Precious education – Style – Kommersant

The school of jewelry art created by the famous French jewelry brand Van Cleef & Arpels celebrated its 10th anniversary. With the beginning of the new academic year, the director of the school, Marie Vallanet-Delom, and the head of the research department, Guillaume Glorier, congratulated the journalists.

In these ten years, exactly what the head of Van Cleef & Arpels, Nicolas Boss, hoped for when he created the school in 2012, happened. At first, many had the impression that this was done for a privileged group of students – loyal customers who deserved a new education with worthy purchases. Now it is clear that it plays a much more important role.

Nicolas Boss once worked at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which is committed to explaining what contemporary art is and why society needs it with every exhibition. Having headed Van Cleef & Arpels, he did not abandon the idea of ​​dialogue with the public. Jewelry art was, in his opinion, too closed a world, focused on a narrow circle of clients. “It seems to me that a house such as ours should maintain a dialogue between the real world and the artistic world,” he said in an interview with Kommersant. “Only this helps to maintain a lively curiosity, that genuine interest that gives us an incentive to improve. This is the way to avoid turning, God forbid, into a beautiful museum of ancient crafts.”

The school, which is located around the corner of Place Vendôme next to the boutique and workshops of the brand, has become the means and territory of communication. During these ten years, she not only welcomed listeners who came from all over the world to learn about jewelry. She supported historical and art research, worked with scientists, published books and catalogs with them, and held exhibitions, each of which became an event even in spoiled Paris.

Among the chamber, but important expositions was, for example, an exhibition of 500 men’s rings: from the jewelry of Ancient Egypt to the biker rings of the 1970s. The Bird’s Paradise exhibition, Paradis d’oiseaux, drew parallels between the descriptions of scientists, fine art and jewelry in the form of birds. Retrospectives of the Parisian house Lacloche or the work of the jeweler Jean Vendôme paid tribute to the names of French jewelry art forgotten by the public, those brands that have not survived to this day, but have influenced the present. An exhibition of glyptics has just ended, showing intaglios, cameos, carved seals, and engraved stones. And ahead, as announced at a press conference, is an exhibition of gold jewelry from the collection of Chinese collectors. This is also an important feature of the school’s exhibitions: as a rule, they show exhibits from private collections, in which the selection of works is also based on the personality of the collector: the Frenchmen Yves Gast and Guy Ladrière, the Chinese Betty Lo and Kenneth Shue and many others.

This year, the usual courses were supplemented by practical classes on diamond analysis, work with designers to create sketches of jewelry, and lectures on the history of jewelry art in the 1960s-1980s. Classes are conducted in French and English. Students are invited to travel around the cities of France and Europe, the next classes will be held in November in Lyon.

From a favorite toy of a rich brand, the school has become a real educational center open to the public, especially useful for those young people who would never otherwise have met with jewelers and gemologists and did not get into the private haute joaillerie club. It not only accepts students in Paris, its branch has been operating in Hong Kong for a long time, and now it will appear in Shanghai. Ten years ago, when I managed to take several courses, the school leaders promised to hold classes in Moscow as well. It would be strange to expect the fulfillment of this promise in the near future, but no one is going to take away the opportunity to learn from our compatriots at Place Vendôme. School enrollment is open to everyone.

Alexey Tarkhanov