EATING THE SKY, 2015, screenprint and enamel on linen, 40 × 40 × 1 1/8 in. (framed), by John Giorno; courtesy of Almine Rech
Can a jewel be poetic? I sincerely believe it can. Not poetic as expressed by a literary genre, naturally—the sort that the reader can delight in discovering in the pages of this magazine—but in terms of the wider definition of poetry. As president and creative director of Van Cleef & Arpels, I seek to ignite creativity through arts and literature—which carries through the Maison’s creations, exhibitions, cultural partnerships, and L’École, our School of Jewelry Arts.
For example, the depiction of a fleeting flower or a multicolored butterfly, whose shapes and hues appear to have been borrowed from a fairy tale, can—once sculpted in gold or platinum and set with gemstones—touch and move the beholder as the light plays across its forms. A watch mechanism that, when activated, awakens a fairy sleeping on a lotus leaf with a gentle chime can inspire curiosity and wonder.
Do you have some message for me?
You can talk; I am discrete.
Is your greenery a secret?
Is your perfume a language?
—From To a Flower by Alfred de Musset, tr. by Victoria de Menil
Here we touch on a theme also celebrated by Alphonse de Lamartine and Stéphane Mallarmé in the nineteenth century: the flower may be a universal embodiment of beauty, but its swift disappearance awakens nostalgic musings on the fleeting nature of existence.
When a painter, jeweler, or sculptor sets the delicateness of a flower, the dazzling trail of a shooting star, or the fragility of a dragonfly on canvas or in metal and stones, they are released from such reflections on the brevity of life. They achieve the childlike, almost naïve dream of making beauty eternal and immortalizing the joy of an emotional moment.
Charged by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death’s victory in his voice, and is aghast.
Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.
—From The Tomb of Edgar Poe by Stéphane Mallarmé, tr. by Richard Wilbur
On a more personal note, the poetry that captivates and inspires me can be found in the lyrical or romantic verse of the nineteenth century as much as in the work of Philippe Jaccottet, the sometimes dry poems of Eugenio Montale, or the often desperate lines of Georg Trakl or Paul Celan.
We were
hands,
we baled the darkness empty, we found
the word that ascended summer:
flower.
..........
Growth.
Heart wall upon heart wall
adds petals to it.
One more word like this word, and the hammers
will swing over open ground.
—From Flower by Paul Celan, tr. by Michael Hamburger
In a few short sentences or words, these authors communicate a vision, share their experiences, and touch on the essential. A sometimes tenuous or diminutive starting point, a passing sensation or a very simple image, is translated into words that can be read in a matter of minutes, but can be just as memorable as a novel of several hundred pages.
Everything breaks, everything wrinkles, everything is defeated,
we are born to see a falling and a bleeding,
to call us foetal is to flatter us,
but I who crumble shall make the daylight reign.
—From April by Philippe Jaccottet, tr. by Michael Hamburger
By way of a comparison, think of how Walker Evans, or more recently Wolfgang Tillmans, photographed subjects that would ordinarily pass unnoticed (a faded advertising board, the leftovers of a meal, an assortment of household objects in a kitchen or on a windowsill) to teach us to look at the world around us and expand our concept of beauty. As I consider words and images to be inseparable, I particularly appreciate moments when a poem leaves the expected form of a page in a volume and strays into the realm of the visual arts. The fragility of Emily Dickinson’s “envelope poems”; the unsolvable, fascinating mystery of the typography in Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”; the minimalist geometry of Carl Andre’s texts; and the visual power of John Giorno’s Poem Paintings fascinate me. These poets’ ability to allow us to picture their relationship with the world in the space of seconds is just as dazzling as a diamond.
Nicolas Bos is the president and creative director of Van Cleef & Arpels.