Paris, City of Pearls: A Historical Heyday for Jewelry - Hardcover

by Léonard Pouy (Author)

Paper Art III explores the infinite possibilities of paper, an ancient and common material in daily life, allowing people to rediscover the breathtaking beauty of the ordinary and perceive the survival and growth of paper in art.

If Paul Lévi and Jean-Paul Poirot are to be believed, rue Lafayette, which has been home to the majority of Parisian gem dealers since the 19th century, is thought to have been home to almost 300 fine pearl merchants between the two world wars, between numbers 1 and 100. The sheer size of this number is striking when compared with the current state of the fine pearl market, both within the capital and worldwide. As well as unraveling the final mysteries surrounding this biomineral, the main aim is to show the extent to which pearls inspired Parisian jewelers and artists of all kinds, both young and old. They all seem to have been driven by the same pearlomania, whatever their medium, from opera to cinema, painting, photography, posters or illustrated books, to the point of making the pearl one of the symbolic forms of the Roaring Twenties.

Text in English and French.

Author Biography

Léonard Pouy is Content and Transmission Manager at L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. Having studied the looters and plunderers of the Thirty Years' War for his doctoral thesis in art history (at Paris-Sorbonne and the University of Geneva), he then turned his attention to the former "Pirate Coast," now the western shore of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, as curator of the exhibition Pearl Merchants, a Rediscovered Saga Between the Gulf & France at the Dawn of the 20th century (2019). A specialist in the history of jewelry, his latest book is Paris, City of Pearls (2024). David B. is a comic book artist and writer. After training in applied arts at the Duperré school, he published his first album, Le Timbre maudit (Bayard), in 1986. Along with J.-C. Menu, Stanislas, Mattt Konture, Killoffer, and Lewis Trondheim he is one of the founding members of L'Association, a famous French comic book publisher. It has released a number of his works, including L'Ascension du Haut Mal (Epileptic), his greatest success to date, from 1996 to 2004. Considered one of the masterpieces of modern comics, this album won many international awards, as well as the Scenario Prize at the Angoulême Festival in 2000. Invited by the High Jewelry Maison Van Cleef & Arpels to share his vision of Robert Louis Stevenson's story, David B. has produced a series of colored illustrations.