carving and casting

Monday, September 24, 2012

THE FOURTH DIMENSION

Remember the tempest in 2009 when actress/model Heidi Klum cancelled her signature jewelry line, which included some clover-inspired designs? Lawyers for Van Cleef & Arpels apparently reminded Klum that "Van Cleef owns the clover" (as The New York Daily News reported), and she and her financiers backed off. Klum has since launched a "wildlife" collection on one of the shopping networks; happily for Klum and her design team, no one has yet suggested that VC&A "owns the wildlife"...

Circa 1975 Van Cleef & Arpels engagement ring

(image via Erstwhile Jewelry)

It's understandable that a luxury retailer like Van Cleef would challenge a TV personality stamping her name on fashion jewelry resembling one of its most popular motifs. But what about one of Van Cleef's own in-house designers? The question arose last week when the Court of Appeals in Paris ruled that contributions by individual members of a fashion house's creative team must be regarded as part of a company's "collective" archive.

The back story: Thierry Berthelot, a former VC&A designer, had argued that his output for the 15 years he was employed at the firm was carried out entirely on his own initiative without supervision and, therefore, he had ownership rights to the designs he'd produced. The French court not only ruled against Berthelot (bringing to mind Diana Vreeland's famous commandment about the collaborative process: "Never say 'I! Always say 'we'!"), it scolded him for holding onto design drawings—more than 500, according to news sources—during the 7-year-dispute in order to "enforce the intellectual property rights he claimed"; he was then ordered to pay his former employer 10,000 euros in damages for this "malicious behavior."

Circa 2003 Frivole earclips in 18kt white gold with pavé-set diamonds

and larger round brilliant cut diamond centers,

signed Van Cleef & Arpels

Image via betteridge.com

Berthelot, who says he was the designer of VC&Arpels 2003 Frivole collection among others, vows to seek satisfaction in a higher court, though French law apparently favors those who "initiate" and supervise creative work over those who execute it. Sounds like someone may need more than a four-leaf clover to win this case.

An unsigned circa 1910 gold and diamond "Symbolist" Clover Ring

with one four-leaf sprig hidden amongst the clovers

Image: Tadema Sold Archive

As William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem "Among Schoolchildren," How can one know the dancer from the dance? Or, in the realm of adornment, the fabricator from the jewel? Clearly, the presence of a retailer's signature or maker's mark does not tell the full story...

Gustav Manz's renderings of his bronzes and numbered

jewelry designs were featured in a self-published brochure

While no registered maker's mark has yet been found for Manz & Co, Gustav Manz did sign at least some of his work. On bronzes as well as his small silver one can detect "Manz" in block letter print, as shown, below, in a detail from a circa 1910 brochure he self-published, with 12 plates illustrating his favorite motifs. An independent designer-fabricator, Manz apparently relied on word-of-mouth, and longstanding relationships (coupled with discretion), to generate commissions from boutique jewelers and retail powerhouses like Theodore B. Starr, Dreicer, F. Walter Lawrence, Kirkpatrick, Gillot, Tiffany & Company, J.E. Caldwell, Marcus, Shreve Crump & Low, Raymond Yard, and Black, Starr, Frost-Gorham (a common practice that continues today, as Courtney Bowers points out in her profile of Manz for Magazine Antiques).

Though confident enough to list his profession as "artist" in early city directories, and recognized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1924 for the exceptional design and workmanship of his production pieces, Manz was less focused on developing brand awareness than providing a steady income for himself and his employees. The firm survived the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and two world wars until Manz's retirement in 1944, and continued for another decade under the ownership of George Hartjen, his head engraver and chaser.

At the Thirteenth Annual Convention on Industrial Art in Washington, D.C. on May 16, 1922, Clara R. Mason, of the Philadelphia Art Alliance, bemoaned the post-industrial practice of paying subcontractors and in-house artists to relinquish ownership of their creative output. Here's the text of Mason's paper, reprinted in the October 1922 issue of The Magazine of Art (via google books).

A circa 1900 gold, enamel and pearls clover brooch, marked for Bippart, Griscom & Osborn. According to the Newark Board of Trade's 1912 directory, the firm employed over 100 workers,

among them "the highest class of skilled workmen engaged in this line of manufacturing."

