gold, diamond, faience and colored stone 'Pylon' brooch, circa 1923, "Property formerly from the estate of Iya, Lady Abdy" (Sotheby's catalog); bottom:

Gustav Manz design for a Pylon-style pendant, circa 1901, Mathews family collection

Cartier has long since moved from No. 712, and the former House of Coty now houses fashion emporium Henri Bendel, now de facto trustee of the window. Coty's gift to the city has given us new respect for vintage perfume decanters offered on eBay, often with desiccated amber residue inside, reminiscent of the ancient tear bottles sought by Gilded Age aesthetes. (More on the history of this fragrant landmark at Daytonian in Manhattan.) 

This week, when Lady Abdy's jewels go on the block, we'll make our own pilgrimage to Bendel's for a whiff of Coty's closest successor to Parfum Styx (introduced in 1911) and a close-up look at the windows that just barely escaped the wrecker's ball when a developer seeking to alter the street-scape was sent packing by preservationists in the 1980s. (People discard perfume atomizers and rework old jewelry mountings, but no one throws stones at Lalique.) 

 

Coty perfume bottle with Lalique-style topper 
in silver travel case, c 1920 (eBay)

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Copyright © Laura Mathews, 2014 
All Rights Reserved 

 GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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SCARAB FEVER

Sphinx head incorporating a piece of ancient glass, design modeled in wax and cast in gold by Gustav Manz for F. Walter Lawrence (image Town & Country, December 12, 1903)

In late spring 1904, Jewelers' Circular reviewed an exhibit organized by the Handicraft League of Cincinnati and held at the city's Woman's Club, leading with a case with almost 50 pieces belonging to "Gustav Manz, New York" that included "fine examples of the old Egyptian outline":

• "The rings in the collection were immense and the settings of gems in etruscan gold, as well as the large brooches of lapis lazuli, Cyprian glass sphynx (sic) head, in the styles of over 2,000 years ago, made a decidedly beautiful and instructive collection..." (1)

Gustav Manz necklace pendant with scarab and pyramid-shaped drop featured at the eighth Industrial Arts Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (image from The Jewelers' Circular, January 30, 1924) 

Earlier that spring Manz's historical and nouveau inspired gold-work, including a sphinx head scarf pin fashioned around a piece of ancient glass, filled the case of jeweler F. Walter Lawrence's display at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Manz's work appeared in articles Lawrence wrote for The Craftsman (2) and Town & Country (3). While neither publication credited Manz as the maker, forms submitted to the jury selecting jewelry for the St. Louis exposition reveal that virtually all of the hand-wrought work in Lawrence's traveling collection were modeled and cast by the German-born Manz, and likely had a hand in designing as well (though an emphasis on "American" design and artistry probably worked against giving credit where it was due). Lawrence's salon, along with most of the prominent jewelry retailers in Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere, would carry Manz's wares over the next four decades. 

Manz's workshop produced this ring carved with stylized Egyptian lotus and set with green tourmaline for Tiffany & Co, 1922 (Manz archive, Winterthur Museum); below: Manz gouache design for a gem-set pendant with carved urei and Egyptian figure wearing headdress (Mathews Family Collection)

                         

By 1912, after partnering with fellow manufacturing jeweler Walter P. McTeigue for a few years, Manz was established in his own studio-factory on East 28th Street, at the edge of the Flatiron District. In March of that year, he registered copyright on one of his Egyptian designs: a sculpted panel, or plaque, depicting "Two columns, carved with figure of Isis and Osiris, supporting plate above panel of pyramids, sphinx and two lions nearby, in bas-relief." 

As the jewelry industry recovered from World War I, and the 1920s roared in, orders for Manz's patriotic themed subsided and demand for his Egyptian, animal, and "oriental" novelties increased. Around this time Manz's younger daughter became her father's traveling sales representative and in-house advisor on rapidly evolving post-war fashions for women. His long record of supplying fine carved mountings for Tiffany & Company paid off when he was invited to participate in one of the Metropolitan Museum's series of industrial art exhibits organized by the museum's forward-thinking decorative arts curator Richard Bach. 

