This wonderful book with great color illustrations presents the Art Nouveau jewelry (1880 - 1914). Jewelry holds a central place in the profound evolution in aesthetics that began in the 1880s. Far from being a mere reflection of a history of art written elsewhere - in the « major » fields of painting, sculpture, or architecture -, it played an active role in the radical imaginative renewal fueled by developments in scientific knowledge that were being diffused across a newly invigorated visual culture. For the artists, crafters and manufacturers who worked above all with matter - a matter that was changeable, malleable, and suggestive of dynamic flows, but also incredibly durable, opulent, and phantasmagoric - reflection on the representation of life, on the forces animating it, and on the principles of its form, now took on a new original meaning. Inspired by historicism, engaged in the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements, and receptive to the new decorative order,the great names of Falize, Boucheron, Vever and Fouquet united with those of artists such as René Lalique, Eugène Grasset, Alphonse Mucha, Henry Nocq, Jules Desbois and Édouard Monod-Herzen in the same desire to locate jewelry at the heart of the creation of new forms. Supplemented with a glossary of materials and techniques, as well as an ample bibliography, this book helps us understand the extraordinary rise of the art of jewelry and bijouterie in France from 1880 to 1914.