Making its US premiere in Dallas, the exhibition features more than 400 objects from the holdings of Cartier, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Musée du Louvre, the Keir Collection of Islamic Art currently on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art, and other significant international collections.

“We are committed to exploring jewellery not only as a historical signifier of wealth and taste, but as a reflection of a global and evolving interest in design, material, and forms,” said Dr Agustin Arteaga, The Eugene McDermott Director at the Dallas Museum of Art.

DMA co-curator Sarah Schleuning said it was to interrogate how ideas move across cultures through trade, travel, trends, and “what it means to be inspired.” It works, elegantly juxtaposing Cartier designs with the influences of Louis J. Cartier—a renowned collector of Persian and Indian paintings, manuscripts, and other objects—and his younger brother Jacques, a frequent traveller to India and Bahrain.

Cartier, founded in 1847, was the first jewellery house to create an archive department in 1973 and began collecting its antique designs ten years later. In 2003, the heritage department was built to open Cartier’s doors to visiting curators as the house has maintained a strict edict that they never curate their museum shows.

The exhibition does a beautiful job of drawing out the variety of influences in the air at the time of some of Cartier’s most iconic creations (many featured are from the 1920s and 1930s). Chinese jades, Indian jewellery, and the arts and architecture of the Islamic world are cleverly diagrammed and dissected to show how they relate to Cartier pieces like Wallis Simpson’s 1947 amethyst and turquoise bib necklace, one of Doris Duke’s diamond bandeaus, or a three-tiered carved emerald brooch belonging to Marjorie Merriweather Post. There is also one of the best displays of the house’s iconic Tutti Frutti designs in memory (including an elaborate showstopper of a necklace on loan from an anonymous collector).

Source: Vogue