Chaumet Opens a Jewelry Show in Tokyo, With Some Explanation of the Treasures and the Life They Stood For

We spoke with the show's two curators — the former director of the Louvre and the director of the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum

Whatever is retro is in fashion.

Put more academically: taking inspiration from the art and fashions of the past is Historicism. The Historicism movement shaped French decorative art deeply during the Romantic period of the first half of the 19th century.

This is the Hope Cup, made by Chaumet between 1853 and 1855 for the connoisseur Henry Thomas Hope, showing the ancient Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda. It won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855. The colorful enameled figures will probably remind you of the slightly odd German Rococo style that had been fashionable a century earlier.

The cup is one of more than 300 objects in Chaumet's jewelry exhibition at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo. The organizers borrowed pieces from 40 collectors and from 15 museums and other institutions, showing jewelry, sketches (design drawings), accessories and related oil paintings that Chaumet has made since the 18th century.

The curators are Henri Loyrette, former director and now honorary director of the Louvre, and Akiya Takahashi, director of the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum. We talked with both of them about the exhibition and about decorative art; the interview is at the end of this article.

Last year Chaumet held a jewelry exhibition at the Palace Museum in Beijing. That one was arranged in chronological order; this one is split by theme into different galleries, with two threads running through it — "jewelry and art movements" and "historical works and contemporary works." The themes that stay with you are Historicism, the meeting of East and West, and Kinetic Art, and the interview below keeps coming back to them.

The rise of Historicism in 19th-century decorative art cannot be separated from the mass production the Industrial Revolution made possible, or from the rise of the bourgeoisie. The show also includes 20 contemporary pieces that are for sale, designed from works one or two hundred years old and displayed alongside the old ones — Chaumet's own idea, presumably, of "contemporary Historicism."

Historicism in art history drew its design ideas from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the 17th-century Grand Siècle, and ended up in Eclecticism.

This is "Raijin," a brooch designed in 1900 in the Eclectic style. A woman in a kimono stands with the thunder god; the figures come from Far Eastern mythology, while the decorative elements come from the Renaissance and the 17th century. It is made of gold, cat's eye, agate, ruby, emerald and diamond.

The brooch is also a reminder that Eastern culture has always had an influence on European art. From the second half of the 19th century, after the Meiji Restoration opened Japan to the outside world, Japanese culture left a mark on the work of Parisian jewelers — smaller, perhaps, than the mark ukiyo-e left on European painting, but real. It went beyond decorative art: it grew into a reverence for Japanese art across several artistic fields, and "Japonisme" flourished in Europe for a time. French decorative art, and Art Nouveau between 1890 and 1910 above all, owed a great deal to it, as the brooch above shows.

Before Japonisme, Europe had a vogue for "Chinoiserie" that began in the 17th century. This is the fan of a French marquise, from 1830, a glimpse of how Europe imagined a Far East centered on China. Chinoiserie caught on among the upper classes because Europe and Asia were trading heavily.

This imagining and absorbing of foreign cultures was, in Loyrette's words, "a search for elsewhere, geographically." By the 1920s it had turned into the better-known Art Deco.

Jewelry, after all, is meant to be seen on a body. That is one reason Loyrette counts it as Kinetic Art.

This is "Six Swallows in Flight," a diamond piece from 1890 that can be worn as a headpiece or as a brooch. Each "swallow" sits on its own flexible support, and the case may also hold a fan, an attempt to recreate the way the birds move when someone wears them.

What Chaumet may most want to show here is its history as Napoleon's jeweler, along with its long record of making tiaras and the size of its own collection.

This is a portrait of Napoleon I in his coronation robes. The coronation sword carries a 140-gram gemstone, now in the Louvre. The stones you can see in the painting were set by Nitot, Chaumet's founder.

The imperial appetite for gemstones carried over into diplomacy. This tiara, on loan from the Vatican, was Napoleon I's gift to Pope Pius VII; it holds a carved emerald of 414 carats.

