A Gem - Intelligent Life Magazine PDF

12/27/2015 Agem|IntelligentLifemagazine
PROFILE
A gem
Joel Arthur Rosenthal is known as the worlds greatest living
jeweller, but he claims to hate selling what he makes, and wont
give interviews. Usually
ISABEL LLOYD
SOUTH AFRICA, THREE million years ago. An Australopith, a distant, red-pelted relation
of mans earliest ancestors, lopes along by some long-forgotten riverside. He or she, or
it sees something glimmering under the water: a large pebble of a reddish-brown
mineral distant descendants will call jasperite. He, or she, or it, picks the pebble up and
takes it back home to their cave. Why? Because, according to the anthropologist
Raymond Dart, who will find the pebble millennia later, in 1924, it has three
indentations that together look like two eyes and a mouth. The face may have
occurred naturally, or may have been chipped in. Either way, Dart claims it as the
earliest example of art: because the creature that owned the pebble saw it represented
something more than just itself.
http://www.intelligentlifemagazine.com/style/agem 1/15
Paris, October 2013. The JAR jewellery store. A small, square room, the walls lined floor
to ceiling with dusty velvet, the carpet a faded bois de rose; padded screens covered in the
same faded colour block the light from outside. Nothing in here is either shiny or new. At
one end is a Chesterfield sofa upholstered in scratched, dark-green leather; behind it and
to one side, paintings and drawings (a beautiful youth sketched in sienna ink, a huge
black-and-white photo of a toreador, an oil of three blown peonies) are stacked against
the walls. Opposite is a plain, rectangular wooden desk. Its centre is clear, apart from a
varnished-pine hand-mirror. But at either end it is crenellated with small, talismanic
objects. A toy London bus. Ceramic rabbits. A lump of lapis lazuli. Three glass
paperweights. Two model terrapins. A ridged lump of coral. A cream porcelain flower.
A block of Perspex inlaid with several strands of glowing, red-gold hair. A plain pebble
that looks a bit like a face.
London, April 2015. A bright-lit viewing room behind locked doors in Christies. Angela
Berden, the jewellery specialist at Christies Geneva office, is balancing a single, pear-
shaped diamond between finger and thumb. Just over an inch long from base to tip, the
stone is of a quality known as D-colour flawless: a chunk of coruscating carbon
perfection, estimated to be worth at least 5.85m. Which would you prefer to own, I ask
her, this diamond, or a piece by JAR. She doesnt hesitate. Oh, a piece by JAR. Why?
Because hes making art. Whereas this this is just a stone.
Unpeeled: orange peel and orange blossom brooch, in garnets, diamonds and enamel, silver and gold, from
2001. The garnets are mounted in blackened silver, a material Rosenthal uses so as not to distract from the
stones
THE COLLECTIONS THAT fill the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are not
confined to painting and sculpture. In the corridors leading off its great domed entrance
hall are cabinets of jewellery from pretty much every age of history: enamelled necklaces
from the Byzantine empire, gold Roman rings and Celtic torcs, diamond-studded eggs
from Faberg, trinket-maker to the tsars. But until 2013, no living jeweller had ever been
granted an exhibition there. Then, in November of that year, the Met opened Jewels by
JAR, handing over an entire room on its ground floor to the work of one man. The show
ran for 15 weeks and was seen by more than a quarter of a million people. Joel Arthur
