Class is In Session at Van Cleef & Arpels

The passion that my mother’s mother had for jewelry ignited my own. Other grandmothers may bake cookies when their granddaughters visit, but with Bebe, bonding took place over a show-and-tell of sparkling treasures. I remember the creak and slam of each little hard, hinged box; the powdery feel of the suede drawstring bags; the cold stones of the earrings and rings; the way the gold links of her necklaces would warm in my hand; the bracelets and brooches that still smelled of Joy.

But a connection, even a passion, does not an education make. And no: Repeat screenings of the summer’s jewelry-heist hit Ocean’s 8 don’t count, no matter how many times you watch the Mindy Kaling scenes.

So, I was excited when I heard that the famed L’École des Arts Joailliers, Van Cleef & Arpels’s School of Jewelry Arts in Paris, was planning a pop-up in my home city of New York this fall. On offer are three jewelry exhibitions, a series of public lectures, and dozens of à la carte, all-level classes in jewelry, taught in English by top masters in their field, including a few for children and teens. And I was thrilled at the chance to visit L’École and preview the New York programs during my short stay in Paris this past summer.

Since Van Cleef & Arpels launched L’École in Paris more than six years ago, the programming there and at its pop-ups has brought the savoir faire of jewelry and gems to more than 30,000 people from nearly 50 countries. I was looking forward to being one of them.

My education started with diamonds.

In the second arrondissement of Paris, just around the corner from Van Cleef & Arpels’s flagship boutique on Place Vendôme, L’École comprises three stories of classrooms, a charming salon where students and teachers mingle for coffee breaks, and an inviting library with more than 1,500 books on jewelry and gems, including a number published in house (a growing enterprise for L’École). Above the school itself is the Van Cleef & Arpels professional workshop, where its finest jewelry is crafted. An old fashioned school bell signals the beginning and end of each class.

My first class, “History and Legends,” was co-taught by gemologist Virginie David and art historian Gislain Aucremanne. “Carats are her, dates are me,” he quipped by way of introduction. They explained how diamonds came to represent abstract concepts like power and majesty for rulers in different cultures—and were not worn by women before the 15th century—only later signifying seduction, luxury, love, and “forever”-ness. The teachers laser-pointed their way across a world map and ticked through their list of the provenance and fate of the most famous-slash-hugest diamonds in human history, ranked by carat. At various points, David donned one white glove—Michael Jackson style—for a show-and-tell of replicas of certain diamonds, “to give an idea of volume,” as she put it. The core of the class comprised entertaining historical narratives so rehearsed they were nearly vaudevillian, name-checking Marco Polo, Pierre Cartier, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Catherine de Medici, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, Napoleon, Louis XIV (“he was crazy for diamonds”), and Louis XV (“he almost had a gemologist’s eye”), plus too many Persian shahs, Indian rulers, British monarchs, and Hollywood starlets to count.

My next diamonds class, “Science and Gemology” opened with the periodic table of elements. (I was not the only one who groaned.) But the two gemology experts, Isabelle Delahaye and Dominique Dufermont, drilled down on the hard science of diamonds and diamond mining—chemistry, geology, physics—in an entertaining way.”

But in both diamond classes, the darker history of mining was, shall we say, mined too, addressing in a forthright fashion slave labor, “the exploitation of the earth,” so-called blood or conflict diamonds, and the role of diamonds in apartheid South Africa.

We also had an opportunity to play with the tools of the trade: I learned how to use a jeweler’s loop and jeweler’s tweezers, as well as how to compare and evaluate crystals, white topaz, and varying qualities of diamonds under a special flip lamp designed to approximate “the northern light at 12 noon in Anvers, Belgium.” I learned to look for occlusions and to understand not just the “four Cs” of cut, clarity, color and carat but also the anatomy of a stone: facets, tables, crowns, and pavilions.

There was even more hands-on work with “Recognize the Gemstones” taught by David and Delahaye. The class was divided into four teams and each was challenged to identify a group of red, blue, green, or clear stones, as if we were in the legendary gem markets of Chanthaburi in Thailand, Ratnapura in Sri Lanka, or Bogotá in Colombia. “You have your passport with you?” joked Delahaye.

To solve the mystery, we learned how to use a gemologist’s polariscope, dichroscope, refractometer, spectroscope, and density scale, along with charts showing each natural stone’s traits. I was in the Green Group, and through process of elimination, we ultimately discovered that we had a piece of synthetic glass, a tourmaline, a tsavorite, and a true emerald.

I thought I’d most enjoy my class on gem-setting techniques (bezels, prongs and so on). But I threw in the tweezers after our charming teachers—a master jeweler and a stone setter who spend their time in the atelier upstairs making the famous Van Cleef & Arpels ballerinas and zipper necklaces—had to keep helping me collect the gemstones I’d dropped in the leather lap of my jeweler’s bench. I did, however, enjoy the laughs I got when I texted friends back home the selfies I took wearing my Steampunk-y jeweler’s spectacles.

Though many of the New York classes are already sold out (of course, there is always Paris!), do not despair; the three exhibitions provide quite a lot.

First, The Fabulous Destiny of Tavernier’s Diamonds: From the Great Mogul to the Sun King, celebrates the 20 diamonds that the great 17th-century explorer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier acquired in 1668 for Louis XIV, then 30. Tavernier, called by one of my teachers at L’École “the Marco Polo of jewelry,” sold hundreds of diamonds from his travels to Louis XIV. All but the Blue Diamond (now called the Hope Diamond) disappeared in the 19th century, but for this project L’École assembled a collaborative team of scholars and gemologists to create accurate 3D reproductions in partnership with Paris’s Museum of Natural History. As she walked me through the exhibition’s Paris iteration, co-curator Cécile Lugand explained that the thrill of this show is the way it brought together scholarship around “gemology, diplomacy, art history, and the history of trade.”

Through the Eyes of a Connoisseur is a selection of jewelry lent by an unnamed New York-based collector. The designs date from the late 1800s to the 1960s, with Art Deco especially well represented. Along with items from Van Cleef & Arpels are designs from Lacloche Frères, Pierre Sterlé, Suzanne Belperron, Cartier, Boucheron, and Tiffany. Several museum-quality pieces of Judaica reflect a more personal aspect of the collection.

Finally, Daniel Brush: Cuffs and Necks features jewelry designed by the Cleveland-born, Manhattan-based metalsmith, painter, and sculptor who garnered a five-page profile in Vanity Fair during his 40-year retrospective at the Museum of Art and Design in 2013. The exhibition, first presented at L’École Place Vendôme, presents two series of work. The first is a set of more than 100 gem-set chokers that riff on les colliers de chien—that’s right: dog collars. The second, which looks at the cultural role of the bracelet in India, is a set of 72 bangles inspired by jewels of the Nizams of Hyderabad, who ruled between 1724 and 1948. “I had been so taken with the jewels of India,” Brush told me. “To be more specific, the treasures handed down from Nizam to Nizam, and even more so, from the Maharajahs of Jaipur.”

In a nice bit of kismet, one of the special public events L’École has organized in New York is Brush in conversation with curator Beth Carver Wees, who co-organized an expansive exhibition that will debut just up Fifth Avenue at the Metropolitan Museum and will also include work by Brush. For the Met’s show, Jewelry: The Body Transformed, Wees and her colleagues have drawn largely from the museum’s own collection to mount a dazzling array of more than 200 objects designed to adorn the human body. The items hail from around the globe, with the earliest dating to 2600 B.C.E., alongside work by many of Brush’s contemporaries. Included too are sculptures, paintings, prints, and photographs that provide context about how, over the centuries, jewelry has been worn and used to tell stories about its wearer. The Met exhibition opens November 12 (through February 24), just after the team from L’École has packed up their jeweler’s benches, said au revoir, and headed home across the Atlantic