A digital archive showcasing the extensive collection of jewellery and adornment images shared on the former Ethnic Jewels Ning site over the years. These images have significantly enriched discussions on cultural adornment and its global dispersion.
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fabulous!!!
I think the style of this is significantly different from the others you show or which I have seen: far more "feminine", one might say, and thus, even though large and not easy for a small Central Asian woman to wear, conceivably one which she did wear, on special occasions. It looks pretty good on your friend, but that is also because of the height of the person. This one is sufficiently different from ours to make me feel acquisitive about it, while I think the others are all too much the same, if they are clearly very large pieces (it would be good to heave the measurements, in each case). A nice picture - thanks for showing!
Very beautiful woman, costume and jewelry. Thank you for posting, Linda.
She is a very famous NY personage who was a patron of the arts, and has what I consider outside of Colette, the best collection of ethnic jewelry I have ever seen. She had everything and the best of type and most unusual examples. She was a mentor of sorts to me. She was a good friend with many artists , Calder, Man Ray, Picasso who drew her face on his pots etc. She alway dressed up in costume and had a very big presence. Had incedible antiques as well. A vanishing species of people unfortunately.
Not only is this a beautiful woman, but this style and size of the necklace-with-box is also suited to her in a way that ours is not. I have just put on ours to save Truus from again having to be weighed down by it. Not only is our piece - 90 cm or 3 feet long - too heavy for any kind of comfort (and I am still a fairly strong male), but the box hangs most unflatteringly on my tum, and the tassels act, one might say, as a "pubic cover". The total effect is ludicrous on someone who is my height (167 cm), leave alone on what would in c. 1890 Chorezm or anywhere in Uzbekistan have been a smaller person than I. What is most striking in a case like ours is that the NECKLACE part, i.e. what is above the box, is far too far down, when worn, in relation to the box, making it very likely that if the piece had been constructed for a human being likely to wear it that part would have been much shorter, so that the box would sit much higher on the body, as is the case here, with the very top starting not far down from the neck. In other words, this does not seem to have been made for the same purpose: it probably would not sit well on a horse, whereas ours sits badly on a person!!
These are, I think, important distinctions we should make. The more we consider differences in manufacture, the more likely it is that we can form an idea for what purpose an individual piece may have been made.
Linda, I'd go a bit further in comparing this woman with Colette Ghysels, and - going by what I see - give her a higher ranking. As you know, I don't think that CG is an adventurous enough collector: she does not often surprise one with what she has bought (and I am talking about everything I have seen in *The Splendor* and the many *A Word of ...* books): she strikes me as a "textbook" buyer. Your own pieces, in fact, are often far more exciting. Similarly here: this, I feel, is a truly OUTSTANDING piece of jewellery, and not only in workmanship and materials, but also in taste. While the piece looks ambitious on the wearer, she does manage to "pull it off", and at the very least draws attention to the quality and unusualness of the piece. Once again we can see that what comes from the Khorezm area is "something special": that it is amongst the very best areas for ethnic jewellery in the world, and partly because in a way it represents a "hybrid" taste - a more elegant aesthetic and workmanship than that of the Turkoman, yet never in danger of a degree of almost "effeminate" or "over-the-top" refinement/luxury/splendour of more typical Uzbekistan pieces. I think that many of the best judges do keep coming back to Khorezm as extremely satisfying. I add also that Ivory easily has the class to wear something which is very beautiful and civilised at the same time. As you say, she is a disappearing breed, not least in America. To put it crassly: she is of the level of the distinguished American beauties of the late 19th c, and at that time I imagine NOONE would have conceived that today the press would follow every move of a to my mind really "sluttish" individual like Paris Hilton (admittedly still, thank God, an exceptionally vulgar woman ...).
Actually I exaggerated a bit about Khorezm: while this has a strong Turkoman element which I like (as often also with the Karakalpak), there *are* pieces from Khorezm that I find excessive. But I do like this very much indeed. It's rich, grand, but restrained.
I wasn't comparing the size with the other ones in photo above, I was trying to show the variant style of Turkoman living in Uzbekistan for similarity of design. I'm still not sure that I agree with you on the size to proportion of body since mostly in the ethnographic world, the size of the woman were all small in the 19th c and if you look at any book of any kind of folk jewelry from Greece through Bulgaria, to Tibetan through Kazakstan and Morocco, the rich had ostentatious size to the proportion of the person. Just remember the photo of the Moroccan child with piles of necklaces and beads from tiznit that dwarfted her? I have seen it both in field photos and in my own travels that size bears no relationship sometimes to what we or you would think its comfortable or workable. We can disagree on this one until more proof is rendered. I think it is illogical why some one would wear something so large but until we really know the reasons these were made, or some tangible proof like a photo, it's all up in the air.
I think Colette's pieces are very consistent in quality and are in my opinion more definitive of a particular type of design. If she has an ivory bracelet of a certain type, it is usually very nearly the best of that type.
There is no variance to the quality of metal or workmanship and it's a very even taste with usually no holes in quality or age. I like her taste very much I guess is what I'm saying and have always used her as a benchmark for my own collecting.
Two quite different things this time! (1) As to size in relation to person: I think there is a difference between wearing e.g. ten necklaces on top of each other, or, as a woman of 5 feet, trying to wear a necklace longer than yourself: the latter is hardly possible. That, I think, is the main problem I have with the idea that a woman would actually have WORN such a piece. But - you are right: it is all up in the air. (2) It is interesting that you should have seen Colette's pieces as a benchmark for yourself. As someone who knows by now quite reasonably well what both of you have collected (I know all the books she has published, and I imagine I would probably by now have seen more of your collection than most people?) I personally think you underrate yourself! Yes, there is no doubt that she has very consistently collected quality examples, and that is pleasing and of course does provide a good insight into what a quality example looks like. And yet, whichever of her books I look through (again and again), I don't find the experience really pleasing. One major problem is that there is no text to speak of, and thus no contact with a person (the pieces seem to float in space); another is that the lay-out (lack of colour etc) of her books is deadly dull; but undoubtedly the main problem - such as it is - is the absence of the kind of daring, personal choice that you (and Truus and I, for that matter) are prepared to make. Everything she shows is utterly "safe", and as such to an extent predictable as one soon gets to see her criteria for buying, which I do think are those of a "textbook" collector (a good example of A, and a good example of B, etc), rather than someone who is passionately exploring and appears to buy because she is really "gripped" by the pieces. That is a major contrast with the experience I get when I look at your own choices: I don't necessarily concur with them at all times, and that is inevitable, and would also apply to what you think of what we buy - but noone can say that we (you, Truus and I) eschew what may seem in the eyes of many odd, imperfect, eccentric, etc, but almost always is at the very least interesting. We are all three of us passionate, explorative collectors, acting very much on our own initiative, which is not a feeling that Truus and I have about the Ghysels, but - from the word go, when we bought our first pair of Miao earrings from you (and though it was expensive to us it is STILL very rare) - you have far more often had the pieces which really interest us. All in all, when I add up what I have seen of the pieces which have gone through your hands, and realise there are even now very many which I do NOT know, and if I mentally put all of those together, I think any books on the objects you have yourself collected, in that sense, would - even if published in the same way as the Ghysels books - be vastly more interesting to us than what the Ghysels show the world. One has to admire them even so, and the books do provide a service, but we are generally not truly excited by much of what we see. With your pieces I think the viewer's imagination is extended and challenged - something Truus and I don't feel in the presence of the Ghysels pieces. It also means, in practice, that you have had many pieces which we are truly sorry about not owning, and would have bought had we been richer, whereas we don't feel that often in the case of the Ghysels pieces.
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