In her column for Elephant, Kitty Lees delves into the jewellery archives. March’s offering: a Modern Cuff by Art Smith.
Cold, flat sheets of brass, held together by thin twisted rods, ever so slightly off balance. If you squint, you could be looking at the warped strings of an old guitar.
This is the work of Art Smith, whose smooth, sculptural practice made him a leading figure in New York’s studio jewellery movement from the 1940s through the 1970s. Centred in Greenwich Village, this was a modernist shift from the conventions of fine jewellery; moving away from precious stones and toward humble materials and handmade techniques.
Smith worked mostly in copper and brass, twisting wire and soldering sheet metal to create these strangely wonderful pieces of wearable art.
His influences were eclectic – drawing from Surrealism, ‘Primitivism’, African sculpture, and the sinuous abstractions of Alexander Calder – but also from jazz: its rhythm, its beat and potentially its blues. Smith, an openly gay Black artist, worked both within and against the limits of his time. His biomorphic metal shapes, punctuated by the occasional semi-precious stone, carved out a language of jewellery that was distinctly his own.
This bracelet carries a lightness not unlike the jazz that Smith so loved – something in the openness of it, the way you can see the wearers skin through the form. Space is important here and so is the wearer, her pose bold to match the jewellery. The cuff’s brass rods arc with a kind of musicality; their flattened ends like the keys of a saxophone or trumpet, as if the piece itself could play a tune.
Like many of Smith’s designs, the cuff is equal parts metal and body. It occupies space, and in doing so asks the wearer to do the same.
