Jewelry

Tuesday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Bryna Pomp is MAD about jewelry

Open Bryna Pomp’s wardrobe and you’ll find a uniform of near identical navy blue and black dresses. Yet squirreled away in dozens of boxes in her closet-cum-office are more than 500 pieces of contemporary jewelry: the bolder the better.  For the last thirteen years, Pomp has curated MAD About Jewelry, the Museum of Arts and Design’s popular annual pop-up that sees makers from across the globe travel to the Manhattan institution to show and sell their wares. In the process, she has built her own vast collection, ranging from brooches to earrings to necklaces.

Monday

Jane Coombs

Jewel aid

In the late 1890s, the workshop of Maison Cartier adorned its Belle Époque clients in “garland-style” jewelry fashioned from white diamonds in platinum settings shaped like curled ribbons and bows. Soon, however, a more streamlined style began to emerge. In 1904, the workshop produced a small, rhomb-shaped brooch, decorated with smaller rhombs in diamonds and rubies. By the 1920s, Cartier was regularly producing polychromatic jewelry in a linear, abstract style made up of interlocking or tessellated triangles, squares, lozenges and other geometric shapes that had rarely been seen in Western jewelry. The craftsmen also combined brightly colored stones such as turquoise, coral and jade, and they experimented with enamel. What prompted this dramatic change?

cartier