Image via Two Nerdy History Girls Pinterest board

From October 1910 through the 1920s, a young woman in Portland OR collected over one thousand four-leaf clovers and pressed them in whimsical patterns between pages of ledger albums. Her name was Alda Carlson, and she lived until the age of 93 according to provenance supplied by the original eBay seller (whether she signed her creations or worked unassisted remains to be determined); more on Alda's creative output here and here

(image via anonymousworks.com)

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GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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Monday, September 17, 2012

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Design for a silver or white gold peacock ornament, c. 1900

Gustav Manz design book (Mathews family collection). Manz's costbooks include a production sketch of a similar pendant fabricated for New York decorator and jeweler Edith Douglas Deane
Design (c) Gustav Manz LLC

During the years preceding World War I, beauty was the thing with feathers—especially in iridescent peacock shades (except in millinery, where ostrich plumes ruled, and fetched nearly as much as diamonds by weight until the global trade crashed in 1914). In 1904 Charles Freer had purchased the Peacock Dining Room his friend James McNeill Whistler had designed for a client, then had the chamber and its appointments dismantled and shipped home to Detroit to house his art pottery collection. In 1911 D.H. Lawrence borrowed the title for his first novel, The White Peacock, from the rare pale Indian Blue bird.

Manz's production sketch for a carved diamond set platinum peacock pendant with colored stones. Made for Tiffany & Company 1910 -1915

Gustav Manz archive, Winterthur Museum Library

In the jewelry trade, Gustav Manz was sculpting peacock feathers in gold, platinum, and silver, embellishing the vanes with diamonds or colored stones or both. He carved peacocks into pendants and rings for Tiffany & Company as well as for private customers. F. Walter Lawrence's display for a jewelry show at the National Arts Club in 1903 featured a large case of articles mostly executed by Manz including: “... a fine conventionalized peacock for a breast ornament, the eyes in the separate feathers formed of colored jewels...” (De Kay, "An Exhibit of Jewelry," NYT, November 20, 1903; also featured in F. Walter Lawrence, "Symbolism in Jewelry," Town & Country, December 12, 1903). When Lawrence sent three dozen pieces to the St. Louis World's Fair the following spring, Manz received credit in the official catalog as the goldsmith responsible for the work—a rare acknowledgment of the craftsman on whose skills the firm's reputation depended.

Peacock ornament, circa 1903, created by Gustav Manz for F. Walter Lawrence, a salon jeweler formerly associated with Marcus & Company, The pendant shown above and below appeared in an article about jewels featured in Lawrence's salon, the majority of which were produced by Manz. Image from Irene Sargent's "A Goldsmith-Sculptor" :The Keystone July 1905

In May 1915, Edith Douglas Deane, a prominent New York interior decorator and designer of "particularly artistic jewelry" (Who's Who of America, 1914) ordered or picked up a silver peacock pendant from Manz's workshop at 37 East 28th Street. A production sketch of the pendant pasted in Manz's costbook illustrates a peacock with tail feathers partially encircling a blue-green oval Amazonite cabochon.

Peacock fever spreads to readers of
Good Housekeeping (February 1902)

A graduate of New York School of Applied Design for Women (founded by Ellen Dunlap Hopkins), Deane was the daughter of lawyer and realtor John Hall Deane, who served as a trustee at Vassar (Edith's alma mater) as well as the University of Rochester (his alma mater), and was a major benefactor to Calvary Baptist Church—where he once dropped $100,000 into the collection plate (no doubt following Andrew Carnegie's dictum that "It is a crime to die rich"). At her Madison Avenue showroom Edith traded precious and semi-precious stones as well as decorating hints, and was the source for turquoise scarabs set into a collar Manz created for another well-heeled client, Elinor Evans Klapp, who also designed jewelry as well as interiors.

By the early 1920s, Deane was associated with the Manhattan decorating firm of J.C. Demarest & Co., contributing occasional pieces to The Modern Priscilla and Today's Housewife and lecturing at Women's Clubs on topics such as "Historic Influences on Modern Furniture in the American House" and "The Use and Abuse of Period Rooms and Furniture"...perhaps wearing the feathery pendant carved by her go-to jeweler.