Rosenthal, Bronx boy turned Parisian aesthete, had come home.
Rosenthal is, very probably, the greatest jeweller in the world. Hes certainly one of the
most expensive. His pieces he creates only 80 or so a year, with the help of a clutch of
artisan workshops in Geneva and France are bought by a small but fanatical circle of
the super-rich, for prices starting at 20,000 and ending at if-you-have-to-ask-you-cant-
afford-it. The occasional JAR piece will appear at auction, and when it does theres
fighting in the saleroom: earlier this year fierce bidding for a sapphire, amethyst and
diamond ring from 1988, estimated at $376,000-590,000, led to a final price of $784,500.
That will have been several multiples of what it originally cost no other living jeweller,
Berden says, sells at auction for so much more than the owner paid for it.
Money aside, museums and collectors venerate Rosenthal. Somerset House in London
jumped at the chance to put on an exhibition of his work in 2002; Il Correr in Venice will
follow suit in 2018, with an exhibition of 100 new pieces which he is still in the middle of
making. (This will infuriate the Louvre. It tried to stage a show in the late 1990s, but he
didnt like its attitude.) But unless youre a jewellery buff, youve probably never heard
of Rosenthal. Unlike the big, heavily branded jewellery firms Cartier, Graff, Harry
Winston JAR has just one small shop, a blank-fronted place in a dull plaza in Paris, and
doesnt spend a sou putting adverts in glossy magazines. Or indeed anywhere. Because
secrecy is JARs secret weapon. You wont find the shops address in any directories; as a
rule, would-be customers have to be vetted and introduced, like Freemasons, by a friend.
Rosenthal himself maintains a Garbo-like silence in the face of the press, giving only a
handful of interviews in his 37-year career and at least partly for reasons of security
never, ever allowing himself to be photographed.
Which is a pity. Because he has a lovely face.
The first time we meet is June 2013, just after his 70th birthday. His partner in business as
in life, a former psychiatrist called Pierre Jeannet whom he met in 1966, has asked me to
come to the lobby of the old-school luxury hotel where the pair stay when theyre in
London. (Much later, when I ask Rosenthal to pick somewhere that means something to
him personally, he chooses not his childhood home, nor one of his current homes in Paris
or Geneva, but a room at this hotel.) Jeannet, a polite man with composed, even features,
stands with his feet close together and offers me a soft, dry hand, before leading us
through the roses and mirrors of the foyer restaurant. On the way, he stops to greet a
good-looking young couple, the man dark-haired, crew-cut, with a jumper over his
shoulders, the girl a clean blonde. Did you like the bracelet? Jeannet asks, in lightly
accented English. Its fantastic, says the man, his hand on Jeannets arm. Thank you
so much. It really is perfect.
We move on, through an archway. At a table by the wall, backlit by plaster sconces, sits a
bulky walrus shape, in a crumpled grey suit and open-necked white shirt, pure white hair
swept back in waves away from his face, stomach sloping down towards the table. A
long, heavy jaw, a large nose; a twinkle in the slanted blue eyes. He levers himself up and
reaches out a hand, smiling broadly.
Mr Rosenthal, we meet at last. Its an honour.
Ah, he says, in pure native New York, dont be cute.
Rosenthal has a leonine reputation, the kind

