JEAN DESPRES

Jean Desprès grew up in Avallon, a small town in Burgundy where his parents kept a shop selling jewellery and fancy goods. At fourteen he left for Paris — younger than most, and with more ambition than his age suggested — to apprentice with a silversmith friend of his father's in the Marais. But the workshop alone was never going to be enough. After hours he attended drawing classes, and whatever time remained was spent at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, where the density of talent in those narrow streets was unlike anything the world would see again. He met Modigliani there, and Picasso, and Signac, and De Chirico. Most importantly, he met Georges Braque, who became his closest friend and whose thinking about form, geometry and the fractured plane would run like a seam through everything Desprès went on to make.

Then the war came, and changed everything — as it did for everyone, though in Desprès' case the change proved strangely generative. Drafted initially into the infantry, his draughtsman's skills were quickly recognised and he was reassigned to work on aeroplane engines. He spent the war years drawing and making aircraft parts, absorbing the vocabulary of machinery — its logic, its geometry, its refusal of ornament — and when peace returned he brought that vocabulary home with him. "I make rugged, constructed jewellery," he would later say, "the jewellery of a silversmith." The sculptor François Pompon, closing his eyes and running his hands over one of Desprès' pieces, exclaimed: "But my dear boy, it's sheer architecture."

He returned to Avallon in 1919 after the death of his sister, set up a workshop at the back of the family house, and began working in silver. The choice was partly practical — silver was affordable and increasingly fashionable in the 1930s — but it was also entirely right for what he wanted to do. His jewellery was bold and uncompromising, built from geometric and Cubist forms, coloured with splashes of coral, lapis, onyx, malachite and turquoise rather than precious stones. "Sketchbooks in Paris, hammer in Avallon," he used to say — and in that duality lies something essential about him. Paris provided the intellectual electricity; Avallon the patience and solitude to work.

He began exhibiting at the official Salons from 1928, on the advice of his friend Paul Signac, and the following year met the painter and engraver Étienne Cournault, with whom he would collaborate on one of the most remarkable bodies of jewellery of the entire Art Deco period. The Bijoux Glacés — glass jewels — were the result: Cournault painted miniature compositions onto glass using silver-plating to create extraordinary effects of light and translucency, and Desprès mounted them in silver settings shaped to complement each image. The partnership was intense and productive, sustained by a correspondence of 153 letters, and the pieces attracted considerable attention — not least from Joséphine Baker, who became one of their most ardent admirers — when they were shown at the Pavillon de Marsan in 1930. A second series, the Bijoux Moteurs, drew more directly on his wartime experience: brooches and rings named Connecting Rod, Cam, Crankshaft — industrial forms made wearable, beautiful, and slightly confrontational. One critic, writing with what he called "ironic good humour," described Desprès as "a danger to society."

His collectors told a rather different story. Jacques Doucet commissioned pieces. André Malraux owned them. Paul Signac, Anatole France, Rose Adler, and eventually Andy Warhol all sought him out. The wealthy bourgeoisie of Burgundy called him "the Picasso of silverware." In 1937 he married the artist Simone Delattre, and around the same time produced a third distinct series — the Bijoux Céramiques — incorporating neo-classical plaques made by his friend Jean Mayodon, future director of the Manufacture de Sèvres. The following year he was awarded the Légion d'Honneur.

He was also, alongside the jewellery, one of the undisputed masters of the revival of silver tableware — his jugs, teapots, candelabras and cutlery, mostly hammered by hand, simple in form and restrained in decoration, became as celebrated as his rings and brooches. Of rings he had a particular and declared love: "For autumn, I'm thinking of creating a showcase of rings — nothing but rings — I enjoy making them." It was rings, Gabardi suggests, that across his long career best demonstrated the full range of what he could do.

He closed his workshop in 1977 at the age of 88, having donated extensively to French museums as a record of his life's work. He died in Avallon in 1980 — the town he had left as a boy of fourteen, burning with curiosity, and to which the world had conspired, in the end, to return him.