Flight of Fancy: Colored Diamonds

Diamonds are common. Shockingly common, in fact. According to the new book Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World (Ecco, $27.99), enough diamonds have been mined since 1870 to provide everyone on earth with a one-half-carat diamond ring and still have an extra billion carats to spare. But occasionally, miners discover that a weird and wonderful accident happened millions of years ago deep within the earth—the diamonds were exposed to radiation, or some of their carbon was replaced with boron, or they endured just the right amount of stress, and they acquired a color. Most of the time, naturally colored diamonds are yellow or brown, but every now and again they assume a scarcer hue: pink, blue, orange, purple, green, red, or something else in between.

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) calls diamonds that display rare and unusual colors “fancy.” Fancy diamonds with the qualities that earn the GIA modifiers “deep,” “intense,” or “vivid” and also weigh more than a carat are even fewer in number. So when a good-sized fancy stone that sports the right stuff appears at auction, bidders vie to empty their wallets. The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index shows that between January 2005 and the fourth quarter of 2014, the value of colored diamonds rose 167 percent. It did so on the strength of a parade of headline-grabbing auctions.

As good a place to start as any is Christie’s London sale of the Wittelsbach diamond, a 35.56-carat fancy deep greyish-blue, in December 2008. English jeweler Laurence Graff placed the winning bid of £16.3 million ($24.3 million) and redubbed it the Wittelsbach-Graff. In May 2009, Sotheby’s Geneva offered the Star of Josephine, a 7.03-carat fancy vivid blue diamond for CHF 10.5 million ($9.4 million), setting a then-record for the highest price paid per carat for any gemstone at auction. Graff struck again in November 2010 at Sotheby’s Geneva, setting a new auction record for any jewel by paying CHF 45.5 million ($45.6 million) for a 24.78-carat fancy intense pink that he christened the Graff Pink. Two other high-profile Christie’s sales that year—a 14.23-carat fancy intense pink that fetched HK $179.9 million ($23.1 million) in Hong Kong and a two-stone ring containing a 10.95-carat fancy vivid blue that sold for $15.7 million in New York—led the auction house to proclaim 2010 the year of the colored diamond.

But more jaw-dropping sales would follow. In April 2013, Christie’s offered the Princie Diamond, a 34.65-carat fancy intense pink Golconda, in New York for $39.3 million, a sum sufficient to earn the titles of the most expensive Golconda diamond at auction, the most expensive diamond sold in the U.S., and the most expensive diamond in Christie’s history. In November 2013, the largest fancy vivid orange diamond yet known appeared at Christie’s Geneva. Weighing in at 14.82 carats and simply called The Orange, it reaped CHF $32.6 million ($35.5 million). November 2014 saw Sotheby’s New York present the Zoe Diamond, a fancy vivid blue that soared to $32.6 million and claimed a trio of auction records—top price for any blue diamond at auction, a price-per-carat record for any gemstone, and the first stone to sell for more than $3 million per carat. In the same month, Christie’s Hong Kong auctioned a 2.09-carat fancy red diamond—not only is red the rarest hue among the colored diamonds, fancy red diamonds are virtually never seen in weights above one carat. It fetched HK $39 million ($5.1 million) and set world auction records for a red diamond and the price-per-carat for a red diamond.

Then came November 2015. On the 10th, Christie’s Geneva sold a 16.08-carat fancy vivid pink diamond for CHF $28.7 million ($28.6 million). The next day, Sotheby’s Geneva offered the Blue Moon diamond, a 12.03-carat fancy vivid blue (see page 96 of this issue). It fetched CHF $48.6 million ($48.4 million), seizing world auction records for any gemstone and for the highest price per carat of any gemstone. It also became the first stone to sell for more than $4 million per carat.

If you’re dazzled by this avalanche of facts, you’re not alone. But don’t form the impression that great colored diamonds are somehow more abundant than they once were. “Record-breaking stones appearing at auction doesn’t mean they’re more plentiful,” says Emily Barber, a jewelry specialist at Bonhams. “People are appreciating how special they are. They’re capturing the imaginations of collectors and investors.”

But why are these record auction prices happening now? Colored diamonds have been cherished throughout history. The Hope diamond is more famous for its alleged curse than for its navy-blue hue, but it remains one of the biggest draws of the Smithsonian museums. Look at any collection of crown jewels and you’re bound to find an impressive colored diamond—France’s contains the Hortensia Diamond, which is peachy in both senses of the word; Iran’s has two pink diamonds, including the largest pink diamond in the world, the 182-carat Daria-i-Noor; and the Green Vault of Dresden, Germany, gains its name from the magnificent 41-carat Dresden Green. Only in the 21st century did colored diamonds push white diamonds out of the spotlight and seize it for themselves.