Not only in France: elsewhere too, at least a hundred years ago, jewelry stood for wealth and power, especially in high society. "We learned the concept of wearing 'luxury jewelry' from the West," Akiya Takahashi said.

In The Role of Jewellery in Japan's Modernization, an essay written for the show, Junko Aoki, a project associate professor at Daito Bunka University, argues that women's dress played an important part while the Meiji government modernized the country through "Westernization."

Japan's imperial family and aristocracy studied Western manners and Western dress — including the wearing of jewelry, which does not really suit the traditional kimono, a point Takahashi returns to in the interview — and went out into international society in a manner Western high society recognized. This was an important step in "Westernization," so jewelry was worn not only to display wealth and power at home, but, more importantly, to show the world a country fitting in.

"There is no doubt that in the modern age the accumulation of wealth has always come with hardship for the less wealthy members of society, and that behind every piece of jewelry lies suffering those people can hardly imagine," Aoki writes near the end. "And yet the brilliance of these stones, and the lives of those noble ladies, still draw us in."

Interview

Henri Loyrette was director of the Louvre from 2001 to 2013. Before that he was at the Musée d'Orsay, as a curator from 1978 to 1999 and as director from 1994 to 2001.

Akiya Takahashi has been director of the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum since 2010. From 1980 to 2006 he was a curator at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and from 1984 to 1986 a visiting scholar in the office set up to open the Musée d'Orsay.

Q - Qdaily

N - Noblesse

L - Henri Loyrette

T - Akiya Takahashi

(Note: interview time was limited, so QDaily conducted this interview together with Noblesse (《望》).)

Q: It looks as though you have known Mr. Takahashi for a long time. Was that one of the reasons this exhibition happened?

L: We have known each other for 40 years; we are both fairly old now. Back then we were both young curators at the Musée d'Orsay. As you know, the Orsay holds a great deal of 19th-century art. Even before it opened, in the early 1980s, we worked together on many projects. Since sometime in the 2000s, Takahashi has run the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, and in the roughly 10 years since, he has done many exhibitions about 19th-century art. For temporary exhibitions this is one of the best places in Tokyo — especially for anything to do with the 19th century.

We have stayed in close touch, and last year we did the Palace Museum show together. After that we decided to stage this exhibition again somewhere else — which is hard, because it means borrowing a good many pieces — and in the end we decided on Japan, with the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum as the venue that suited the show best. After talking it over with Takahashi and his team, we put together a curatorial team. I think we picked the right place. But imagine it: mounting a show inside the vast Palace Museum and mounting one here are two completely different spaces, so we had to think again about how to make a different exhibition, even though the text is the same.

Q: Why Chaumet for this exhibition?

L: I didn't choose Chaumet — I mean, you could say we chose each other. I am a curator who specializes in 19th-century art, and about four years ago I came across the Chaumet Archive in Paris. It is not just a room full of jewelry; it is a considerable cultural heritage. They have thousands of drawings, photographs and other records, work they have kept up for nearly 200 years. For a scholar like me, digging through that material was fascinating. After talking with Béatrice de Plinval, who heads Chaumet's heritage department and is a curator herself, we decided to put on an exhibition. Last year's Palace Museum show was, you could say, the first time this Chaumet collection had ever been exhibited.

N: You have curated many exhibitions. Chaumet has more than 200 years of history, and the museum is old too, while exhibition-goers around the world today are a younger crowd. What specific ways are there to attract those younger visitors?

L: Every exhibition is curated differently. I have always tried to help young people make sense of the heritage of the past — I began doing that at the Louvre. There are many methods: you can invite a contemporary artist to comment on the pieces, or display the collection in a particular way to bring in more young people.

There is another important point. A curator has to look back, but not only back; you also have to understand the present and have some insight into the future. You can learn a great deal from history. In your country, for instance, Chinese history is very long, reaching back to classical antiquity, which is unusual. You understand the past in order to serve the present, and you keep an eye on what is coming.

