Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Set up in the Princes' Apartment and in the Tapestry Rooms, the exhibition is open to the public from tomorrow until 23 February 2020, with free entry

Milan, November 29 2019 - The exhibition "Van Cleef & Arpels: time, nature, love", set up in the rooms of the Princes' Apartment and in the Tapestry Rooms of the Milanese palace, will open to the public from tomorrow.

The exhibition presents, for the first time in Italy, the universe of the high jewelery maison through over 400 jewels, watches and precious objects created since its foundation in 1906.

Archive documents, line drawings and gouache bear witness to the origins of artistic creation, accompanying the precious specimens from the Van Cleef & Arpels collection and private loans.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan Culture and Palazzo Reale and produced by Van Cleef & Arpels in collaboration with the Cologni Foundation, the exhibition is curated by Alba Cappellieri, full professor of Jewelery and Accessory Design at the Polytechnic of Milan and director of the Museo del jewel of Vicenza.

The contemporary scenography, conceived by the American designer Johanna Grawunder, dialogues with the rooms of the Princes' Apartment and the Tapestry Rooms of the Milanese palace.

The exhibition is structured around three concepts: time, nature and love, considered as the most representative values ​​of the maison. For the curator, "jewelry is always poised between eternity and ephemerality, tradition and fashion, love and investment, beauty and concept and the relationship with time is controversial while here we want to demonstrate the ability of the French Maison to fully represent both time fragmented of the twentieth century that the ability to embody the eternal values ​​of beauty and, at the same time, the ephemeral power of seduction.”

Starting from Italo Calvino's work “American Lessons. Six proposals for the next millennium”, Alba Cappellieri has selected the key concepts through which to decode the creations of Van Cleef & Arpels and their relationship with time. The initial section on time unfolds in ten rooms: the first is dedicated to Paris, followed by exoticism and Calvino's five values: lightness, speed, visibility, accuracy, multiplicity. The last rooms of the section emphasize the intersections with other disciplines such as dance, fashion and architecture.

At the heart of the exhibition, the section on love presents creations - testimonies and tokens of love - which were the expression of the strength of feelings and which accompanied some of the great passions of the XNUMXth century which have now become mythical.

The last three rooms of the exhibition are finally dedicated to nature with botany, flora and fauna. They reveal an enchanted world in which the artisanal excellence of Van Cleef & Arpels and its search for harmony come together.