“Before the last 30 years, colored diamonds were [seen] more as curiosities,” says David Bennett, worldwide chairman of jewelry for Sotheby’s. “Only recently have they been valued just as they are.” The shift in attitude can be seen in the designs of vintage and contemporary jewelry. “Today, when there’s a colored diamond in a piece, it’s the central feature. It’s about celebrating the beauty of the stone,” says Greg Kwiat, CEO of Fred Leighton, the legendary dealer of vintage and estate jewelry, and also CFO of his family’s 109-year-old namesake jewelry business. He adds that before 1980, colored diamonds “would still have been part of the piece, but they might have been part of a greater design. And they were maybe used a bit more whimsically in the past.”

The series of stunning auction results deserve much of the credit for the higher public profile of colored diamonds, but other factors played a role. Several experts cite a much earlier auction—a 1988 sale of a .95 carat red diamond for $880,000 at Christie’s New York—as pivotal. “When it sold for almost $1 million a carat, it created a stir,” says John King, chief quality officer for the GIA. “[The stir] started to build within the industry, and it spilled into greater awareness among consumers.” King also credits the effect of cutting techniques that arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “[The newer cuts] tend to collect and intensify the color,” he says.

Pop-culture events helped, too. When Ben Affleck proposed to Jennifer Lopez in 2002 with a six-carat pink diamond ring custom-designed by Harry Winston, it introduced countless people to the fact that diamonds come in colors other than white. “It was huge,” says Tom Burstein, senior specialist and head of private sales for jewelry in the Americas at Christie’s. “I was at Harry Winston at the time. It was then called the J. Lo pink. It drew great, great interest, for sure, and it had a tangible effect. People called in wanting to acquire a pink diamond of some size.”

The most powerful factor of all is the surge in demand from collectors seeking solid investment options. “Colored diamonds are perceived as a relatively safe asset class in which to put money,” says Barber. “White diamonds are soft at the moment, but colored diamonds continue to grow, and 2015 was a record year for colored diamonds. It’s not plateauing or decreasing. It’s increasing.” Burstein concurs: “The demand base is much broader, much more global.”

But the qualities that make colored diamonds sublime can also make them frustrating to acquire. “Even with the means, it’s tough to get anything exact,” says Scott West, executive vice president of LJ West Diamonds, which specializes in colored diamonds. “If you want a five-carat fancy vivid blue diamond, you may have to wait. It could be years. And when the stone does come out, there’s not just one customer, there’s a few customers that want it. When you have people capable of paying more, it’s a question of do you want to wait a few years for something similar, if it ever does come, or do you pay five or 10 percent more?”

Also confounding is the gulf between words and life. Two colored diamonds that have near-identical descriptions on paper can seem radically different when you hold them in your hands and really look at them. “When you talk about pink and blue diamonds of size and importance, it’s tough to talk about them as a group. They’re all individuals,” says Bennett. “To me, each stone has a personality. They are as different as people are different.” The distinctive personalities of large fancy colored diamonds ensure that every auction is a one-time event: there is no other stone quite like it, and there won’t be one again until it finds its way back to the market. “You don’t wear a GIA report on your finger. You have to look at the stone,” Burstein says. “If this color pleases you, I could show you three others of the same grade and you won’t like them.”

For all these reasons, top colored diamonds are likely to continue to make and break auction records for years to come. “The thing is, white diamonds are not really worth what everyone’s been told they’re worth. They don’t have the rarity that’s been claimed for decades. Colored diamonds actually do,” says Aja Raden, author of Stoned. “They are what white diamonds were advertised to be. They are rare, and they do hold their value. I think they are headed toward being in the 21st century what white diamonds were in the 20th—the icon of privilege and glamour.”

“Nothing interacts with light like a diamond. That’s what makes them so prized,” says Burstein. “When you add color on top of it? Forget about it, it’s over.”

original source: http://www.artandantiquesmag.com/2016/01/fancy-diamonds/ by Sheila Gibson Stoodley

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The Story of Art Nouveau

If you’ve been to Paris or seen it in photos, you’ll recognize the swirling, plant-like gates, with their distinctive lettering, that serve as entryways to the city’s subway system, or metro, as it’s known there. Of the many terms for Art Nouveau in France, Style Metro remains one of the most persistent, thanks to Hector Guimard’s enduring design for the entrances. Unveiled during the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, the design would become a symbol of the Art Nouveau movement.

