Christie’s Geneva has announced two Art Deco jewels as early highlights of its Magnificent Jewels auction, scheduled for May 13 at the Four Seasons Hôtel des Bergues, and both pieces arrive with histories that go well beyond the auction room.
The first is a Cartier sautoir, made in New York in 1925 as a bespoke commission for one of the maison‘s most important clients. The client already owned a carved emerald and asked Cartier to rebuild it into something significant. What came back was a long necklace of pearls and emerald beads, anchored by an 86.71-carat carved emerald depicting the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati. It is estimated at CHF 240,000 to 400,000, or approximately US$ 310,000 to 510,000.
Cartier had been incorporating Indian gemstones and Mughal-carved stones into its designs since the early 20th century, a practice that became one of the brand’s most recognised signatures. This sautoir belongs to that tradition, and its carved emerald is among the more significant examples of that design language to appear on the secondary market in recent years.
Its story does not stop there. In 1974, the sautoir was worn on screen in the film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, by actress Lois Chiles, who played Jordan Baker. Cartier supplied Art Deco jewels for Mia Farrow and all the principal female cast members for the production. Costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge, who worked closely with Cartier and longtime house designer Alfred Durante, won the Academy Award for her work on the film. Two years after the film’s release, Cartier put many of those same jewels, including this sautoir, on display at the Louis Cartier Retrospective exhibition in New York.
The 1974 production became notable for its decision to use actual archive pieces rather than replicas. Most period productions settle for approximations, but this one did not. As a result, the jewels were given a second, documented life.
A Boucheron necklace from the same period brings its own set of credentials. Set with rubies, emeralds, onyx and diamonds in platinum, and estimated at CHF 240,000 to 400,000, it is built to come apart into four separate sections, reconfiguring into two bracelets and a choker. Boucheron had been thinking about jewellery this way for decades. Its 1879, the Question Mark necklace was designed to move naturally with the body, and its feather-light designs of 1889 pushed the idea further. This piece is a direct continuation of that thinking.
Boucheron presented the necklace at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the exhibition that gave the Art Deco movement its name and set the visual tone for a generation of designers. Its stylised rose motif draws from a pattern that illustrator Paul Iribe created for fashion designer Paul Poiret around 1908 to 1909, a design that had spread widely across Parisian creative circles by the mid-1920s. Boucheron’s home on Place Vendôme was already the address of fine jewellery in Paris by this point, and its presence at the 1925 exposition reflected both its standing in the industry and its role in shaping what Art Deco came to look like.
The broader Art Deco section of the sale includes a garnet and diamond necklace attributed to Cartier, estimated at CHF 160,000 to 240,000, a Cartier Art Deco diamond tiara estimated at CHF 260,000 to 480,000, and a Van Cleef and Arpels sapphire and diamond Fuchsia mystery-set clip-brooch estimated at CHF 100,000 to 150,000.
Art Deco jewellery has held its value consistently at auction over the past decade, with ownership history and exhibition records playing a clear role in how much buyers are willing to pay. Both the Cartier sautoir and the Boucheron necklace carry that kind of solid background, one with a Hollywood film credit and a major exhibition behind it, the other with a direct link to the Paris show that defined an entire design era.
