Daniel Brush, who died in 2022, was a one-off, a phenomenon, a sort of genius without portfolio, a maker of marvellous objects. His output was tiny and he usually hung on to what he produced for decades before parting with it, if he parted with it at all. He never accepted a commission, seldom exhibited, didn’t have a dealer and sold only when and to whom he pleased. For these reasons, hardly anyone got to see, let alone own, the things he made.
Despite or perhaps because of his Sasquatch-like elusiveness, a retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Art and Design in 2012 was the best attended show in the museum’s history.
The retrospective exhibition features more than 75 works — including jewellery, sculptures and paintings.
Now another opportunity to see a significant cross-section of his work has arisen. ‘Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light’, at Van Cleef & Arpels’ L’Ecole in Paris until October 2, 2026, comprises 75 pieces spanning most though not quite all of his career. There are some exquisite drawings, jagged, fraught and intense. There are sculptural, totemic objects of profound mystery in steel and gold. There are brooches and cuffs, some whimsical, some transcendent, in precious gemstones, Bakelite and ultralight NASA metal alloys — wearable sculptures that, for better or worse, earned Daniel a reputation as a jeweller (the finest since Benvenuto Cellini, in the opinion of no less an authority than Christie’s chairman and jewellery supremo, François Curiel).
I got to know Daniel and his wife Olivia in the mid-2000s and visited them whenever I was in New York. Their apartment on West 24th Street was itself a kind of installation, a 5,000-square-foot, open-plan living-working space and a mirror of their shared life and enthusiasms. Olivia is an artist who works primarily in textiles; Daniel’s Loose Threads — my favourite of his works, magnificently displayed in its entirety in Paris — is a moving tribute to her tendency to end each day covered in squiggly bits of yarn.
There’s such diversity among Daniel’s works that it’s difficult to believe they sprang from the same consciousness or were wrought by the same pair of hands. His conversation was no less eclectic. Looking at the transcript of our last meeting, I see that he spoke, for the best part of six hours, about cowboy boots, German bisque dolls, Bugatti engines, endangered species, the Noh concept of yugen, macaroons, calligraphy, snaphaunces, Hedy Lamarr, Vladimir Horowitz, Modern Farmer magazine, machine guns, mimesis, fishmongers, ballet, Scotch whisky, Polaroid film, ‘classic seven’ Upper East Side apartments, punctuation marks and Casio G-Shock digital watches. Among other things.
What’s the line through, the loose thread of connection? People ooh and ah endlessly about Daniel’s almost superhuman manipulation of materials, particularly metals. But curiosity, not virtuosity, is, I think, the key. He loathed the ‘v’ word. Virtuosity for its own sake meant nothing to him. Technique interested him greatly, but only as a means, not an end, a way to get things done. He was fascinated by the way well-made objects can serve as a direct and intimate link between artist and audience.
'Thinking About Monet' is a series of engravings on 1018 steel.
Every one of the pieces on display in Paris might be considered in terms of line and light. Some of them fit the bill to perfection: the astonishing Remembrance of Things Present sequence of ink drawings, for instance, which are all about line, and the mesmeric engraved steel sculptures, Thinking About Monet, which are all about colour.
And yet, while taking in the show, I was also reminded of something that usually happened when I went to see Daniel and Olivia at the studio — not every time, but more often than not. Shortly after I arrived Daniel would say: ‘Shut your eyes and open your hand. Here. Now close your hand and hold on to this.’ It would be something he’d made — maybe something he’d finished that morning, or 30 years ago. For as long as the object remained invisible in my closed hand, considerations of line and light were, of course, irrelevant. Daniel was inviting an act of imaginative engagement based solely on touch, a response to what I could feel but not see. I recall his fondness for Native American dreamcatchers — objects intended both to bring on dreams and to banish them while under the influence of hallucinogens in order to commune directly with the spirit world. ‘Can a jewel do that?’ he asked. ‘Can a jewel take your breath away, in and of itself, so that it doesn’t even have to be worn? Can it be held in your hand so you dream? Can it become an intimate sculpture without a utilitarian function?’
The questions were rhetorical. His belief that a jewel could do those things was absolute and unwavering.
‘So, you know,’ he went on, ‘I got this wonderful note the other day, from this sensational guy. I love it. He said he has one of my things in a fitted box in his study, where he reads about art. And every once in a while he opens the box with his eyes closed and touches it, because he wants to experience it as if he were blind. God, I love that. I absolutely love that. I keep thinking and hoping, the more I engage with people, that it’s not just the tactile nature of it, it’s that private, quiet, removed, you know, secret kind of thing… You’re engaging with another person you don’t know but you’ve become intimate with. It’s such an odd transference.’
The chance to see so much of Daniel’s work, so elegantly displayed under one roof, is unlikely to be repeated any time soon. Make your way to Paris and let the transference begin.
‘Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light’ is at L’Ecole School of Jewellery Arts, supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau, Paris, until October 4, 2026. Admission is free upon reservation. Click here for more information.