But it had begun years earlier. From the 1880s until World War I, artworks, design objects, and architecture in Western Europe and the United States sprouted with sinuous, unruly lines. Taking cues from Rococo curves, Celtic graphic motifs, Japanese masters Andō Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence(1789), Art Nouveau artists took the plant forms they saw in nature and then flattened and abstracted them into elegant, organic motifs.

The Movement’s Origins

The term Art Nouveau first appeared in the Belgian art journal L’Art Moderne in 1884 to describe the work of Les Vingt, a society of 20 progressive artists that included James Ensor. These painters responded to leading theories by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and British critic John Ruskin, who advocated for the unity of all arts. In December 1895, the German-born art dealer Siegfried Bing opened a gallery in Paris named “Maison l’Art Nouveau.” Branching out from the Japanese ceramics and ukiyo-e prints for which he had become known, Bing promoted this “new art” in the gallery, selling a selection of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, and objets d’art.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

La troupe de Mlle Eglantine, 1896

Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris

William Morris (1834-1896)

The Strawberry Thief (Flower and Bird Pattern), 1884

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Encouraging the organic forms and patterns of Art Nouveau to flow from one object to another, the movement’s theorists championed a greater coordination of art and design. A continuation of democratic ideas from Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement, this impulse was as political as it was aesthetic. The movement’s philosophical father, the English designer and businessman William Morris, defined its main goals: “To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it.” Morris disdained the working conditions bred by the industrial revolution and abhorred the low-quality bric-a-brac created by factories and amassed in homes of the era.

He insisted that functional design be incorporated into the objects of everyday life, and his mix of aesthetics and ethics rejected the heavy ornamental qualities of the 19th century, specifically the cumbersome, almost suffocating excesses of the Victorian period. His ideas manifested as many distinct national flavors. In Scotland, there was the rectilinear Glasgow Style; in Italy, Arte Nuova or Stile Liberty, after the London firm Liberty & Co.; Style nouille (“noodle”) or coup de fouet (“whiplash”) in Belgium; Jugendstil (“young style”) in Germany and Austria; Tiffany Style in the United States; and in France, Style Metro, fin-de-siècle, and Belle Époque. For some, Art Nouveau was the last unified style; for others, it was not one style, but many. As with all art movements up until the late 20th century, it was dominated by men. 

The Leaders of Art Nouveau

Perhaps the person who best expressed Art Nouveau’s steep historical arc, like a flame that burned brightly but briefly, was the young Englishman Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, whose perverse sensibilities made him the most controversial figure of Art Nouveau. Finding inspiration in the truculent manner of American expat James Abbott McNeill Whistler and in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Japoniste posters, Beardsley began his formal artistic career at just 19 years old. The celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones would come to shower praise on the untrained Beardsley’s drawings when he saw them in 1891.

Beardsley’s India ink illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé established many essential Art Nouveau ideals. Their shadowy imagery, flat decorative patterns, stark contrast, and controlled but swooping lines quickly earned the artist international recognition. Depicting the biblical story of Herod beheading St. John the Baptist at Salomé’s request, the drawing for “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan” drips with erotic imagery: folds of fabric, streams of blood, and tendrils of hair. At lower right, a flower evocatively blooms in the darkness, while a black passage at upper left seems to reverberate with the dark thoughts of a scowling Salomé. Thanks to his formal talents—not to mention his propensity for erotic and sometimes pornographic subject matter—Beardsley became a touchstone for some of Art Nouveau’s most recognizable artists, despite his early death from tuberculosis in 1898.

Left: Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax, 1894. Image via Wikimedia Commons; Right: Photo of the painting Medicine by Gustav Klimt, via Wikimedia Commons.

While Beardsley was an untrained prodigy, Gustav Klimt attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) and began his career as the establishment wunderkind. Klimt’s early works, such as his murals for the new Burgtheater in Vienna’s Ringstrasse, fulfilled academic and bourgeois expectations for art with their naturalistic depictions of historical scenes.

But not all of Klimt’s work fit such orthodox constraints. The atmosphere of erotic love and sexuality that pervaded Vienna around 1900 exerted a powerful influence on the artist. Like the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Klimt saw the artist as a messenger of truth, not fantasy. In 1894, he undertook a commission for murals in the assembly hall of the University of Vienna. Rather than representing the field of Medicine in a logical or sanitized way, as he was expected to do, Klimt portrayed confusion and darkness, knotting together naked bodies and juxtaposing pregnant stomachs with veiled skeletons.

