基本説明
Comment, il y a un siècle, Paris est-il parvenu à se hisser au sommet du négoce mondial de la perle ? Pour quelles raisons ce commerce si florissant a-t-il disparu ? Mais surtout, comment se fait-il que la mémoire de cet âge d'or de la perle soit aujourd'hui perdue ? Au-delà de l'élucidation des derniers mystères liés à un biominéral dont l'ancienneté des relations avec les hommes est sans cesse repoussée, cet ouvrage dévoile de quelle manière la perle a su inspirer tant l'ensemble des joailliers que les artistes parisiens au sens large. Tous semblent en effet avoir été animés d'une même « perlomanie », et ce quel que soit leur médium, de l'opéra au cinéma en passant par la peinture, la photographie, l'affiche ou les illustrés, au point de faire de la perle l'une des formes symboliques des Années folles.
Full Description
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 unravelling the final mysteries surrounding this biomineral, the main aim is to show the extent to which pearls inspired Parisian jewellers 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.
Contents
Foreword 13
Introduction 14
Pearls and the East 18
The nature of pearls 20
Pearl vocabulary: origins and definitions 22
The Wild Wild East 25
Conquering the market 32
The slow rise of French merchants in the Gulf 35
The queen of gems, the gem of queens...
and of first Ladies 45
London versus Paris: a war of pearls 55
The "new pearl fisheries" 65
The arrival of the "king of pearls":
Léonard Rosenthal 68
London's fall, rise of Paris 71
From Kuwait to Rue La Fayette... and back 78
The pearl as a symbol of modernity 88
From Art Nouveau to the "new style" 90
The pearl trade during the First World War 116
Pearl mania in Paris 128
The Gulf merchants head to Paris 130
Much-decorated merchant-kings 134
It's raining pearls! 137
Cultured pearls burst onto the Western market 158
The pearl enthroned: the Exposition Internationale
des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes
of 1925 163
Sea, land and sky: all pearl routes lead to Paris 172
The dark years 174
"At this price, Ladies." 176
Cultured pearls: problem or solution? 180
The end of an era 183
The pearl crisis 186
The Rosenthals' terrible odyssey 197
The pearl trade from then to now 202
The pearl paths after the war 205
Papeete, new center of cultured pearls? 211
Pearls in the 21st century: back in favor? 217
Appendices 222
