Salvador Dalí’s Surreal Jewelry Designs: From Throbbing Hear…

Upon hear­ing the name of Sal­vador Dalí, even a total lay­man in the art world is bound to get visions of melt­ing clocks. Sur­pris­ing­ly, for an artist who showed so much self-mar­ket­ing savvy, Dalí nev­er brought an actu­al time­piece in that dis­tinc­tive­ly, even canon­i­cal­ly sur­re­al shape to mar­ket. But that hard­ly stopped Carti­er from putting out the Crash, whose dis­tort­ed shape may have always brought The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry to mind, but whose name hints at the inspi­ra­tion of a watch smashed up in a car wreck. The Crash came out in swing­ing-six­ties Lon­don at its very height, by which time Dalí him­self had been design­ing real jew­el­ry for more than a quar­ter cen­tu­ry.

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You can see a few of Dalí’s jew­els in the 1960 British Pathé clip at the top of the post. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, they occu­py a realm apart from, or at least orthog­o­nal to, that of con­ven­tion­al jew­el­ry. Some of them move: Liv­ing Flower, for instance, which “opens to reveal sta­men and petals paved with dia­monds. The mech­a­nism is embed­ded in mala­chite from the Con­go, which to Dalí rep­re­sents the unknown, latent forces, while the gold and dia­mond flow­ers, known beau­ty and cre­ativ­i­ty.”

Angel Cross, by con­trast, embod­ies “the hypox­i­o­log­i­cal con­cept of exis­tence — what­ev­er that means.”  Cer­tain­ly, Dalí nev­er claimed to play to the sen­si­bil­i­ty of the British, though some of them might go in for The Roy­al Heart, with its “pul­sat­ing rubies rep­re­sent­ing our queen, heart beat­ing con­stant­ly for her peo­ple, while the nugget gold sym­bol­izes the peo­ple shel­ter­ing and pro­tect­ing their ruler.”

The seg­men­t’s out­takes fea­ture more footage of these pieces, giv­ing us a longer look at works like The Eye of Time, embed­ded with a small clock signed by Dalí, and the “leaf-veined hands” he described as “reach­ing out to the future.” Oth­er of his vivid jew­el­ry designs include the Medusa brooch, com­plet­ed with a nest of ruby-eyed gold snakes, and a con­struc­tion that lit­er­al­izes — and, at the same time, sur­re­al­izes — the expres­sion “ruby lips and teeth like pearls.” Real­ized in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the well-regard­ed jew­el­ers Car­los Ale­many, Eric Ert­man, and Hen­ryk Kas­ton, and often inspired by his wife and muse Gala, they may be over­shad­owed by Dalí’s paint­ings and draw­ings, but haute cou­ture does pay them occa­sion­al homage. What else — indeed, who else — could have inspired the throb­bing heart-shaped rhine­stone neck­lace seen on Schi­a­par­el­li’s mod­els last sum­mer at Paris Fash­ion Week?

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s Sur­re­al Cut­lery Set from 1957

The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Sal­vador Dalí

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed a Sur­re­al­ist Fun­house at New York World’s Fair (1939)

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing “The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry” a Great Work of Art

Cap­ti­vat­ing Col­lab­o­ra­tion: Artist Hubert Duprat Uses Insects to Cre­ate Gold­en Sculp­tures

Take a Jour­ney Through 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.