Retro 1940-1949

Say hello to nuclear fission, the computer, the microwave oven, the Xerox copier and the Polaroid. The United Nations is born, Israel is reborn, and Gandhi is assassinated. LSD is discovered and the French involve themselves in Vietnam, two events that will reshape the America psyche in about 25 years. Blood transfusions are introduced and Pan Am announces the first round-the-world flight. World War II ends, Germany is divided, India and Pakistan make war, not love. Mao seizes power in China. All is not bleak, though. The Great Depression is finally over.

Paris, as always, is the catalyst. The 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Modern Life takes Art Deco's geometrics and floral stylizations and gives them a dramatic, sculptural twist that leads to a new movement in jewelry design. As with WWI, WWII pulled rank and co-opted the world's platinum supplies, leaving designers to their own devices. Designers rose to the occasion, as expected. Suddenly there appeared assertive, sculptured pieces using rose, white and green gold in conjunction with yellow gold. The new, three-dimensional look took life in scrolls and raised domes. Rubies and sapphires were accented with the muted colors of citrine, tourmaline, amethyst and aquamarine, which were around in abundance. The motifs of the movement included ballerinas, bows, large link chains, and rings with fantastically scrolled shanks.

Sculptured Style

Nothing spurs ingenuity so much as a good war. Faced with destruction, privation and hardship, people adapt to survive. Paradoxically, adverse situations even cause them to thrive. The Retro movement in jewelry was just such a case of adaptability leading to triumph. In the same way that Art Deco was Art's reproach to the obscenity of World War I, Retro was its retort to the waste of World War II.

French house Van Cleef & Arpels, exhibiting their fine jewels at the 1939 World's Fair, opted to keep them in the U.S. at the outbreak of the war. U.S. designers were greatly influenced by what they saw, including bracelets with ribbons of hexagonal lines, centered on flowery clusters of fine gemstones fastened with heavy clasps containing gems set en suite with the band. In Paris, the house of Cartier responded to the German defeat of France in apt fashion. It showed its unbowed spirit by creating its fanciful animalier style. Animal figures in gold, studded with gems and enhanced by shining enamel, reaffirmed the power of joy and beauty in the face of the Nazi occupation. In particular, its Bird in the Cage and Freed Bird jewelry items were done as a slap in the face to the Vichy regime.

Retro rose as Deco fell. Deco's one-dimensional flatness became Retro's chunky, sculptured three-dimensionality. There were raised rectangles, domes, baroque scrolls and gemstone bands. Gold and gems were thus consolidated for easier transport during dangerous times. Because the war effort cut off supplies, jewelry manufacturers used what gems and metals were in stock. Sprays and bunches of diamonds were bound loosely with flowing scrolls, plaques, twists and spirals of diamond baguettes. The Spanish Crown Jewels became a casualty of war, though others used this to their advantage. The jewels were broken up and their stones put on market. American dealers bought many of them and had the old-fashioned mine cuts redone in modern cuts, employing the talents of those European cutters who had fled the war overseas.

Bouquets of Color

One of the few nice things about a war is that it ends. The growing, upper-middle class of the post-war period reveled in its new prosperity. After years of deprivation it was hungry for opulence. It longed to strut its stuff, and did. A remarkably ostentatious use of gemstones marked the period, and for good reason. While mining in South America for electronic-grade mica, feldspar, quartz and lithium minerals to fuel the needs of war, the powers that be inadvertently uncovered hundreds of gemstone mines in Brazil. Eureka is too small a word for what followed. A cornucopia of gems poured out of the mines of South America, including citrine, topaz, kunzite, chrysoberyl, aquamarine and amethyst. Tourmaline and rubellite were discovered in vast quantities. Rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and turquoises became the favorites of the period, but the unchallenged star of the day was peridot, which found its way into numerous modern pieces of the time. Faceted gems retained their popularity, but there was concurrently a big revival of interest in beads and cabochons. All of these were popular when mounted in independent prong settings that made a smoothly continuous band, or jumbled together in a bouquet of color. The new gold alloys mixed with copper and silver turned out lovely new shades of gold in pink, green, and white as well as in the accustomed yellow.

Though created from the crisis of war, Retro did not immediately pass with the conflict. It hung on a few years. Many interpreted this period as a mere transition between Art Deco and the styles of the 1950s, but it took François Curiel to realize what had been afoot. Curiel, the head of Christie's jewelry department in New York, first categorized this movement in the 1970s. He saw the pattern that those living through it had been close enough to miss. To make it easier for his customers to approach the jewelry of that period he gave it the label, Retro. Soon, valuable and expensive pieces of the period were showing up at prestigious auction houses. Retro, to be sure, was a genuine movement. It had a nice run until shortly after the war, and then passed its crown to the glitzy Fifties.

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