Tag: Dallas Museum of Art

Decoration Arabe, studies of Arab art and Arab-style patterns, Cartier Paris, c. 1910, after illustrations in Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856). Archives Cartier Paris, © Cartier. All photographs courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. The slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coupled with European—particularly French—colonial expansion in the Middle East, contributed to an influx of Islamic art and design objects flowing into cities of the West. There, scholars, artists, designers, architects, and others saw in them a potentially rejuvenating aesthetic for then-modernizing Europe. The jewelry and watchmaking firm Cartier was no exception. The third-generation head of the Paris branch, Louis J. Cartier, and his workshop adapted Islamic motifs, materials, and methods of making into a strikingly original style that continues to be expressed in Cartier’s jewelry to this day. The exhibition Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity at the Dallas Museum of Art offers insight into the creative process of Cartier’s designers through more than four hundred objects from the firm’s own collection, and those of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (where the exhibition debuted last year), the Louvre, the privately owned Keir Collection of Islamic Art, and more. Installation view of Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity, on view at the Dallas Museum of Art to September 18. Louis Cartier’s personal collection of Islamic art and design, reassembled for the first time in nearly eighty years, was an indispensable resource for Cartier designers. Mostly portable objects produced for an urban elite, it includes artifacts such as illuminated Persian manuscript pages, walrus-ivory-and-silk pen boxes, jewel-encrusted daggers, and, perhaps most importantly, sourcebooks of Ottoman, Arabic, or polychrome design work. Cartier and his designers isolated Islamic motifs like S-curves, arches, and pyramidal merlons—a decorative