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RAYMOND TEMPLIER A RARE ART DECO SILVER AND BLACK LACQUER BRACELET The articulated band, designed...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:80,000.00 - 100,000.00 USD
RAYMOND TEMPLIER A RARE ART DECO SILVER AND BLACK LACQUER BRACELET The articulated band, designed...
RAYMOND TEMPLIER
A RARE ART DECO SILVER AND BLACK LACQUER BRACELET
The articulated band, designed as a series of silver geometric links, each decorated with black lacquer and set with brilliant-cut diamonds, ca. 1928, in a late fitted case by Raymond Templier, some restoration with black lacquer, length 17.5 cm indistinctly signed
ESTIMATE CHF 120,000 - 150,000
$ 80,000 - 100,000
LITERATURE
Illustrated in Sylvie Raulet, Art Deco Jewelry, Thames and Hudson, 1985, p. 214
Raymond Templier (1891-1968) was one of a very small group of artist jewellers in Paris who succeeded in the late 1920s in creating a dramatic new aesthetic. Templier - like his contemporaries Jean Fouquet and Gerard Sandoz - was born into a family of jewellers with a history going back into the nineteenth century. The names of Templier, Fouquet and Sandoz were well established and highly respected, associated with the creation of jewels of the finest quality, albeit mostly in traditional and conventional styles. Raymond Templier was to break dramatically with such traditions. He trained at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs between 1909 and 1912 before entering the family business as a designer. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs from 1911, and regularly attracted critical acclaim, notably at the Paris Exposition Internationale of 1925. This exhibition marked the high point of French Art Deco in all its indulgent luxury and sumptuous elaboration. Yet the floral excesses, the swags and garlands of Sue et Mare and Lalique, the richly decorated interiors of Ruhlmann were at odds with Templier's attraction to a more restrained, even austere style. He felt a particular affinity with the work of architect Le Corbusier and with the functionalist aesthetic evident in the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau. Templier had found the elements of a new direction. From 1928, he aligned himself with the architects and designers of the newly founded Union des Artistes Modernes. They rejected decoration, placing their faith in simple, uncluttered forms, inspired by the functionalism and utopian ideals of the Modern Movement that was emerging internationally.
French design has always boasted a tradition of sophistication, and Raymond Templier's work from this period, from 1928 into the early thirties, achieved a great level of refinement. He succeeded in marrying the formal purity of Modernist ideals with the high stylishness, the supreme elegance associated with the Parisian luxury industries. He, Fouquet and Sandoz defined a key moment in the applied arts in France through their forceful jewellery designs. When, in 1928, Templier was commissioned to create an over-scaled parure for the German screen goddess Brigitte Helm in her starring role in Marcel L'Herbier's film 'L'Argent', his position at the pinnacle of fashion was assured. Templier favoured the crisp, cool effects of platinum allied with black enamel or lacquer and the juxtaposition of white diamonds. Any motif would be integrated into the form and structure of a piece, so that there could be no superfluous detail. Decorative flourish was anathema to him. The result was a hard chic, perfectly in tune with the most avant-garde tastes of the day. Templier's jewellery shared a kinship with the purist lines of the new architecture, with a dynamic, functionalist aesthetic vision. The UAM manifesto of
1934 explained the search for harmony in a work. A design was deemed successful when no detail could be removed without destroying the structure of the whole. Ornament for its own sake was to be shunned.
The present bracelet has been dated to around 1928, to the defining moment of emergence of the French Modernist style. It is a perfect expression of that movement. The bold, austere design of stylised 'S' shapes in characteristic black against silver, with the bright counterpoint of paired diamonds, is a perfect example of Templier's achievement. The bracelet has a purity of design, a balance and harmony that were the very definition of modern some seventy years ago - and which feel just as modern at the start of the 21st century.
Philippe Garner
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