Deane served as contributing editor for Today's Housewife (cover illustration by Ruth Eastman Rodgers); a 1925 advertisement in The New Yorker promoted Deane's lecture series (probably placed by the James B. Pond bureau, which booked her speaking engagements)

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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

IN THE ARCHIVES: GUSTAV MANZ'S BRONZE AGE

Bronze Egyptian revival desk suite by Gustav Manz, circa 1921 (Private collection). Image Gustav Manz LLC

Established at the turn of the 19th century by Riccardo Bertelli, Roman Bronze Works was the first bronze foundry in the United States to devote its business to the lost-wax casting method—a process that offers a more exact replica of the artist's original work than any other. From its Brooklyn location and subsequent factory in Corona, Queens the foundry cast sculpture and decorative hardware (floor registers and door jambs, etc.) for virtually all of the architects, sculptors, and other metal artists associated with the American Renaissance, including artist-jeweler Gustav Manz (1865-1946).

In the late 1980s, Roman Bronze closed and its sculpture inventory was auctioned. The business archives—77 linear feet of them—were acquired in 1990 by the Amon Carter Museum in Forth Worth. At this time, records are not yet digitized, but an index of names culled from ledgers, account books, and client/customer index cards is searchable online. And the library staff welcome research queries (though serious data diving still requires an on-site visit). The scope of Manz's dealings with Roman Bronze may never be known—a good chunk of the foundry's records were destroyed when one of its Brooklyn buildings (275-289 Green Street) caught fire in 1921; additional records were lost during a later move to Queens.

Bronze bulldog plaque signed by Manz, possibly cast at Roman Bronze Works, circa 1912

(Private collection)

In the early 1900s, when he was actively pursuing a career as a sculptor, Manz may have retained RBW to cast some of the statuary he would later exhibit at the National Arts Club. He would have been familiar with the foundry's scaled-down replicas of neoclassical sculpture and animal figures by Barye, and western vignettes by Remington; as a designer-manufacturer he may have ordered castings of artistic metalware he produced as a sideline to his jewelry.

Future delving in the archives may provide answers.

But what a snapshot of an era just one page from a 1905 ledger provides! A record for Manz—who was by then residing in the Leonia artists' colony in northern New Jersey—abuts one for B.E. Dahlgren, chief model-maker (originally trained as a dentist) for the American Museum of Natural History, and later curator at the Field Museum in Chicago; as well as hardware vendor Henry Frank Jr.—whose mail-order catalogue stocked iron, brass and steel nuts and bolts, tools and other supplies for maritime, factory, railroad, plantation, and general contracting. These days, an art gallery occupies street level at 23 Warren Street, the cast-iron-fronted building where Frank conducted his hardware business—a reuse some of the neoclassical architects in RB's ledgers might have appreciated.

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GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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Ledger image courtesy of Amon Carter Museum Library in Forth Worth

Monday, August 13, 2012

THE JEWELER'S DAUGHTER

Born in 1903 on the Fourth of July, Doris Rosalie Manz was the younger of Gustav Manz's two daughters with his first wife Martha Bachem. In a circa 1920s studio photo (detail above), Doris wears a Chinese style dress, and a ring stack that includes one of her father's designs for a bezel-set cabochon jade, as well as a link bracelet with tassels wound around her wrist. By her late teens she'd not only become fashion-conscious but was acting as her father's sales agent, picking up knowledge of gems for mounting from people she called on in the trade, such as young Harry Winston, Witherbee Black of Black, Starr & Frost, and George Frederick Kunz of Tiffany & Co.

Stylish, gregarious, and ambitious, Doris inevitably came onto the radar of Neysa McMein, the illustrator responsible for McCall's magazine's American Beauty series and a friend of sculptor Sally James Farnham, who was a personal acquaintance and customer of Doris's father. The resulting cover portrait—showing Doris with a wavy bob, representing the "The Scandinavian American Girl"—appeared on the magazine's November 1924 issue. (Surely an issue worth splurging a Liberty head dime on!)

Decades after Manz's business archive was donated to Winterthur Museum, one of Doris's business cards was discovered pasted inside her personal copy of George F. Kunz's Rings for the Finger. The author's inscription on the flyleaf reads:

For

Miss Doris Manz,

In appreciation of a

friend of her father

the author

George Frederick Kunz

27 August 1920

New York

Beside his signature, Kunz sketched a hieroglyph or rune engraved upon a stone. We'd give anything to know whether Tiffany's swashbuckling gemologist was merely showing off his calligraphy or offering a secret handshake to a young woman seeking to rise and prosper in the field her immigrant father (as well as her maternal grandparents, diamond ring manufacturers in Newark) had chosen.

