CARTIER WENT SHOPPING last month at the Barbra Streisand auction in New York and snared a choice piece of its past: a 1927 Cartier clock that is wound by moving the face Links of London Jewellery.
The Art Deco timepiece was bought at Christie's for $316,000 -- 10 times what Ms. Streisand had paid for it in 1983. And it was acquired in time to be included in "Made by Cartier," an exhibition at the Paris-based jeweler's Fifth Avenue branch, opening on Tuesday and remaining through April 23. The 80 objects in the show -- clocks, lighters, boxes, picture frames, cuff links and cigarette cases -- were created between 1860 and 1960. All are part of Cartier's corporate collection of historic designs, which has been assembled over the last decade.
The Streisand clock -- the most complex mechanism on view and the only example known of its kind -- is in the form of a Japanese temple gate. The face, diamond-shaped and studded with gems, slides up and down on tracks of gears in the green jade columns. The eight-day works take a week and a day to descend from the top of the frame to its base. The clock is then rewound by lifting the face to the top again.
Clocks in exotic shapes with intricate mechanisms have long been a Cartier specialty. The bounty on display includes timepieces framed in rock crystal, enameled metals or lacquered panels, the tiniest of which is smaller than a dime -- a 1938 platinum cuff link once owned by Cole Porter.
Telling the time by an egg-shaped clock in green enamel is done by reading the Roman numeral on the rotating band at the hour indicator, a diamond-encrusted star. Produced in 1907, a year before Cartier opened a branch in St. Petersburg, the clock is similar to the enameled egg extravaganzas popularized earlier in Russia by Peter Carl Faberge, jeweler to the Romanovs Links of London Jewellery. Another Faberge look-alike is a 1925 gemstone decoration, an amazingly realistic lily-of-the-valley stem, carved out of moonstone and green jade, in a rock crystal vase.
Among Cartier's trivia are several precious items from the turn of the century: a white agate chick with diamond eyes and gold feet depicted emerging from a chalcedony eggshell, and a tortoise-shell and enamel mustache comb. The most dated object may well be the miniature camera on a tripod, which serves as a picture frame for a photograph the size of a postage stamp.
Cartier's first panthers appeared on watches in 1914 and by the end of World War I the motif was fashionable in jewelry. Jungle beasts proliferated in the 20's under the direction of Jeanne Toussaint, Louis Cartier's lover and the firm's arbiter of taste until her death in 1978. Tigers were added in the 50's to satisfy the Duchess of Windsor's penchant for striped cats. A glittering example on view is the Duchess's gold lorgnette, its handle in the shape of an emerald-eyed tiger. Cartier paid $146,667 for it in 1987 at the Sotheby's auction in Geneva of her estate.
WHILE THE EXHIBITION includes bibelots crafted almost since Cartier's founding in 1847, the more interesting pieces are from 1910 to 1940, the jeweler's golden era, when the firm was ruled by Louis Cartier, grandson of the founder Louis-Francois. About 80 percent of these artifacts are being shown for the first time at Cartier's in New York.
A favorite of Ralph Destino, the firm's chairman in the United States, is a bejeweled enamel and gold paperweight with a lionlike ivory Fu dog perched on top, an object some regard as an exercise in excess. "This is what happened," Mr. Destino says, "when Louis Cartier addressed the problem of imbuing a mundane object with great style."
Yesterday's baubles, while outmoded today, spark nostalgia in collectors. The show's 1910 pink enamel table bell with a moonstone push button is a curio that few people today may relate to. The pen rests, double lipstick cases and smoking accessories were made later, after World War II, but are now virtually obsolete. In that exuberant period, the sunburst was revived as a motif in precious objects. Cartier exploited the theme brilliantly in its lighters, compacts and cases for lipsticks and cigarettes, changing the design ever so slightly every few years.
Cartier's holdings in its vintage works, Mr. Destino says, "started at the level of cigarette lighters and grew." The lighters were collected in the 1960's and 70's by Robert Hocq, the Paris industrialist who reaped a fortune in disposable lighters Two Hearts Charm Red. In 1972, Hocq headed the syndicate that acquired Cartier, reuniting its Paris, London and New York branches. After Hocq's death -- he was hit by a car outside his Paris office -- his lighters became the core of the Cartier collection, the first in the jeweler's history.