The scandal that ensued ultimately ended Klimt’s academic career, prompting him to found and serve as the first president of the Sezession, the radical Art Nouveau group in Vienna that brought together artists, designers, and architects. They collaborated in the principle of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” which aimed to be spiritually uplifting through a combination of beauty and utility. Josef Hoffmann’s design for the dining room of Brussels’s Palais Stoclet, which included Klimt’s spiral-filled arboreal murals, exemplified this goal.

It was his iconic portraiture style, however, that earned him a place in art’s historic pantheon. The Kiss (1907), perhaps his most famous work, displays the basic but revolutionary elements of his distinctive idiom: a flattening of form and rich design flourishes within patches of gold leaf applied to the canvas. Representing love as an alignment of surfaces, The Kiss locks the central figures in concentric shapes, entwining lovers’ bodies like jewels in a gold ring. They embrace, a shimmering cloak surrounding them like a membrane, and a wall of flowers falls away. This anxious eroticism for which Klimt is known infused the work of subsequent artists, including his protégé Egon Schiele.

The decorative arts formed another cornerstone of Art Nouveau’s legacy. While France was home to many notable figures—Georges de Feure, Édouard Colonna, and Eugène Gaillard, among others—on the other side of the Atlantic, Louis Comfort Tiffany became the name most associated with the Art Nouveau movement in the United States.

Heir to the silver empire of Tiffany & Co., a company founded by his father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, in 1837, Tiffany started his career as a painter. After studying under George Inness, he began working with decorative art in the 1870s. Supported by enthusiastic patrons in New York, he produced elaborate interiors and complementary metalwork, enamels, lighting, and jewelry.

But Tiffany (as well as his leading competitor, John LaFarge) was best known for an innovative fabrication of leaded glass that became a distinctly American phenomenon. By 1881, his experiments in chemistry had led to the development of glass with an opalescent finish that produced a dreamy, milky quality of light. Surviving features from Tiffany’s elaborate estate on Long Island, Laurelton Hall, reveal his work in full bloom, with windows, ceramic tile, and architectural features coalescing into a garden-like alcove. Staining his glass in an array of colors and adding finely painted details to it prior to firing, Tiffany created a revolutionary look that was hugely successful and allowed the company to expand into the empire of decorative art and jewelry that continues today.

Tiffany Studios

Snowball Table Lamp, ca. 1904

Lillian Nassau LLC

Alphonse Mucha

BISCUITS CHAMPAGNE LÈFEVRE-UTILE, 1896

Christopher-Clark Fine Art

Why Does Art Nouveau Matter?

The success of Tiffany and other decorative artists testifies to Art Nouveau’s goal of tearing down hierarchies between the arts. The rise of print and graphic arts similarly advanced this cause and, unlike Tiffany’s more rarified creations, they could be reproduced to enrich the lives of a broader public. Czech artist Alphonse Mucha’s representations of la femme nouvelle (the bold new woman) are illustrative of the emerging medium of graphic advertisements, as are those of Jules Cheret, whose distinctive Belle Époque designs led to his being considered the father of the modern poster. Even talented painters like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jan Toorop became as renowned for their graphic art as for their canvases.

Following the vision of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, architects used steel and other modern materials to create new vocabularies featuring arched and cantilevered forms. The breathtaking Tassel House by Henry van de Velde and Victor Horta, the latter a gifted Belgian disciple of both Morris and Viollet-le-Duc, remains a highpoint of this fluid architectural design. Other outstanding examples came from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald in Scotland; Otto Wagner in Austria; Louis Sullivan in the United States; and the inimitable Antoni Gaudí, known for Casa Mila and Sagrada Familia, in Spanish Catalonia.

Left: Antoni Gaudí, Casa Mila. Photo by deming131, via Flickr; Right: Hector Guimard, Style Metro. Photo by zoetnet, via Flickr.

Art Nouveau bridged an essential gap between 19th-century aestheticism and 20th-century design. Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, for example, two iconic modern painters, worked in Jugendstil before moving toward their own personal styles. But, just as quickly as it had blossomed across the Western aesthetic landscape, Art Nouveau began to wither in the early 20th century. Ultimately, the movement’s reputation for decadence drove an unintended wedge between wealthy patrons and skilled workers. The flowing, floral character that had once been praised became its liability, leading the English illustrator Walter Crane to condemn it as a “strange decorative disease” as early as 1903. By 1920, the style coup de fouet, or whiplash, had been limply renamed style branche de persil, or sprig of parsley.

