Did Art Deco produce mourning jewellery at all?

Not as a genre of its own. The First World War (1914–1918), with its millions of dead, broke the ritualised mourning tradition of the nineteenth century (see The Victorian Era (1837–1901), The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth Century). The interwar years produced no new mourning-jewellery genre; instead, memorial pieces were either made as discreet personal pendants without any explicit mourning marker (a chain with a small photographic locket, a plain ring inscribed inside with a date of death) or handed down as pre-war family heirlooms. One important exception: memorial pieces for soldiers killed in the First World War were produced in distinct forms of their own (cross-pattée pendants, anchor pendants, regimental-crest pendants).

Which Art Deco pieces are used as memorial jewellery today?

Several typical applications. Plain rings engraved inside with a date of death in geometric lettering - a restrained version of the classic mourning ring (see Mourning Ring (Memorial Ring)). Onyx pendants in geometric gold settings - the Art Deco counterpart to Victorian black mourning jewellery. Photographic lockets with a pared-back outline (rectangular, or oval with clean lines) - forerunners of the modern memorial pendant. Cigarette cases with an inscription - an Art Deco speciality made as a memorial gift for widowers and other male mourners.

Which mourning-jewellery convention does the Art Deco break establish?

The decisive shift: mourning becomes invisible. Where a nineteenth-century mourner was unmistakably identifiable by her black mourning toilette and its specific jewellery (see Mourning Necklace, Mourning Earrings), the Art Deco mourner wears modern, elegant pieces that are barely recognisable as mourning jewellery. This shift shapes the entire subsequent history of mourning jewellery down to the present: modern memorial pendants (fingerprint pendants, ash pendants; see Fingerprint Pendant, Ash Pendant) are likewise designed to read as ordinary everyday jewellery - the mourning function is known only to the wearer.

Art Deco

Art Deco (1920–1939) is the first jewellery epoch without a ritualised canon of mourning - shaped by geometric rigour, machine aesthetics and a decisive rejection of the sentimental mourning fashions of the nineteenth century; memorial jewellery becomes private, understated and formally absorbed into the general jewellery line rather than set apart as its own genre.

Deutsch