When I lived in downtown Dallas a few years ago, one of my favorite perks was being just a ten-minutes walk from the Dallas Museum of Art. The museum has an impressive permanent collection and consistently hosts excellent exhibitions.
In the summer of 2022, I visited Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity, one of the most memorable shows I've ever seen there. The exhibit introduced me to a subject I knew very little about and sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole. It explored the influence of Islamic art on the work of the Cartier brothers.
While the jewelry itself was extraordinary, what I found even more interesting was seeing the creative process behind it all, including the studies, sketches, and reference materials that shaped the final designs.
During my first visit (I ended up going three times, it was that good), I noticed the exhibit repeatedly referenced a book called The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones. I learned that the Cartier brothers used it as a source of inspiration when developing their designs. Intrigued, I purchased the 2016 edition.
The book is fascinating on several levels. Jones was a British designer and architect who set out to study and document decorative arts from different cultures with the goal of improving the quality of Western design. In 1856, he published a comprehensive collection of illustrations and analyses of ornamental design gathered during his travels throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Jones begins with the idea that one of humanity's universal traits is the desire to make things beautiful. Looking through the book, it's hard to disagree. The hand-drawn illustrations are remarkable on their own, but they also reveal an endless variety of geometric patterns accompanied by notes and explanations that make their structure and purpose easy to understand.
He then introduces what he calls the “general principles in the arrangement of form and colour, in architecture and the decorative arts, which are advocated throughout this work.” The list is extensive, but a few of my favorites are:
- “The Decorative Arts arise from, and should properly be attendant upon Architecture.”
- "As Architecture, so all works of the Decorative Arts, should possess fitness, proportion, harmony, the result of all which is repose.”
- “True beauty results from that repose which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect, and the affections, are satisfied from the absence of any want.”
These ideas are especially evident in Jones's discussion of the Alhambra in Spain. The rabbit hole deepened considerably when I reached that chapter, which I go into detail here.
After reading the book and seeing the exhibit, it's easy to understand why the Cartier brothers found so much inspiration within Jones's book. As someone who enjoys making things, I found it fascinating to see how shapes and patterns from India, the Middle East, and North Africa evolved into three-dimensional jewelry designs.
Photographing items (especially sparkly jewelry) in the exhibit was very challenging because of the low lighting and the glass displays, which created glare in many of the photos.
A Cartier sketch from the exhibit:
From The Grammar of Ornament:
