Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.
“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”
The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”
L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.
The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.
Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.
“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”
A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.
The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”
Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”
The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.
All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.
Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.
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