that bites your head off. Stories abound of
him refusing to sell to customers, however
much money they offer
Rosenthal, it seems, is a pussycat. (You know that, he tells me. Others dont.) But he
has a leonine reputation, the kind that bites your head off. Stories abound of him refusing
to sell to customers, however much money they offer. He admits to me that he is
opinionated I say what I think and that doesnt suit a lot of people; hes notorious for
insisting that he knows what suits a customer better than they do. He claims to hate
selling, saying that, If I open the door of the shop and someone says, Oh, are you Mr
Jar?, I say, No, he is [pointing to Jeannet] and I leave. Let him deal with them. Hes
much nicer than I am.
Pretending to be someone else is the least of it. I was told by a source in the business that
a customer who dared return her earrings because the fittings were wrong saw them
flung in a fury into the street. An American journalist who was promised an interview
and flew at great expense to Paris was refused access at the last minute; piqued, she
wrote that Rosenthals noli me tangere pose was all a shtick, a marketeers way of making
customers want what they couldnt have. Treat em meanly, charge em keenly.
At first I thought she might be right. What, after all, is the actual value of a JAR piece?
Gem dealing is a hidden world where, if you dont know the right people its impossible
to get a straight answer about wholesale prices, but what is clear is that a stone that might
cost one buyer 1m could be offered to someone else for 100,000. That means the
apparent value of Rosenthals jewellery is all a trick, isnt it? After all, you cant eat
stones, I tell him. No, but nor can you mount a meat pie as a ring, he says, slyly.
Different purposes. There. Thatll shut you up.
Rosenthal likes to tease, to offer then withdraw. He is a flirt. We talk for a while about
the kind of interview he wants. He complains that other writers havent been tough
enough on him, or the distaste flowing off him that they have just wanted an in, the
better to get to his jewellery. Then he suddenly asks, Do you like perfume? I say yes,
and see he has magicked a couple of small brown glass bottles onto the table. He
withdraws a stopper and passes it to me. Put it on, he commands. No! On the back of
the wrist! Always the back of the wrist or it rubs off. Now, smell it. Its a very old
perfume. Do you know it? No? See if you can work it out and tell me later; then Ill tell
you if youre right. Of course I have no way of recognising it, but find myself sniffing
the back of my hand all the rest of that day, and the next, wondering what it could be,
wanting to frame this very old perfume. Rosenthal has me snagged.
Nature, pinned: lilac brooches in diamonds, sapphires, garnets, aluminium, silver and gold, from 2001 and 2002
JOEL ARTHUR ROSENTHALS jewels are nothing if not contradictory. They are both very,
very small and, often, very, very big. The small bit is micropav, a kind of pointillist
technique of stone-setting that Rosenthal invented (though he refuses to acknowledge
the name, saying it was coined by an American competitor he clearly has no time for). In
traditional pav, small gemstones are laid close together, but with plenty of the metal
setting still visible, usually with a bobbly texture to trick the eye into thinking its seeing
a continuous run or pavement of glitter. In the JAR version, stones ranging in size
from matchhead down to pinprick are cut and set so close the joins are all but invisible:
what the eye sees is a textured surface of pure precious colour.
The big is in the results many of his show-stopping pieces would barely fit in an
outstretched hand. At the Met exhibition, a pair of black-feather earrings with diamonds
at their nub came in at about nine inches long; a fat rose, its petals surfaced with tiny pink
rubies and rimmed with blackened silver, was as big as a clenched fist. Larger, truly, than
life and often as hard to wear. The American philanthropist Marion Lambert, by her
own account one of very few JAR customers who can return things if she doesnt like
them, says,Joel doesnt care if a pair of earrings are so heavy they tear up your ears.
Which makes you wonder what he does care about.
Well, stones, for a start. Rosenthal adores them, and ignores them. He likes to have one
in his pocket, a mineral comfort between his fingers an unusual pebble, maybe; a piece
of bi-coloured jade; an emerald ring he once dropped in the Grand Canal in Venice and
had to pay police divers to rescue. Physically he keeps his stock of gems, bought from
dealers and at specialist auctions, in boxes. But where they really are is filed away in his
head, in all their particularity of size and colour. His favourites he refuses to use or sell
for years at a time, a practice he admits would drive any business-minded manager to
distraction. It costs him, no doubt; but theyre like my tubes of paint, you cant paint
without the tubes. Then, when their time does come, he treats them with what might be
disrespect, setting cut diamonds upside down in a ring so that their pointed bottoms stick
out, or dangling a stonking great gem as big as a gulls egg off an otherwise hyper-realistic
rose brooch. Hes no naf: the business made a profit from the off, and he knows his
stocks value down to the last tenth of a carat. But even if tomorrow you told me that
every stone we owned was worth ten dollars a pound, I wouldnt love them any less.