Q: Mr. Takahashi, we have just talked with Mr. Loyrette about your friendship, how this exhibition came about, and what museums can do to draw in young people. I would like to move on to the place jewelry, as a category of art object, holds in art history, and to other art-historical questions — you are both, after all, art historians. From the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum's side, what do you hope this exhibition will bring?

T: Yes, we probably have to go back into some history to understand it, because it is very different from the Chinese case. Japan does not have a strong tradition of wearing jewelry. In fact we did wear jewelry before the 18th century, but in the 18th century, for various reasons — above all once the kimono took the stage, a garment worn in layer upon layer, which is not well suited to jewelry — people stopped. So for a long time neither men nor women wore jewelry, which is probably different from China, and different from Europe, which has a jewelry tradition.

When Japan began to modernize, from the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a great deal of exchange with Europe, especially during the Meiji era, and we became interested in digging up a jewelry tradition, France's above all. That was when Japan and Europe met each other aesthetically.

On the other side, as Mr. Loyrette mentioned, Europeans had always had certain notions about the Far East, and in decorative art especially, Asian taste influenced many European artists. So Chaumet's heyday fell exactly in the period when Europe met Japan — not only Japan, in fact, but all of Asia. Chaumet had already taken a great deal of inspiration from Asia by then, and that is one of the things that drew us to this exhibition.

Our museum opened in 2010 and puts on three or four exhibitions a year, and certain themes come back. One is art in the broad sense, and 19th-century art in particular: the building went up in the 1890s, at the end of the 19th century, which is one reason we concentrate on that period. The second theme is the meeting of East and West. Another is women. We started with a Manet exhibition, and we have also shown the famous British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

The Chaumet project fits what we have been doing over the past decade or so. Add to that the fact that Mr. Loyrette and I are old friends — we worked together at the Musée d'Orsay, a friendship of more than 40 years — so when I was invited to join, I felt it connected with the museum's earlier projects, and that it was a good idea.

Q: Since we are on the subject of putting on exhibitions: is a jewelry show different from other shows, an Impressionist painting show, say? If so, how?

L: It really is different. Jewelry is a branch of decorative art, of course, but in museums jewelry is usually displayed apart from other art objects. At the Louvre, for instance, it is shown in a long gallery upstairs, as though it were the museum's treasure. That is not how other artistic genres are handled, including other decorative arts. So there is always an ambiguity about jewelry — is the point to show the beauty of the stones, or to tell people the pieces are rare and precious (and expensive, naturally), or to present the design itself as a work of art?

Besides, the main purpose of jewelry is not to lie on a table, hang on a wall or sit in a case. Jewelry is made to be worn, and that is its meaning. When a jeweler designs and makes a piece, he or she keeps in mind that it will be worn — perhaps against the skin, perhaps over a garment — and has to think about how it moves, because the wearer is always moving.

That is a little like what we now call Kinetic Art: the object, jewelry in this case, is always in motion, and it usually changes as the light changes. So jewelry is not a static art object that sits in one place; fundamentally it is meant to be worn. But once you turn it into an exhibition it sits in a case and stops moving, displayed like any other art object. There is a tension there, a contradiction — though not a total one, as long as you remember that being displayed is not the whole of a piece of jewelry's life.

Q: Is there any way to ease that tension, that contradiction? Mr. Takahashi, at the opening you brought up the idea of "intimacy," which was also one reason you thought the Tokyo show would be better than last year's in Beijing. Is "intimacy" a solution, or a key element of a jewelry exhibition?

T: I did say I have a bit of nationalism in me (laughs), so that was something of a joke. I have great respect for both cities. That said, at a jewelry show like this I really would urge people to look closely at these precious objects, which are in a sense quite personal — and for the intimate atmosphere such a show needs, I do like the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum.

N: We talked earlier about two cultures meeting and influencing each other. We know Japonisme flourished in France during the Belle Époque — why did the influence from Japan come in that particular period? As far as Japanese culture's influence in France goes, the Belle Époque matters a great deal.

