Tucked inside the Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau on the Boulevard Montmartre is L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts — a school founded by Van Cleef & Arpels in 2012, not to sell jewelry, but to teach people about it. They run courses on gemology, jewelry history, and the hands-on techniques of the trade, plus talks, a library, and rotating exhibitions. It's a rare thing: a space built entirely around the culture of jewelry.
I was recently in Paris and went to see their current exhibition, "Daniel Brush, the Art of Line and Light", running through October 4th. Daniel Brush was not an artist that I knew before I saw the exhibition, but now that I’ve seen his work, I find I can’t stop thinking about it.
Who was Daniel Brush
Brush (1947–2022) was an American artist-goldsmith who spent his career refusing to be filed under any one category. Trained as a painter, he taught art philosophy at Georgetown before moving to New York in 1978 to work full-time out of a Manhattan loft, surrounded by antique tools and machines. He was self-taught as a jeweler, which turns out to matter a lot — he never learned the rules well enough to feel bound by them.
The show gathers more than 75 pieces, some leaving his studio for the very first time, and it's the kind of survey that makes clear he wasn't making "jewelry" in the way most of us define it. He was making objects that happened to sometimes be wearable.
What stuck with me
He didn't care what materials were supposed to go together. Brush paired fine diamonds with stainless steel and aluminum. He set pure gold against raw steel. In a field that's obsessed with hierarchies of preciousness, he just ignored the hierarchy. He made what he wanted to make, out of what the piece needed, and let the rest of the world sort out what to call it.
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Top left: Nest: Butterflies, Ladybugs, 1990–1992. Pure gold and steel.
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His engraving looks like drawing. Some of the surfaces in this show have the precision of architectural renderings like his Rings of Infinity (one shown above) — fine, controlled lines that catch the light differently depending on where you stand. Others look like he pulled a wide brush across canvas, the engraving patterns reading almost like brushstrokes in a painting. It's engraving used as a drawing tool, in ways I haven’t seen before.
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Left: one piece from the series called Thinking About Monet, 2015–2020. Engraved 1018 steel. Right: one piece from the series called Red Breathing, mid-1990s-mid-2000s. Ink on paper. |
Scale and ambition. Seeing the range of his work — from small wearable pieces to large sculptural objects — pushed me to think bigger. Not every piece has to sit neatly in the "jewelry" box. Some things can be jewelry and stand alone as art objects in their own right.
The studio photos. The exhibition includes images of his New York workspace, full of classic and vintage tools — nothing high-tech about it. And yet the complexity of what he made with those tools is staggering. It's a good reminder that the ideas and the hands matter more than the equipment.
Permission to play. More than any single technique, what I took away was a nudge to protect time for experimentation. It's easy to let the business of running a jewelry business — production, orders, deadlines — crowd out the studio time that isn't tied to an outcome. Brush spent a lifetime just following curiosity. I would love more time for that in my own practice.
If you're anywhere near Paris before October 4th, it's free with a reservation and well worth planning for. You don’t need a full day – it's not a huge show, and reservations give you roughly an hour inside, but that hour stays with you. I'm still unpacking what I saw, and I have a feeling the inspiration of how he played in his studio is going to stick with me.