—George Philip LeBourdais

Cover image: Gustave Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer’s Portrait, 1907. Image via Wikimedia Commons.Portraits via Wikimedia Commons.Timeline: Photo of Style Metro by Ganymedes Costagravas, via Flickr; Beardsley and Steinlen images via Wikimedia Commons.

Original Source: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-what-is-art-nouveau

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Trainee in a gem mine discovered the world's biggest diamond worth £50m

A young man just months into his apprenticeship at a mine uncovered the 'diamond of the century' which is now set to be auctioned for a record £50 million.

Tiroyaone Mathaba, 27, said he 'wanted to scream' when he found the tennis-ball sized diamond in the Karowe mine in Botswana.

It is the biggest find since 1905, when a 3,106.75-carat rough gem was uncovered in a South African mine and cut into nine diamonds - eight of which now form part of the Crown Jewels.

Named 'Lesedi la Rona', the diamond has been described as a the 'find of a lifetime' and its sale at Sotheby's on June 29 is expected to smash the world record for the most expensive diamond ever sold at auction.

The Lesedi la Rona was uncovered by Mr Mathaba last November, while he was on probation as a trainee at the Lucara Diamond Corp at its Karowe mine.

Mr Mathaba spotted the diamond, which upon first glance appeared nothing more than a stone. 

However on closer inspection he realised it was exceptionally valuable.  

Mr Mathaba told The Sunday Telegraph: 'At first I wanted to scream. Then I said in a low hoarse voice 'God, it's a diamond! It's a diamond, it's a big diamond!'

He added: 'Everyone looks forward to coming to work, it’s been a breath of new life.'

Mr Mathaba, the grandson of a chief from a village in the hills of Botswana, continues to help care for the family cattle herd in his spare time.

He began working for Lucara after graduating in geology from the University of Botswana, despite his studies being interrupted when his father died.

The 27-year-old has now been offered a full-time job at the mine - but won't be given a bonus despite his ground-breaking and historic discovery. 

The company does not award individual employees bonuses for finding big stones, but all 804 people working at Lucara have received a bonus related to the find.

Sotheby's have given the 1,109 carat gem, which is three billion years old, a guide price in excess of £48million ($70million).

The current record stands at £32million, paid for a blue diamond at Sotheby's last year.  

Independent reports say the gem has the potential to yield the largest top-quality diamond that has ever been cut and polished.

The record is currently held by the Great Star of Africa, which came from the Cullinan – unearthed in 1905, and weighs 530.20 carats. 

It sits atop the sovereign's sceptre with cross.

David Bennett, worldwide chairman of Sotheby's jewellery division, said: 'The Lesedi la Rona is simply outstanding and its discovery is the find of a lifetime.

'Not only is the rough superlative in size and quality, but no rough even remotely of this scale has ever been offered before at public auction.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3649313/Diamond-geezer-Trainee-five-months-apprenticeship-gem-tells-moment-discovered-world-s-biggest-sparkler-worth-50m.html#ixzz4CCxATrVy
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Kensington and Chelsea Art and Design Exhibition 2016

Ending the scholar year I have had the opportunity to participate in the Art and Design Show in June 2016. 

It takes places in Kensington and Chelsea College, located in Wornington Road, near the famous Portobello Road in London. 

For this occasion I have selected two pieces of different nature and Style that have been performed by me in this last term. 

The First one is a Caddy Spoon, made in Britannia Silver 95% and finished in matte color. I have selected Britannia silver instead of sterling because of the extra White color that gives the britannia, leaving the piece with a fine sanding finishing but without polishing. The design reminds of a viking wing and is an homage to some of the ancient tools that were used by the northern tribes of slavs and that has been discovered in treasure hoards in many archeological sites. 

The second piece is a mixture of techniques and imagination. The symbol came into my mind throughout a dream and I wanted to make it real so to remember not only  the fantastic oniric experience but that the things that we have in our minds and imagination, have their reflects in the real life. 

As I was experimenting I wanted to execute the project using different metals and techniques so to depict the complexity that a simple object can conceal. Using Copper, Brass and Silver, this box pendant has a blue enamel over an engraved base in copper and brass with silver hinges. 

Following you can see the opening times and days and the link to google maps location:

Friday 17                11:00 - 16:00

Monday 20             11:00 - 16:00

Tuesday 21             11:00 - 16:00

Wednesday 22        11:00 - 16:00

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