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Saturday, July 28, 2012

OLYMPIC DREAMS CARVED IN GOLD

In honor of the London games this summer, we pulled up a few Olympian gems produced by Gustav Manz in the early 1900s. Manz's training as a draughtsman and jeweler coincided with archaeological digs of the late 19th century, which revived classical motifs and styles.

THE DISC THROWER

A pair of classical figures flank a large sapphire on the ring above: the visible side depicts the Discobolus; the other side features Manz's take on the marble statue of the Borghese Gladiator by first-century B.C. sculptor Agasius of Ephesus

THE HEAVY LIFTERS

Heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, naked with their reined steeds, steady an oval stone in this early Manz design

Hand-wrought in rose gold, Manz's "Discobolus and Gladiator" ring (shown above) was one of a dozen pieces illustrating art critic Irene Sargent's review of work coming out of F. Walter Lawrence's salon (most of it executed by Manz) in the July 1905 issue. The detailing on the signet ring in the sketch below it not only shows off Manz's fondness for high-relief carving but his wit and skill in compressing the myth of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, onto the narrow band of the ring. He managed to fit in a "boxing ring" (overlapping straps) beneath the feet of Pollux, famous for his fisticuffs though he was ultimately outmatched by a brass-headed giant named Amycus. When his twin Castor died in a fight their father arranged for the brothers to maintain their closeness by placing them among the stars as the Gemini Twins.

THE ARCHER

Designs in Manz's surviving ledgers invoke satyrs and bacchantes, fauns and naiads, and other Greco-Roman figures; an entry for a ring sold to retailer George Bell in 1919, who may have been introduced to Manz's work at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904,identifies the figure reaching for a grape cluster in this sketch as Diana, Greek goddess of hunting, the moon, and chastity

THE FREESTYLERS

More pieces showing off Manz's flair for modeling mythological figures, photographed on stationery from his studio at 41-43 Maiden Lane, circa 1901 (Winterthur Museum and Library)

Coincidentally, the third modern Olympiad also took place in
St. Louis during the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and was more or less folded into the fair—creating the perfect backdrop for Manz's evocations of buff classical gods and goddesses in the fair's art pavilion.

A photograph of unfinished jewelry found in Manz's business archive at Winterthur (above) offers further clues to what his work from that time looked like. Several items incorporate iridescent shards of ancient glass. Placed atop a sheet of Manz's business stationery are a buckle or dress clip styles as a lotus flower; two scenic brooches evoking Nile Valley flora and fauna—lion and snake (upper left), Sphinx and pyramids (upper right); a fancy pendant depicting a semi-nude woman dancing above diamond-set lotus blossoms. And, at center, an purse frame carved with mermaids rising from a lotus pond; the finished piece, marked for F. Walter Lawrence, was set with a cabochon chrysoprase and is now in private collection.

To be sure a craftsman's homage to artistry, and to the heroes and deities, from a distant, non-industrialized past ... in perfect harmony with wealthy Americans' infatuation with Grand Tours and European high culture.

notes

1. Discobolus ring first appeared in The Keystone; thanks to Cleota Reed at Syracuse University for locating this image

2. Photo of custom work from Manz's studio, c 1900-1905; courtesy Winterthur Museum
3. Atlas and Diana ring design drawings by Gustav Manz (c) Gustav Manz LLC
4. Poster courtesy of Smithsonian Image Collection
5. Special thanks to several descendants of George Bell for sharing biographical details

Olympic Revival: Poster for the games held in St. Louis during the summer of 1904, signed "St. John"

GUSTAV MANZ LLC

Thursday, June 7, 2012

GUNDA RISES TO THE OCCASION

GUSTAV MANZ™

Her big ears mark her as African. Also her tusks: Only males of the Asiatic species grow ivory. Nonetheless, we nicknamed this bracelet Gunda to honor the spirit of the wild-caught Asian male elephant that was a star attraction at New York Zoological Park (aka Bronx Zoo) in the early 1900s, when William Temple Hornaday was director.

The bangle's ornament, replicated from an original Manz casting, derives from his design for a platinum and pave-set diamond elephant brooch. Variations of the pin were made for Cartier, Black Starr & Frost, Udall & Balllou and others in the 1920s.

Production notes for platinum and diamond elephant brooch,

pave-set with 80 stones, sold to Cartier on September 19, 1925

Gustav Manz stockbook, Winterthur

The Gunda Bangle (top and above)
GUSTAV MANZ™

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GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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All images (c) Gustav Manz LLC