On the other hand, in the Meiji era Japan opened to Western civilization — not only France, but Italy, Germany, and, after the Second World War, the United States. So why does France's influence on Japan today seem to exceed that of other European countries — Japanese chefs' fondness for French cooking, for instance?

Perhaps a hundred years ago, with no internet and travel far less convenient than now, people had a certain imagination about unfamiliar cultures, and that pushed them to explore them. Now that people travel so often, will this sort of thing still happen a hundred years from now?

L: Mr. Takahashi will take your second question. On the first, you have to understand that France has been curious about places beyond itself since very early on.

From the Middle Ages onward, for instance, France was very interested in Islamic culture, collecting and admiring its art. By the 18th century China's influence on France was considerable too, and there is a word for that phase — Chinoiserie — which eventually became very lively and did a great deal for the development of French decorative art. Not only decorative art, in fact: you can see the influence in the paintings of François Boucher, a very French artist.

But those countries — the Islamic lands, China — were open at the time, trading freely, so you could get such things from them fairly easily. Japan was a completely closed country then; we knew very little about it. Then suddenly, at the end of the 18th century, Japan opened its doors, and it happened that French artists were looking for something new. This exquisite art arriving from Japan was, for them, quite a shock.

The 19th century was also an age that was always looking elsewhere, in time and in space. Back in time: many of these Chaumet pieces were shaped by the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Outward in space: to distant countries, India, China, Japan, and later Africa and Oceania. All of that came afterwards. When Japan met Europe, French artists were looking for some kind of aesthetic renewal, and the two fitted together.

T: For Japanese people, the outside world — France, China — consists of continental countries, which is not our experience. Both gave rise to vast civilizations, historically and geographically. France is an influential cultural empire, and China needs no explanation from me: a huge empire, thousands of years of civilization. Japan is completely different, which probably has to do with our different social structure.

Japan of course had periods when it was stronger than at other times, and it had an imperial system too, but on the whole it was a lighter system, resting on a kind of openness tied to nature and the divine, rather unlike an empire with real power in its hands. It was not dominating, and the culture that came out of it was also more closely tied to nature and the divine.

To foreigners Japan is samurai culture, and therefore masculine, but the truly important culture underneath it was nurtured by women — soft culture, for want of a better term. In 19th-century France, this thing I call soft culture began to spread widely.

It may have been a coincidence — but history is always like that. Soft culture happened to be in vogue in France just as Japan opened up, bringing with it a culture and an art built on soft culture, and the two matched perfectly. That is probably also why Japanese people always feel close to 19th-century France, a feeling that has lasted from the 19th century to this day.

Paris then was perhaps taken to be the center of world culture, and even now France and Paris strike Japanese people as a very high-end culture, which keeps them feeling close to France, or at least imagining they are. Looked at another way, this is probably a kind of trauma for us (laughs).

Q: Judging by your studies and your careers, you both have a great interest in 19th-century French art. Where does that interest come from, for each of you?

L: Hard to say. As a Frenchman I have easy access to French art and the material around it, but my interest is not confined to France; I have always been interested in the world beyond it. At the Orsay, for instance, I was very interested in Scandinavian art, and at the Louvre I dealt a great deal with Russian art and founded the museum's Department of Islamic Art.

Being very interested in the art of one period does not mean ignoring the rest, and French museums have always been open to collections from abroad. The Louvre was founded in 1793, and its earliest holdings came from the French king's collection, much of which came from overseas — so from the start the Louvre was seen as a global museum open to everyone, and it has gone on collecting art from around the world.

T: The same goes for our museum: we do not look only at 19th-century art. If we get the chance to show work by Chinese or other Asian artists, we would be glad to — Sanyu's work, for instance.

The Worlds of Chaumet jewelry exhibition is on view from June 28 to September 17, 2018 at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

The cover image and the unattributed images in this article were provided by Chaumet; the cover image has been cropped. Please note that reproduction photos shift the colors and cannot show the pieces faithfully.