The starfishs’ value, I had heard over and over again, rested not in the value of their gemstones, but in their design. I wanted to know what had inspired them. In a sense, I was asking how starfish are born, and I wished the question had been as easy to answer as learning about starfish in the ocean.
My quest would draw me back to Jeanne Boivin and the ways that she had guided her jewelry house in new directions after her husband’s death. She hung on to the master jewelers who kept Boivin’s quality high, but the designs that flourished under her direction were different from the Cubist and geometric styles that were popularized during the Art Deco rage. These designs were softer, figurative, and feminine. Like her brother, who had rejected corsets for women’s styles, she chafed against bourgeois “good taste,” which she considered to be stultifying and uninspired.1 Rather, Jeanne sought styles in jewelry that were figurative and suited to women, their fluid body movements, and their clothes. Much of the jewelry of the time more closely resembled military insignia. Boivin’s was informed by a new philosophy that embraced sumptuousness and exotic forms. It was not surprising that wealthy trendsetters like Louise de Vilmorin, who was considered the most stylish woman in Paris in the twenties and thirties, European royalty, American movie stars, and stylish American heiresses had all climbed the stairs to the Boivin atelier. De Vilmorin came with her handbag brimming with francs but always stashed one bank note back into her bag as she left. She explained it would be her reason for returning to visit with her friend Jeanne.2 Business and society strode side by side in the jewelry business at the time. The world of rich and fashionable clients was relatively small by today’s global standards, and word traveled fast about Jeanne Boivin’s distinctively chic new designs and the pleasure of basking in the glow of her charming jewelry salon.
Inspiration for design is more difficult to assign. It was assumed that René Boivin incorporated flowers into his jewelry designs because he was an avid gardener—and the flowers showed up in his sketchbooks. Jeanne Boivin took long walks along the coast of Brittany that put her in mind of seashells, pebbles, branches, and other bits of nature along the shore. Whatever sparked it, a fresh naturalist influence began to creep into Boivin designs. Shells and sea creatures were often cast in gold. Madame Boivin asked her designers for seashells, and one young new designer in particular heeded her call.
The progression of the Boivin look and style owes a great deal to a young designer whom Jeanne Boivin hired in 1925. Suzanne Belperron started as a salesgirl but would go on to great design fame, as a recent retrospective of her designs at Christie’s in 2012 attests. Jeanne began to teach her the tools of the trade and Belperron’s real talent soon emerged. Though she is often referred to as a former sales clerk because that was her entry-level job at Boivin, in fact, Belperron had already studied design when she took the position. She moved quickly out of sales and into the workshop, where she made her way into the pantheon of great jewelry designers of the twentieth century. The five years that she spent at Boivin seemed to solidify the house’s reputation as a bastion of innovative women designers. The jewelry they made derived its primary value from original design and excellent craftsmanship rather than simply the quality and worth of the gemstones. This would become a distinguishing characteristic of Boivin jewelry and ultimately a way of knowing its creator, especially since Jeanne Boivin and Suzanne Belperron did not sign or otherwise mark their jewelry. They stubbornly believed that the eminent design, at least its distinctive character, was evidence enough of who had made the pieces that came out of the salon. It hardly came as a surprise that when Suzanne Belperron’s work began to embody her own personal style, these two strong-minded women would conflict. According to a former employee of Boivin, both were obstinate and strong-willed, and in 1930, Belperron left Boivin.
The concern, as in most jewelry business ruptures, was that the younger designer would also take clients and designs with her. The matter of creative ownership plagues jewelers. Jeanne would continue to think that Belperron’s talent was a hybrid of their collaboration, though Belperron and her followers see her as an original genius. The different point of view still sparks quarrels in the jewelry community.
In trying to assign provenance to the Boivin starfish, Suzanne Belperron is often suggested. There are several starfish in her sketchbook. They are chubbier and smaller overall than the ruby and amethyst starfish, and in the drawings, at least, they have little curls at the ends of all the arms, whereas an identifying feature of the Boivin starfish is that two rays of each starfish are flipped at their ends. There seems to be no question that while Belperron was employed at Boivin, her employer, Jeanne, requested seashell and other maritime designs. It is also easy to assume that all fine Boivin design during her tenure and shortly thereafter was inspired by Belperron because her archives are accessible and Olivier Baroin, a French jeweler and archivist who has digitized them, is a champion of her work. As recently as 2012, Cathy Horyn wrote in The New York Times that “her designs are so singular—bold, playful, anti-ornamental—that they tend to strip away one’s assumptions about jewelry in the latter half of the 20th century, if not in the period before World War II.” She was undoubtedly a star.
Her replacement at Boivin, Juliette Moutard, who designed the Boivin starfish, left a very different impression. Perhaps equally important to how the story is publicly perceived and understood, the Boivin archive, in contrast to Belperron’s, has been kept mostly a secret, allowing for much conjecture and intrigue about the provenance of many designs and pieces. That seems to be exactly the way Nathalie Hocq, its current owner since 2000, wants to keep it. Hocq, a sixty-four-year-old uncommunicative beauty best known for her habit of smoking man-sized cigars and her former position as jewelry director of Cartier who inherited a Cartier fortune, is just another of the sphinxlike figures strewn along the path I followed into the history of the starfish.
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The history of Boivin up until 1930, when Suzanne Belperron struck out on her own, merely explains the design environment that the starfish were conceived in. When the curtain rose on Paris in the 1930s, Boivin occupied a somewhat exalted position in the jewelry world. It had become a mecca for fashionable rich clients who wanted something beyond the flat black-and-white Art Deco pieces studded with diamonds that had dominated the prior decade. Jeanne, now sole proprietor, pushed her designs and salon in several directions. She moved Boivin from Rue des Pyramides to the Palais-Royal on the Avenue de l’Opéra, a bold decision at a time when most jewelers in Paris were establishing themselves in the tonier Place Vendôme, a square in the First Arrondissement underneath a statue of Napoleon I in a Roman Senator–style toga that would become a high-end shopping mecca. She had remarked while hunting for a new space that she “did not want a boutique” for the passing trade, one adorned with the silk, velvet, and wood paneling that was typical décor for other jewelry stores at the time. Somewhat in contrast to her proper, discreet personal appearance and manner, in the salon she opted for edginess. She hired a well-known decorator, André Groult, her brother-in-law, to help with the design.3 It was as if the Boivin salon were her plumage. She covered the walls with straw marquetry that her last designer, Marie-Caroline de Brosses, remembered, “shone like gold straw.” White lead paint gave an enameled appearance to an old dark wood fretwork display cabinet. Overall, it was more rustic than other salons and that distinguished it from bourgeois fustiness. She burned sandalwood incense. It was a maverick environment and backdrop for stones and designs that were assertively unique. Modern. Cutting-edge. Boivin attracted a clientele that wanted something new and different. The new salon cemented the impression with an enviable array of artistic patrons and style setters that included the painter Pierre Bonnard, writer Colette, filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and composers Cole Porter and Erik Satie, among notable others. The fashionable Lady Duff Cooper and the Duchess of Windsor came to shop, as did European royalty. Then as now, celebrity style captured attention and advertised the Boivin brand. Her clients found their way to her by referral only.
Jeanne needed to replace Suzanne Belperron after her departure, and she decided on a very different designer, Moutard. Juliette was also malleable to Jeanne’s specifications, an essential requirement for working with Madame Boivin. She wasn’t the finger-popping, hot new talent that Belperron had been, nor as headstrong. Moutard had designed small clocks before she went to work for Boivin. She was what was called a Raphaelite in her time, a reference to being of unspecific gender, like an angel. She was soft, whereas Belperron had been hard. Photos of her depict a plain-faced woman, unadorned and more coarsely featured than the elegant Belperron. Her operating style was more relaxed and easygoing than her predecessor’s. She effusively talked over a design with Boivin clients, while Madame, a bit stern, stayed in the shadows. A former colleague of Belperron’s told me a story that paints a picture of her I cannot shake. When showing gemstones to a client, she would extend her hand to show the stones cradled in her lengthy upturned fingernail, like a claw. The image, nearly grotesque, conveyed Belperron’s strong sense of drama. Moutard, more measured and less flamboyant, as befitted a former clockmaker, put whatever flair she had into her designs.
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Those designs were her hallmark. And she got along with Madame. The collaboration between Jeanne and Juliette was a fruitful one. It spawned the starfish. Madame Boivin not only ran the business but she usually had the brainstorm for the designs that were created at Boivin. Yet because she did not draw, she could only talk them through with her designers, who sometimes worked with a paintbox close at hand to render an idea on paper. Boivin biographer Françoise Cailles describes Jeanne Boivin’s role as being like a sculptor or colorist. She had the big idea that she talked over with the designer. Then Juliette made the sketch, often in gouache from her paintbox while seated at her workbench, in a workshop behind the salon that was cramped with eighteen employees needed to fill thirty-three orders in 1933 alone. Boivin was booming.
And this is important: so confident were these women of the value and uniqueness of their designs that they continued the practice of the Belperron era of not signing their jewelry, and often did not keep drawings. A client’s wishes were never written into the record books. Most clients gave up trying to influence a design since their comments were rarely taken into account. Boivin, Moutard, and Jeanne Boivin’s daughter, Germaine, who had also entered the business with her mother, believed, arrogantly or wishfully, that their pieces were distinctive enough to not need written identification. Mostly, they were right. The problems this has caused for the chroniclers of Boivin and the story of the pieces they created were not their concern. However, their stance on the matter is confirmed by two unmistakable designs to emerge from Juliette’s sketchbook, a chameleon created in 1939 and the iconic Boivin starfish.
We won’t know what inspired Juliette Moutard to design the starfish. She played with the idea after Madame Boivin had brought a number of seashells into the salon. According to Marie-Caroline de Brosses, the last designer to work for Boivin before it shuttered its doors in 1992, Jeanne and her daughter, Germaine, often brought shells and bones, sometimes glued together, into the salon after walks or outings in nature. De Brosses considered the practice funny and a little odd, and guessed that it had always been the way Madame Boivin operated with her designers, suggesting a motif and prodding for its creation. Moutard’s sketches, when they exist, typically say “from an idea of Madame Boivin.” Animal motifs and a new naturalism began to be evident in Boivin designs from 1929 onward. From 1933 to 1935 a wave of shell designs from whelks to winged shells to ammonites made their way into the Boivin salon showroom. A Boivin diamond whelk brooch appeared on international socialite Mrs. Reginald Fellowes in a photo for Vogue in 1933. In 1934 there was a platinum and diamond starfish clip. And then, suddenly, a showstopper appeared in her sketchpad of cardboard and tracing paper. A cabochon ruby and amethyst pavé (from the French word meaning “to pave,” for small stones set tightly together for continuous sparkle) starfish with rays that were articulated by twenty-eight yellow gold joints. As with many of the pieces to come from Boivin, once Juliette captured them on paper, Jeanne Boivin stayed away until they came back from the fabricator, ready to approve. It was a period of some suspense since the pressure to deliver the design—and these were complicated designs with moving parts—shifted onto the fabricator. Boivin’s eminence in the trade depended both on design originality and the quality of its workmanship.
Boivin began to attract a clientele that was confident and brazen enough by the standards of the day to encourage designers to push the limits. There should be no doubt about the fact that Jeanne was an exacting taskmistress. Jeanne did not draw designs herself but made notes on the drawings made by her designers. She was a tireless perfectionist who wanted symmetry from every angle of a Boivin piece and on more than one occasion sent back to the workshop a whole order that she did not think was up to her standards. In one reported instance, her in-house workmaster, Robert Davière, burst into tears when Jeanne asked him to remount a stone for the third time.4
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Jeanne Boivin’s high card in the jewelry business had always been her relationship with a stable of workshop specialists. The making of a piece of jewelry was a collaboration far more complicated than I, or the woman who blithely selects a finished piece, can imagine. Juliette Moutard’s sketch of starfish was sent out to one of Jeanne’s favorite and best fabricators, Charles Profillet, the workmaster who made all three, and possibly a fourth, ruby and amethyst starfish. His minute initials can be seen with the aid of a jeweler’s magnifying loupe on their undersides.
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Jean Pierre Brun, whose family fabricated jewelry for generations and knew Charles Profillet, painted me a picture of what a puzzle a design with articulated pieces like the Boivin starfish could be for the fabricators who set them into gold. I imagined architects and contractors envisioning a skyscraper. The sheer challenge might have at first seemed insurmountable, but artisans accepted it as a test of skill and capability that could become a singular achievement.
Making gold jewelry is an ancient art and alchemy that dates back five thousand years to the sands of the Euphrates River, where gold was first discovered. To quantify and measure it, the ancients used barley grains or carob seeds (from which the word “carat” is derived) to balance and weigh it on a scale. They divided it into fractions of twenty-four, meaning that pure gold is twenty-four karats. Eighteen-karat gold, which was used for the starfish and most precious jewelry, is eighteen, indicating that the six remaining karats of weight (carob seeds balanced on the scale) were copper and nickel to be mixed with the molten gold to harden it and make it durable. Alloys could also affect color. Achieving the mix of copper and silver that would create a desired tint was another specialty of the goldsmith.
The process began with the goldsmith who melted the eighteen-karat gold ingots or grains into “their own soup,” the alloy, to make the sheet of metal that was used, and ended with the lapidary who cut and set the stones. The raw gold and its recipe of alloys was first heated to its liquid state (1650 degrees Fahrenheit) in small crucibles placed in a furnace to liquefy before being poured into sheets to cool. Next came the magic step by the skilled craftsmen who gave a design, once a drawing on paper, its first real gold form. At this stage the collaboration between fabricator and designer was crucial. In gritty, wood-floored workshops filled with furnaces and men at workbenches with their sleeves rolled up working under table lamps, the starfish were truly made manifest.
The secretive craftsmen did not publicize their techniques, but the starfish were most likely to have been made by “chasing,” gently hammering a specialized tool, a “punch,” actually more like a stamp, to shape a sheet of eighteen-karat gold over a nickel or agate model. By the 1950s this step would be done in beeswax for the “lost wax” casting method, but the Boivin starfish were made without a mold in the 1930s. Another Frenchman, Sylvain Chervin of Carvin French Jewelers in New York, whose uncle André came to the United States from Paris in 1954 and has shared his history of the French jewelry trade with Sylvain, believes it more likely that the jeweler, in this case in a workshop that had a close relationship to the designer and knew from experience how to read her complex drawing, would have been able to manufacture the piece without a model. The fabricator would have formed the rays from a sheet of gold one at a time, then sliced through them to create the links for articulation. The pieces, like the hinged bones of a gold vertebra, were meticulously cleaned and refined by another specialist before they could be assembled. The jeweler’s hand tools, little steel drills resembling modern dental drills and shaped steel blades called gravers, were used to smooth and chisel the settings for the 312 amethyst and ruby gemstones that were set by the stone setter in tandem with the lapidary who cut and shaped the stones—yet another pair of skilled hands in the process. Then the links, or joints, would be soldered or riveted together, much the way a gold bracelet or necklace is fashioned for flexibility. In either case, each step was performed by a specialist in his art. Madame Boivin had her own lapidary in-house, so it is possible that the last step in the completion of the starfish was added in the workroom behind the Boivin salon. I have heard several contemporary jewelers express wonder at exactly how the Boivin starfish was constructed and assembled. They consider it a miraculous piece of craftsmanship out of a bygone era. “It is a secret that is still held by the jeweler,” according to Ulysses Dietz, chief curator and curator of decorative arts at the Newark Museum.
Madame Boivin, as was her practice, kept close watch over the process. She probably visited the Profillet workshop, two hundred meters down the street from the Boivin salon, to check on how the work was progressing. By then in her sixties, she often stayed late in the salon, her years of nighttime soirees behind her.
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The process was much like an assembly line in miniature, and one assumes its tasks were performed expertly and proudly at every stage. In one estimate, three hundred hours would have been spent by another half-dozen specialists before it was completed. All this was for one starfish. No wonder no two are exactly the same. Each owner can bask in the satisfaction that her starfish is in some way unique. With its hand-hewn irregularities and variations, each piece is one of a kind. It must have been a moment of intense expectancy when designer and jeweler awaited the delivery and unveiling of the piece. Surely workmaster Charles Profillet’s face was flushed with pride and victory when he left his workshop on Rue Chabanais, a backstreet behind the Louvre once known for its famous high-end brothel, Le Chabanais (frequented by Edward VII, Prince of Wales; Toulouse-Lautrec; Cary Grant; Humphrey Bogart; Mae West; and diplomatic guests of the French government, but that’s another story…)5, and strode with the starfish in his pocket to the nearby Boivin salon to present it to Madame Boivin and Mademoiselle Moutard. Voilà.
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Butterflies, horseheads, ladybugs, chameleons, lion claws, pigeon wings, roosters, squirrels, turtles, and dragonflies emerged from Juliette’s sketchbook during the thirties and forties, yet it was the starfish that remained one of Madame Boivin’s most favorite pieces. The starfish in particular, like inanimate puppets to emerge from a carpenter’s bench, were about to be dispersed onto two continents, pinned on the shoulders and busts of some of the most beautiful and fashionable women in the world at the time, to begin their journey from then to now. In time, they became, according to Cailles, “Boivin’s most famous creation: the starfish.” It was Madame Boivin’s favorite from the start, perhaps the reason that one version was seemingly kept by Boivin until it was offered for sale in Geneva in 2006. It landed in the hands of another Hollywood actress, this one spirited enough to buy it on a payment plan, and is still described by the American Jewelry University, an online encyclopedia, as “the most famous and iconic of Boivin’s pieces.”
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The hubris that led these designing women to refuse to sign their work was admirable on one hand. I liked their confidence and pluck, but the practice has surely permitted a mind-boggling tangle of doubts, deceptions, and confusions to arise. (How such hauteur would challenge our label-conscious fashion world today!) On one hand Jeanne Boivin did not want to sign Boivin pieces because she believed the design alone was adequate to identify them. “From 1930 onwards it becomes extremely difficult to identify with precision the author of any jewel which left the Avenue de l’Opéra workshop … the final realization was invariably a joint effort … That is how they wanted it,” explains Françoise Cailles in her book about Boivin. Yet the practice of authentication of such pieces invariably requires mention of whether or not they were signed and is relied upon by auctioneers and dealers. I had also been told that signage was sometimes removed from fine jewelry to avoid taxes and customs regulations. And then I had heard also that jewelers had on occasion taken a piece they believed to be Boivin to be stamped on its underside, so that prospective buyers would have confidence in its origin. (And thus establishing that it was possibly not original!) What was I to make of this? Like so much of the jewelry business it was shrouded in ambiguity and it would plague my attempt to identify the starfish later.