I was anxious to meet Janet Zapata, a jewelry expert who had helped Lee Siegelson and other leading jewelers research some of the famous vintage items they advertised for sale. A writer herself, she produced the text that described the provenance and history of starfish and other pieces in catalogues and online notices. As an independent scholar and museum consultant, Zapata had written books about jewelry and curated exhibitions. When I had asked Lee Siegelson how he knew the starfish he offered for sale was the third one made by Boivin, he told me to “ask Janet.”
Major jewelers rested their credibility and reputations on people like Janet, but they were seldom visible. She, and a few others like her, moved about the jewelry sales world at will, and as I would learn, usually had up-to-the-minute information about pieces that came on the market. I was prepared to value her as someone who, like an academic in other disciplines, was more interested in learning things about the pieces that are being sold than in sales or client relationships.
The woman who met me for tea at the Cosmopolitan Club on the Upper East Side of New York was a neatly dressed middle-aged woman with short brown hair. Her shoes were sensible low heels. I got the impression she was at home in her own skin, and she was confident enough to be open in her professional capacity. There was no need to dance around the subject of the starfish. We plunged right into it.
She had first seen a starfish in 2007 with Lee Siegelson, whose acquisitions she often researched, she said.1 She believed Claudette Colbert’s was the first one made by Boivin in Paris. Then Millicent’s was the second. Lee had also owned the third. “Jewelry gets stuck in vaults,” she explained. Dealers wait patiently for certain pieces to make an appearance on the market. The characteristic that distinguished the starfish for her, among the many pieces of jewelry that she has studied and observed, was simple. “These pieces move. They are not stationary. They are big and their design came up through the Art Deco period. In the thirties there was a figural change that they were part of,” she said, offering her grounded understanding of the starfish’s appeal. “Jewelry became an art form in that period.” She added that the later ones, those extra two or three that were made in the eighties and nineties, “they were the same design but stiffer.” One that came up for sale at Christie’s that had belonged to the designer Oscar de la Renta was a “later one.” She told me that if I saw one I would know the difference. It was more than just a matter of size, even though the newer ones were a few centimeters bigger than the originals. I must have looked dubious. “You’ll just know,” she assured me.
I could see that unlike the dealers I had spoken with so far, Janet’s attachment to the pieces we were discussing was much more objective. She did not have the passionate personal connection to the pieces or get the same buzz from having them around her that the dealers did. She mentioned how she had watched dealers, especially the men, fall in love with jewelry. “They love their work. Unlike all the other decorative arts, you touch and wear jewelry. It becomes part of you. You can hold it and carry it. There is no big box.” She went a step further, hypothesizing that the attachment men have to jewelry often substitutes for extramarital intrigue. “Men in the jewelry world don’t cheat. They relate to women differently. As experts. The jewelry is what is always there the next day for them,” she said. “You can put it in your pocket and touch it. That is what is so special.” And the chase never ends.
When I asked for her overview of the jewelry business in general, she was quick to answer. “Everyone has a secret. The jewelry business is very secretive, what they have and who they know. To be a dealer, you have to have a lot, a lot of money. They control it. They buy and sell jewelry every day, and because of the money, it is very secretive.” She explained that every shop was somewhat in hostage to “the money people,” either partners, lenders, or banks. “The dealers in those stores own a percentage but not usually all,” she said. There were “upstairs jewelers,” like Siegelson and Verdura and “money people,” in the parlance of the industry. I assumed that Siegelson, because of what I had heard about the fortune he had inherited from his father’s diamond business, fit both models.
She told me a little self-deprecating story when we talked about the kind of women who wear Boivin starfish brooches. “They usually have vast wealth and are women who are self-assured and out at all events. As you grow into your personality, your jewelry gets bigger. All have important jewelry. Other people just get more diamonds, which is not the same thing as a starfish. It takes a sophisticated someone who has an eye to go into this. The average person wouldn’t want to buy a starfish or understand it. It’s too threatening.” Where did she fit into this? I asked her. Again she laughed. When she worked at Tiffany, she said, her employer had called her in at one point and said that she was a “little jewelry” person. The big pieces, like the starfish, were not her own style.
I told Janet that I would soon need to go to Paris and London to delve further into the starfish history. She mentioned several people whom I should speak with. I could see the wheels turning in her mind. “Tell them you talked to Janet and perhaps they can help you figure out the puzzle.” That was what attracted her to this line of work. The puzzle.
* * *
I had heard that Audrey Friedman, a principal with Primavera Gallery in Chelsea, was an expert on Boivin. When I e-mailed her we agreed to meet at the fine art and jewelry show at the Park Avenue Armory, where Primavera had a booth. As I approached the Primavera booth, I knew that the woman with jet-black hair, dark lipstick, and white skin as smooth as porcelain with a large Alexander Calder pin on her black dress had to be Audrey Friedman. There was something very ladylike and old-world about her on one hand and modern and savvy on the other. Phlegmatic now, after forty years Audrey knows her business from both sales experience and tireless research. She writes about and lectures on French jewelry from the 1930s and 1940s. “One of the reasons for the superior workmanship of French jewelry was the apprenticeship system, whereby a person would begin to learn his trade at age fourteen. This gave rise to a class of jeweler who was skilled in all aspects of jewelry work to a degree almost unknown today, and it is one of the things that made French jewelry so special,” she told me. It was the design and craftsmanship that attracted her. The Primavera Web site boldly asserts, “We are not interested in large diamonds or masses of precious stones—this, for us, is geology rather than jewelry. We are interested in great style, exciting design, and integrity of workmanship.” Design, not rocks.
She lamented the end of the days when “you could find Boivin and other pieces from this period because other dealers didn’t know what they were. Nobody was paying attention.” But Boivin has been in demand again recently, she reported. And Boivin pieces are harder to find. “The dealers are gone. There used to be ten dealers on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris,” she said. Now there are perhaps two. The starfish appeal, in her opinion, to the same people who wanted them in the 1940s. “Sophisticated women with money. Their appeal is visual and feminine.”
The business of buying jewelry like the Boivin starfish has always been based, in her experience, on one criterion. “Does the piece make your heart beat faster?” She said that she had been caught by this herself. A woman dealer can more easily flaunt her wares by wearing them. A Boivin bracelet, the Alexander Calder pin she wore when I met her at the Armory show, and other favorite pieces have become part of her private collection. “My heart often beats fast, that’s when I have to have it.” She laughed. “If I wanted pieces that we acquired, I kept them. It has always been about the piece for me.” She added regretfully, “Unfortunately, it becomes about the money. It is so expensive these days that you have to sell them.” But the sale, even of an expensive piece that makes a profit, can generate a sense of loss. “I miss knowing I have it,” she said, smiling. I heard the echo of Russell Zelenetz and Stephen Feuerman telling me they liked having the necklace around that the buyer didn’t claim. “When you have them you connect with the spirit of the maker. Like listening to music,” she added. Abiding affection for what they do seemed to distinguish and unite jewelers as a class. Most will tell you that they can’t imagine doing anything else, or like Audrey, they tried other professions and gave them up.
We were sitting in the Primavera gallery in Chelsea late in the afternoon while the winter sun went down over the Hudson River out the window. The lights in the Art Deco lamps on display around the gallery came up and threw their warm glow around us. She and her husband and business partner, Haim Manishevitz, who had sat quietly in the back while Audrey and I talked, joined in to tell me the story of a male client who bought jewelry for his wife. “In one case we suspected that when the wife of the man who bought a piece was away he put it on and walked around the house.” Audrey chuckled.