A Masterpiece of 20th-Century Sculpture That You Can Wear Around Your Neck
In 1952, the German-French artist Jean Arp made several trips to Greece, where he encountered the ideas of Claudius Ptolemy, the Greco-Roman astronomer, mathematician and geographer best known for his maps of the stars, which date to the second century A.D. Arp had helped found the radical Dada art movement in Zurich in 1916 and went on to become a leading Surrealist, but by this stage of his career, he was most preoccupied with the forms of the natural world — a fascination that he recognized in Ptolemy’s work. Some years later, back at the artist’s studio just outside of Paris, this discovery would inform Arp’s “Ptolemy” series of abstract sculptures, including “Ptolemy II” (1958), a roughly three-foot-tall biomorphic bronze that is widely considered to be among his masterworks. If Ptolemy hoped to reveal the contours of the universe in maps and treatises, Arp, who died in 1966 at 79, sought to render them in solid, three-dimensional form.
This fall, the French fashion house Celine will release a miniature version of “Ptolemy II,” made in collaboration with Arp’s foundation, that can be worn as a pendant necklace. It will be the third piece produced by the Celine Artist Jewelry Program, a project conceived by the brand’s creative director, Hedi Slimane, with the goal of translating celebrated works by avant-garde artists into wearable objects. First, in 2020, came a columnlike pendant based on a sculpture by the 20th-century French artist César, followed, in 2022, by a necklace that drew on the work of the 20th-century American artist Louise Nevelson. The Arp edition comprises 50 silver and 50 vermeil pendants, each with a matching silver or vermeil rounded link chain, and will be offered at eight select Celine boutiques. The piece can be worn long, as a sautoir, or short, wrapped twice around the neck. The pendant can also be detached and positioned, like a tiny sculpture, on a tabletop or shelf.
Measuring just under two and a half inches tall, the piece is modeled precisely after “Ptolemy II,” with a looping, ovular exterior structure embracing a hollow interior. Arp created the bronze and limestone sculptures in the “Ptolemy” series by first carving into curved plaster forms, a process that allowed him to “work on and cut out a part of the round figure, to sand it and thus give rise to new shapes,” says Etienne Robial, the president of the Fondation Arp. Located in Meudon-Clamart, France, the organization is run from the home and studio that Arp shared with the artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, his wife and one of his many close collaborators, until her death in 1943.
