From Carved Emeralds to Plique-à-jour Enamels: The Fin de Siècle Jewelry of Marcus & Co.
A Paul and Irene Hollister Lecture by Sheila Barron Smithie (Fellow of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain) and Beth Carver Wees (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The New York firm Marcus & Co. (1892–1942) created exceptional jewelry for an art-loving, wealthy elite. Travels throughout India in 1895 inspired their first distinctive body of design, featuring elaborate gold and colored stone jewels. In the following years, annual visits to the Paris Salons and encounters with the work of Lalique, Colonna, and Vever resulted in an original response to the Art Nouveau style. In this talk, Sheila Barron Smithie and Beth Carver Wees—coauthors of the new book Marcus & Co.: Three Generations of New York Jewelers—will focus on their turn-of-the-century work, produced under the leadership of the family’s second generation, highlighting the firm’s body of extraordinary plique-à-jour enamel jewelry. Surviving objects and archival drawings from two sources reveal new aspects of the firm’s history.

Paul Hollister (1918–2004) was a pioneering critic of contemporary studio glass and a glass historian. Irene Hollister (1920–2016) was a philanthropist, advocate for glass scholarship, and founding administrator of the Association for Computing Machinery. The Paul and Irene Hollister Lectures on Glass were established at Bard Graduate Center in 2007.

September 24 at 6pm
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall