tiffany & co. x mad | i am only a pencil

Jean Schlumberger at his working table, Hotel Regina, by Luc Bouchage, 1951, MAD.

Paris Fashion Week is on the horizon, but the most compelling line-up in town isn’t hitting a the runway this season. Instead, Tiffany & Co. is setting up camp in the French capital to launch a multi-year preservation initiative dedicated to the creative universe of the legendary jewellery designer Jean Schlumberger. Partnering with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the luxury house is embarking on a monumental digital archive project to rescue, conserve and scan roughly 5,000 original sketches and 5,000 historic documents that have remained tucked away from public view.

To kick off the partnership, the duo has conceived ‘I Am Only a Pencil’, an immersive private exhibition curated in tandem with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that maps out the precise evolution from a simple stroke of graphite to a multi-million-pound high jewellery masterpiece. The installation pairs fragile, historical works on paper directly with the physical treasures they generated, focusing heavily on items recovered from the private collection of Schlumberger’s lifetime confidante, the renowned philanthropist and landscape architect Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon.

left.
Jean Schlumberger, sketch for the Jasmine necklace, 1961-2, MAD
right.
Jean Schlumberger, sketch for the Tulips necklace, 1959, MAD

Jean Schlumberger, Sketch for the Butterflies Bracelets for Rachel Bunny Mellon, 1956, MAD.

When Schlumberger joined Tiffany & Co. in 1956, he ushered in a new era for the house, bringing an eccentric and highly imaginative vocabulary of birds, flowers, marine life and fantastical forms to jewellery through an instinctive sense of movement, colour and wit. The exhibition follows these recurring motifs through a series of thematic displays, with Hedges and Flowers, Jasmine and Tulips among the creations shown alongside their corresponding designs. Other sections explore the influence of Surrealism on his objets d’art and the role of couture in shaping his creative output.

The visual layout naturally culminates in a comprehensive study of the ‘Bird on a Rock’, arguably the most enduring high jewellery profile in modern history. The display brings out one of the very first iterations of the brooch ever manufactured — the personal piece belonging to Mrs Mellon, which features the signature diamond-set cockatoo balanced atop a striking lapis lazuli stone rather than the traditional citrines or aquamarines seen today.

left.
Jean Schlumberger, Mermaid (Siréne) (Candlestick), 1969
right.
Jean Schlumberger, Table Clock, ca. 1962

left.
Tiffany & Co. Jean Schlumberger, Bird on a Rock brooch, 1965
right.
Jean Schlumberger, Sketch for Sphere for Rachel Bunny Mellon, ca. 1964, MAD

Yet ‘I Am Only a Pencil’ is about more than revisiting a celebrated chapter in Tiffany’s history. By bringing fragile original drawings and archival material together with the finished jewels they produced, the exhibition also preserves the less visible stages of jewellery design — the sketches, ideas and experiments that might otherwise disappear long before the finished pieces do. The wider archive initiative extends that idea considerably, ensuring that thousands of Schlumberger’s original works survive not simply as records of Tiffany’s past, but as a source of inspiration for the designers and researchers still to come.

The ‘I Am Only a Pencil’ exhibition was presented privately to invited guests in Paris on September 28, with selected material from the wider Jean Schlumberger archive initiative to be made accessible digitally. Find out more here.

photography. courtesy of Tiffany & Co. and Musée des Arts Décoratifs
words. Gennaro Costanzo