Viewing Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry From the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, you might think poor Helen Williams Drutt has to walk around unadorned these days.
Not so.
Drutt, whose collection was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2002, visited the museum recently wearing loads of bold, wearable art — including a new wedding ring.
"I'm 76 and a bride," she said, beaming. Jet-black hair peeked from under her well-worn Panama hat, and her eyes sparkled through massive Jean Paul Gaultier glasses with curly metal "eyelashes" at the corners.
She flashed a stacked-look gold wedding band by British artist Breon O'Casey, who also made the big silver cuffs on each of her arms.
But it was hard not to stare at her elaborate Peter Skubic brooch of stainless steel, which looked like a maze of mirrors and feathers. Then there were the Georg Dobler earrings, square assemblages of colored glass. And a large Max Frölich ring that could knock a guy out if it hit him right.
MFAH curator Cindi Strauss aptly calls Drutt "a walking billboard for the field." Not in a tacky sense, of course — it was all displayed against the clean palette of a black dress.
Even without the arty bling, Drutt can command a room. The undisputed queen of contemporary craft, she sweeps into a room with authority, seeming much taller than she is. She's self-effacing and slightly mischievous, the sort of woman who takes you by the arm and leans in close to share a juicy story.
"She was the person who introduced America to the idea that jewelry could be something other than what is traditional," Strauss says. (Although Strauss admits that some exhibit visitors might question the wearability of such highly conceptual works as Hiramatsu Yasuki's Crown or David Watkins' Hinged Loop Neckpiece With Three Bars.)
Drutt bought her first piece of art jewelry in 1968 from legendary jewelry designer Stanley Lechtzin, who pioneered the technique of electroforming, or forming metal with molds. She also met Lechtzin's friends and students — also pioneers — and was soon collecting obsessively all over the world.
In Philadelphia, her hometown (and Lechtzin's), she founded one of the first galleries devoted to jewelry by academic artists, also focusing on ceramics. Over about 40 years, she amassed the most important cache of contemporary art jewelry in the United States, and one of the top three in the world. The MFAH's Drutt Collection now comprises about 800 works, representing 175 artists from 18 countries, tracing every aspect of the craft's development.
Only about a third of it appears in Ornament as Art — and even so, the exhibit is encyclopedic.
Drutt's delight was palpable as she once again saw brooches, necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings — as well as a few sketches — now ensconced behind Plexiglas. To her, they represent a lifetime of work and friendships.
"I feel very privileged as a layperson to have been part of this community of artists," she said.
And while she said she never considered it "ornament," she has worn most of the pieces in the exhibit. (One suspects, if she'd figured out how, she might have donned even the drawings.)
"I haven't worn this, because it didn't fit quite right," she admitted, pressing her index finger against the case containing a gold mold of that same finger, now known officially as Gerd Rothmann's Index Finger.
Drutt looked at her flesh finger again.
"The reason I wanted this gold finger is because I love to write," she said, "and I wish this finger had ink in it, and I could just write with it all the time."
Next to Index Finger sits another piece by Rothman — The Golden Nose of Helen Drutt — a mold of her nose made in 1994, which she did wear, albeit disappointingly.
"I wore it to a Salvador Dali opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts," she explained. "I thought everyone would comment, but no one did. They must have thought I'd broken my nose. So I was just incognito the whole night."
She stepped toward works from the late 1960s, including Albert Paley's Double Fibula Brooch. Houstonians know Paley as the creator of the grand metal sculptures alongside the Wortham Theater Center's elevators; but for about a decade he also made jewelry, and these pieces are rare.
Double Fibula is more than 5 1/2 inches long and wide, with a pin clasp nearly that long on the back.
"The first time I wore it, I was invited to a grand dinner party with a lot of famous artists," Drutt said. "I wanted to be smashing. And to be innovative, I wore the brooch at my waist. Then during dinner, the clasp disengaged."
Not far away, another slightly problematic piece caught her attention: Ken Cory's Squash Blossom Necklace, made of tiny light bulbs, bullet shells, a bronze-cast pencil, brass and leather. "The light bulbs are fragile, so I couldn't wear it much," she said. "But I love the bent pencil."
In an area featuring some especially unwearable-looking works made of alternative materials such as paper, Drutt thought about home.
"Those were on a mannequin in my library," she said, eyeing necklaces and a headpiece by Lam de Wolf and Caroline Broadhead's nylon monofilament Necklace / Veil. "And those laminated collars (Hiroko Sato Pijanowski and Eugene Pijanowski's Mizuhiki) were on a vertical wall in my bedroom, arranged rather beautifully."
At home, her collection also occupied a print drawer, a safe and several safe-deposit boxes. "I take care of things," she said curtly.
"Oh, here's the BOE box!," she said, veering toward a section of the exhibit about the depth of artistic influences on contemporary jewelry — minimalism, the Bauhaus movement, you name it. This box is one of only 15 such assemblages made by a revolutionary Dutch collective in the 1970s.
"I acquired it because I happened to meet the artist at a conference," Drutt explained. "Chance has played an amazing role."
Drutt suggested she was driven in part by a sense of responsibility to record the history of this art form: "I acquired some of these works because people were dying and needed to be remembered."
She has long collected living people, too. Her Philadelphia home is a famous gathering spot for visiting scholars, artists, architects and poets. That all began, she said, after her first husband, the poet Maurice English, died in 1983, and the nearby University of Pennsylvania began asking if she'd put people up. Some stayed for months. (Strauss suggests that as a result, Drutt's home is as important today as Alfred Stieglitz's studio was in the early 20th century.)
"It's a lot of sheets," Drutt quipped.
She was just warming up, getting chummy with the reporter. But she was due to give a lecture, so the museum's staff rushed her along.
She resisted, lingering at yet another piece along a wall of "narrative" jewelry — pieces that, appropriately enough, tell stories. (Imagine a scene from Moby Dick depicted in a silver pendant.)
And she wanted to show off that ring on her left hand. In May, Drutt married Peter Stern, an art-world luminary who is president of the Storm King Art Center, a major outdoor sculpture garden in New York state.
"I've been alone 15 years," she said. "I'll be 77 in November. And our families have known each other for a long time."
A museum staffer almost had to lead her out by the arm. Drutt hadn't yet had breakfast, she said, and she was hungry. But not to worry, she said. Food could wait.
Source: chron
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