Domenique Mora: Where Design Meets Vision

Lorenz Bäumer  was born in the United States in 1965,  grew up from one country to another through the missions of his German diplomat father and his French mother. His childhood of globe-trotter made him discover the diversity of the world and  influenced all of his artistic career.   Bäumer  always had a fascination for creation in all its forms, eventually turning his passion into a career.   After his studies as an engineer at the Ecole Centrale de Paris,  Bäumer  opened his first salons at 23 rue Royale in 1989 to sell costume jewelry.  Six years later he moved to 4 Place Vendôme and gradually he abandoned the jewelry fantasy from 1992 to devote himself exclusively to jewelry. The creation of the "Ecume de Diamants" tiara for the wedding of SAS Prince Albert of Monaco with Charlène Wittstock in 2010 was a great moment for  Bäumer . In 2013  Bäumer  opened his shop at 19 Place Vendôme, next to the Ritz. Lorenz...

Cuban-born, Brooklyn-raised Art Smith was one of the major modernist jewelers of the mid-twentieth century.  He attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1942 to 1946 where he first pursued architectural studies but eventually abandoned them to concentrate on sculpture and the manipulation of three-dimensional forms. During the early 1940's he learned jewelry making while working part-time as a crafts supervisor at the Children’s Aid Society, and through a night course at New York University. He also worked for and was influenced by Winifred Mason, an African-American jewelry designer with a store in Greenwich Village. In 1946, Smith opened his first store, also in Greenwich Village. Inspired by surrealism, biomorphism, and primitivism, Smith’s jewelry included large scale, asymmetrical forms made from hand-hammered elements of silver, copper, or brass, sometimes combined with quartz or other colorful stones.  His jewelry explored organic shapes and ...

The Jewelry of Margaret De Patta was a seminal figure in the history of American art jewelry and its relationship to constructivism and the Bauhaus.  De Patta’s jewelry embodies the concept of ‘vision in motion’ as championed by the legendary Bauhaus visionary, Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy. In the 1930's Margaret De Patta turned to jewelry and was already an established jeweler by the time she attended the Chicago Bauhaus in 1940. In the early 1940s, she returned to San Francisco where she spent the rest of her life making one-of-a-kind and production jewelry that was perfectly in line with Bauhaus aesthetics. De Patta was sixteen when the German Bauhaus was established in 1919. It moved from Weimar to Dessau and then to Berlin for one final year in 1933 before it closed for good after being raided by the Nazis. As German democracy collapsed in the 1930's, most of the Bauhaus faculty was forced to flee, including Moholy-Nagy, one of the principal Dessau faculty who had...