Johnny has just opened the salon mentioned by Jean-Pierre Brun in Paris and is traveling to South-East Asia. Bali, Cambodia … It’s his new passion. No doubt awakened by her companion Luc Bouchage who, after having frequented the world of the New York magazine press, Harper’s Bazaar at House & Garden, collaborates alongside Jacques Prévert with the wildlife photographer Yll, until her death in 1955 during an ox race in Rajasthan. That same year, Walter Hoving, the new CEO of Tiffany, tears his hair out to relaunch the American jewelry house with only $ 7 million in sales per year (and 100 million twenty years later, when he leaves the society). Distinguished 50-year-old, later author of an amusing book entitled Tiffany’s Good Table Manners for teens, Hoving offered the services of Van Day Truex, an interior designer who worked in Paris before the war and became friends with Elsie de Wolfe, aka Lady Mendl, Schiaparelli client. Former president of the Parsons School of Design, Van Day Truex, a French-speaking Francophile (newly appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor) will whisper the name of Schlumberger to him in 1956.
“We were given the moon,” Bongard recalled when they came to Tiffany’s. Schlum is directly appointed vice-chairman. He has, within the flagship of Fifth Avenue, a lounge just for him, accessible by a private elevator guarded, according to Jean-Pierre Brun, by a chic French-speaking Haitian half-great salesman, half-master of ‘hotel. It is a stroke of genius. The faithful of 63rd Street now come to Fifth Avenue as well as to Rue de Ponthieu. “When a piece was sold in Paris, it sold a hundred times more in the United States,” recalls Jean-Pierre Brun. For Evelyne Possémé-Rageau, curator at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris and curator of the Parisian exhibition dedicated to her in 1995, “it’s a UFO that arrives in the community. He dares the volume, the mixture of colors, a very spicy, spiky side, unheard of at the time ”. He imagined in 1961 for the Tiffany diamond a necklace in the form of interlacing ribbons worn by Audrey Hepburn – the photo is more effective at the time than today a post of Kim Kardashian – before placing a bird on it, the famous “Bird on the Rock”. John Kennedy in person takes the private elevator to buy jewelry for Jacqueline. The latter comes for her part to attend the opening of the exhibition dedicated to her at the Wildenstein gallery in November 1961.
“Diamonds, pearls, rubies are often brought together for heavy and easy effects […]. No one, I think, understood it so well as Jean Schlumberger […]. He returned to the jewel its quality of three-dimensional object that one does not stroke only with the eyes, but also with the hands ”, writes Charles Sterling, director of the painting department of the Louvre, in the exhibition catalog. The names of the lenders make you dizzy: Diana Vreeland, of course, but also Daisy Fellows, the baronne of Thyssen-Bornemisza, Millicent Rogers and Bunny Mellon who lends a holy water font in emeralds and sapphires. In the evening, a Russian dinner at Schlum celebrates the event. Jackie is, of course.
In turn, Jean d’Ormesson wrote in a rare two-volume book dedicated to the jeweler (now sold for over $ 2,000 on Ebay): “Schlumberger objects should not only be seen: they should be touched and caressed,” adding: “I see Schlumberger more like a choreographer, a botanist, even a psychoanalyst rather than a fashionable jeweler, drawn more to bestiaries and palimpsests than to catalogs. “
A botanist, Schlumberger certainly is. Like her friend and client Bunny Mellon, no doubt met thanks to the clique ofHubert de Givenchy and Cristóbal Balenciaga – whose pajamas he wears to draw, in winter, on the property he bought in Guadeloupe. This millionaire friend, crazy about horticulture, travels in a private jet with her orchids, collects historical works at her property in Oak Spring, Virginia, and even designs the gardens of the White House. Schlum imagines for her a gold flowerpot with sunflower and emerald leaves, in addition to a fish brooch, the famous cucumber box made by Jean-Pierre Brun, a hummingbird set with colored stones and other treasures today kept by the Museum of Fine Arts of Virginia. Commissioner Stanton David showed them in 2019 in an exhibition at the one in St. Petersburg, Florida: “These are pieces that speak to all ages, that go beyond its aura of French chic of the time. Schlumberger revolutionized Tiffany, who was very diamond and pearl, by bringing volume, color, fantasy … I also think he had a kindness, a loyalty very appreciated by these women. And at the heart of the jet-set, he systematically dodged the photographers’ lens. “
Emmanuel Tarpin, 28, already confirmed hope of indie high jewelry made in Paris, tells me about his admiration for the French designer: “I love his almost mythological animals, his chimeras at the crossroads of koi carp and hedgehog. And his work with color, his indifference to central stones, and his craftsmanship of metal which he makes a star and not a structure. “
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