        Gustav Manz gouache rendering of an Egyptian temple 

            mounting for a scarab (Mathews Family Collection)

The Jewelers' Circular's fashion correspondent Isabelle Archer effused over "splendid examples of commercial jewelry [from] the houses of Mehrlust, Manz, and Cartier..."(4) on view at the eighth annual show. One of the most admired pieces in Manz's case was a pendant depicting a king of the Nile flanked by seated attendants; it appeared on the cover of Jewelers' Circular's issue containing the first of Archer's reviews of the 1924 show. The piece incorporated a pastiche of symbols derived from Manz's earlier studies of archaeological holdings at the Cairo Museum as well as objects from excavations of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Detail from brochure for Metropolitan Museum of Art Eighth Exhibition of Industrial Art, 1924; inset: the Met decorative art galleries, circa 1920s (brochure and gallery image accessed via Thomas Watson Library, MMA)

At the conclusion of her review, Archer pivoted from the angular sapphire, diamond and onyx jewels in the Cartier group to Manz's latest reboot of traditional motifs that were, in her words, "very distinctly the Oriental type." The array of jade, pearls, pink beryls, and other gemstones set in lattice made for "a most remarkable color scheme."(5) Cartier's geometric mounts and Manz's chinoiserie broke away from art nouveau fantasy and Edwardian garlands and toward the sleeker, stylized forms and brilliant colors embraced by the flapper generation and designers of the art deco era. 

Manz's work rarely qualified as trendy, however. To the end of his career he maintained a craftsman's allegiance to hand-wrought, custom work, generally eschewing deco's glossy, machine-age contours. Through all the change he witnessed in over his five decades in America—political, social, industrial—his favorite periods and motifs hardly changed. As Fitzgerald writes at the end of The Great Gatsby, his 1925 flapper novel: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

From Near to Far East: This gold, jade, and enamel Buddha pendant passed down to a descendant by Manz's daughter may have featured in his display case at the Metropolitan Museum Industrial Art show in 1924 (Mathews family collection)

Notes

(1) "Beautiful Art Work at the Recent Exhibition of the Handicraft League of Cincinnati." The Jewelers' Circular-Weekly, Vol. 53, No. 20 (1904): 14  
(2) Lawrence, F. Walter. "Craftsmanship versus Intrinsic Value." The Craftsman 4:3 (1903): 181-185 (illustrated)

(3) Lawrence, F. Walter. "Symbolism and Jewelry." Town & Country (December 12, 1903): 34-35

(4) Archer, Isabelle M., "When Art Meets Industry: Modern Decorative Design As Shown at The Metropolitan Museum." Archer, Isabelle M. The Jewelers' Circular, Vol. 88 (February 6, 1924): 275. Jacob Mehrlust was the third manufacturer, along with Cartier and Gustav Manz, who received special mention in Archer's review.
(5) Archer, Isabelle M., "The Present Trend in Decorative Designing, Traced Through the Industrial Exhibition Now at the Metropolitan Museum," Jewelers' Circular Vol. 88 (January 30, 1924): 53-55

We would like to thank Courtney Bowers Marhev, author of the first scholarly 

study of Gustav Manz's work, Where Credit Is Due (Smithsonian, 2008); Janet Zapata for identifying Manz's relationship with F. Walter Lawrence in an article for Magazine Antiques (April 2004); the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum for digital access to The Jewelers' Circular, Industrial Art exhibition catalogs, and help locating correspondence between 

Doris Manz Eastman and Francis Henry Taylor; and to Winterthur Museum, Garden, 

and Library as the repository for the Gustav Manz Papers.

Post updated October 21, 2019

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Copyright © 2019 | All Rights Reserved 

 Except where otherwise credited all images 
 © Gustav Manz LLC