Colour, Rosenthal says of his designs, is as much the object as shape. When he was
three, the adored only son of an administrator in the Bronx postal service and a high-
school biology teacher, his favourite toys were marbles, his mothers round, metallic
chartreuse-coloured button box (it had a certain smell, which I liked), and glasses of
water which hed tint with paints. Before he became a jeweller in the mid-1970s, he spent
six months running a tapestry shop with Jeannet, painting pictures of cut flowers on
canvases with coloured wools. It was an amusement. Since a kid, I was going to be a
painter. He certainly started on that course, attending New Yorks High School of
Music and Art, but then chose to study art history and philosophy at Harvard, rather
than, say, painting at Cooper; a friend of his from student days told me, I always knew
Joel would be a designer.
While the odd piece Rosenthal makes is all-diamond white and sparkle, the best are
rainbow-rich, with waves of colour that seem to move across them purple next to red
next to pink. Many of his jewels are very sexual, in a round, full-blooded, lushly sensual
way. They occupy their space with certainty; they drip, they fold, they shower, they
stand their ground. And of them all, flowers bring out the best in him: streaked and
frilled tulips, drooping heads of lilacs with drops of green dew trembling at their tips,
purple hellebores, their centres heaving with vivid green enamel stamens. They seem
alive, about to move, on the point of rottenness or collapse and yet static, locked in
stone. You think of The Tempest, the drowned king those are pearls that were his
eyes. Nature becomes both rich, and strange.
His jewellery is serious, and silly. Serious because it takes so long to make ten years to
complete a single piece is not uncommon. Silly, because he is such a joker. In one of the
vitrines at the Met, between iridescent jewelled butterflies and a fob watch buried in a
chunk of blond tortoiseshell, was a bagel. Made of wood, indistinguishable from the real
thing, it was commissioned as an anniversary present. Scratched into its surface was this
legend: 45 and still fresh!
Flower power: camellia bracelet in rubies and enamel, silver and gold, 1995
And his jewellery bites. When we meet in London, at one point he reaches down into
the battered leather briefcase at his feet, and pulls out a couple of tatty cardboard boxes,
with Sellotape around the edges. He takes my wrist, and slips something onto it. Its a
slim torc of what looks like brass, but isnt, topped by a stiff spray of bell-shaped flowers
around a central stone. Vivid green, tender white: theyre lilies of the valley, rendered in
minute, interlocked diamonds. The metal grips my wrist, the base of the emerald
pressing slightly into the flesh. It feels, faintly, carnivorous. This is not a bangle. A
bangle you can forget youre wearing, whereas this would gnaw at the edge of your
attention. I suspect thats how Rosenthal wants it.
For he has an ego. Now 72 and with thoughts clearly turning to his legacy, he is in
discussion with a major museum about starting a jewellery collection with some of his
biggest pieces as its core. He has chutzpah: he is writing a novel about his hero, the
society portraitist John Singer Sargent; he is making a movie (an early job was as a
scriptwriter) about Sargents most famous model, the red-headed Madame X. He
assumes he can do both these things oh, and make and sell perfume with the same
success that he designs jewellery. When I ask why, he says: My father was literary, my
mother artistic. But they both gave me all the courage in the world to do anything I
wanted to do, to just be myself. So I wouldnt say Ive ever made a mistake. I just did
things the way I wanted to and anything that was contradictory to that that was the
mistake.
He is demanding, insisting that those around him cleave just as resolutely to what he
wants: when an idea for a piece pops into his head, he draws it, then instructs his teams
of artisans to model, remodel, make and remake, 20, 30, 50 times, until he feels theyve
got it right. He is vain, worrying about his weight in the run-up to the Met opening. He
can be catty with Jeannet, who seems patience personified and who, despite his claim to
hate anything commercial, is the wheels on which the business runs.
But he is loved. This is not something you expect to say about a man with a reputation
for brusqueness, rudeness, intemperance. At the Met private view and the party for 400
guests at the Four Seasons hotel afterwards, I talk to people from every corner of his life:
bony Upper East Side women of indeterminate age, whose husbands bring home lumps
of JAR jewellery for them as a caveman might bring home a lump of mammoth for dinner;
a dreadlocked Swiss free-diver who roams the world finding natural pearls; a young
American girl whose father was a classmate of Rosenthals; a tipsy couple who knew him
at Harvard; a tall, dark-blonde woman with a German accent who sells Old Masters; a
sculptor from Paris; a jeweller from Hong Kong. Without exception, they all spoke
about his generosity, his warmth, his lion of a heart. And they all wore his pieces. The
richest had huge great things, which they brandished like badges, or medals. But many
others wore something smaller and more intimate, often made especially for them: a curl
of green fern frond on a finger, to remind the wearer of a botanical print shed shown
him; an aluminium rose-petal earring, in honour of our friendship; a pair of earrings,
gold circling blue circling gold, that exactly matched the wearers pale red hair and
gentle, blue-grey eyes. All of these pieces were less like medals, more like the traces left
by a kiss.
Earlier, Rosenthal had told me he was dreading the party: Itll be torture. (Marion
Lambert says he far prefers to spend time with friends one-on-one.) He wouldnt be
giving a speech, either. At a party after the Somerset House exhibition, he got no further
than saying thank you to the assembled guests before bursting into tears and having to
be led from the room. That may be why hes the last to arrive tonight. He edges up the
grand staircase wearing a draped, midnight-blue velvet jacket, white shirt cuffs flopping
over his hands, looking like some Belle Epoque artist dragged, unwillingly, from his
studio. The band spots him and starts playing Hello, Dolly, but even in a room where
everybody knows him, no one else notices hes there. For a shy man, secrecy can have its
rewards.
The way he sees: the branch-under-snow bracelet of diamond beads, silver, platinum and gold, from 2010
I DONT THINK of what I do as art, Rosenthal says. I just make what I make. Its very
soothing and encouraging to hear all kinds of people say, What you make is art, but its
not any kind of label I give myself. I call myself a designer. Ignore the humblebrag: like
an artist, Rosenthal has improved across his career, making work that is steadily more
refined, more masterful, and more itself. Unlike art, jewellery generally doesnt make
you feel anything. But at the Met exhibition the most common sound was a soft intake of
breath, as people gasped, not in shock at the bling, but in pleasure. The highest gasp rate
came at the final vitrine, which held a series of flower bracelets. In its centre was what
looked like a pale twig from a cherry-blossom tree, scattered with creamy droplets of
melting snow tiny diamond beads pierced with silvery pins, gentle, serene and
exquisite. It was like a Japanese painting, and it moved me almost to tears.
Convincing people, thats what I like doing, Rosenthal says. I like being
able to make people see the way I see. Yes, he thinks he knows best what suits
his customers, but hes also talking about the artists love for their own vision,
and their ability to transmit it. And then there is the question of worth, a
slippery word that becomes slipperier still in the strange, cosseted world
Rosenthal inhabits, where he is surrounded by comfort and the richest of the
rich, where waitresses rush to help him off-menu and the spaghetti-thin,
chiffon-clad editor of Italian Vogue coos over him at lunch, pinching his cheeks
and dropping an earring into his lap. Does worth mean the same now as it did
when he was a child in the Bronx? Does he hold on to the singular stones he
loves so much because of who might otherwise buy them? When I go back to
the shop with him after our final meeting, wanting to check the colour of its
walls (for the record: verdigris), a dark-haired woman is in there, sheathed in
purple, pirouetting in self-regard as an assistant drapes chandeliers of emeralds
from her ears. Rosenthal flinches, and closes the door.
This, I suspect, is what lies at the heart of his fabled in-store monstrousness:
his determination to show the world the way he sees it, in all its cherry-
blossom beauty, keeps coming up against the cold light of retail. He has an idea
that is very, very precious to him, and when the world wont play along, he
gets arsey. Perhaps when the Australopith showed their mate the beautiful
pebble, the mate didnt see it. Perhaps the Australopith got angry, and threw
the pebble on the floor.
Artist, monster or marketeer? During our conversations, he rejects all three labels. But
the third time we meet, for lunch in London, he plays that same trick of pulling a surprise
from his pocket when youre in the middle of talking, like a rabbit out of a hat a
magicians distraction. Its not perfume. In fact, when I question him, he cant remember
what it was he used as bait all those months ago. Instead, what he wants to show me is a
small oval ring, pale chalcedony set in the thinnest rim of gold. On it in relief is the
silhouette of Isaac Newton, carved for Catherine of Russia, who according to Rosenthal
had the hots for old Isaac. History, plus science, plus beauty, plus sex: hes snagged me,
again. An artist, maybe. But not a salesman? Ah, dont be cute.
ISABEL LLOYD is our deputy editor. She is a former features editor of theIndependentand
a former actress
PHOTOGRAPHS JOZSEF TARI / KATHERINA FAERBER
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12/27/2015 Agem|IntelligentLifemagazine

Which is a pity. Because he has a lovely face.

Mr Rosenthal, we meet at last. Its an honour.

Ah, he says, in pure native New York, dont be cute.

Rosenthal has a leonine reputation, the kind

PHOTOGRAPHS JOZSEF TARI / KATHERINA FAERBER

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR

Hot coals to New York

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Around the world with David Adjaye

David Adjaye, the architect behind

Robin Ticciati, maestrochef

British, 31, radically collaborative, and he plans

Nathan Myhrvold, myth buster

John Green: teenager, aged 36

Young-adult writer, YouTube star and world-

SIGN UP TO OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

your email SUBMIT

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