Last year, ARTINFO’s staff began the tradition of creating artist-inspired hand turkeys to celebrate Thanksgiving. Our 2012 drawings and collages interpreted the styles of art history’s most famous figures, from Frida Kahlo to Damien Hirst and Vincent van Gogh to Jean-Michel Basquiat. This year, we decided to look to the present, reflecting on some of the contemporary art world’s biggest newsmakers and market players (we’ve made a few allowances for crossover celebrities like newcomer Lady Gaga and the ever-elusive James Franco). The hand turkey line-up you see here is our staff’s way of giving thanks to all the artists and machers who made 2013 unforgettable.  

Click on the slide show to see our 2013 artist-inspired hand turkeys.

VIDEO — take a peek at the process:

– Bay Psalm Breaks Book Record: The Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in America, is now the most expensive book ever sold with a $14.2 million price tag achieved at Sotheby’s. The Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony printed the tiny book in 1640 in a run of about 17,000. Boston's Old South Church, which had 2 of the 11 existing copies, sold one to financier David Rubenstein, who plans to loan the book to libraries across the U.S. [BBC]

– Olympic Art Thieves Get Gold — in Jail Time: A court in Greece sentence seven men for stealing almost 80 archaeological objects from a museum in Olympia devoted to the Olympic Games in an armed robbery in February 2012. The robbery's three ring-leaders each received seven-year sentences, while two Greek accomplices were handed six-year sentences, and two Bulgarian men copped shorter sentences. [AFP]

– Constable Pried Off Another Constable: Conservators at the Victoria & Albert Museum have discovered a previously unknown oil painting by John Constable glued to the back of another Constable painting — "Branch Hill Pond: Hampstead" — while preparing for the museum's fall 2014 retrospective of the celebrated British artist's work. A ghost painting had shown up during an x-ray of the painting, but conservators figured the typically thrifty artist had simply painted over an earlier work. "It was very exciting," conservator Nicola Costaras said. "We obviously knew that no one had seen it since… well, certainly since it came in to the collection. It was very lucky that the paint wasn't more damaged given it had been ironed on to a layer of glue." [Guardian]

– Saatchi Cries Drug Habit: The mud-slinging continues as Charles Saatchi accuses Nigella Lawson of a daily cocaine habit in London court. [National Post]

– Art Recovery Rate Low: The rate of recovery of stolen art is as low as 1.5 percent internationally as police forces give low priority to recovering pilfered works. [TAN]

– Oman Funds Smithsonian: The Omani Sultanate has donated $1.8 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art for the institution to study Oman. [WP]

– Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts has settled a long-running dispute with former director Peter Noever. [TAN]

– Sicily has banned loans of 23 of its most famous artworks — including a Caravaggio and a number of ancient Greek sculptures — out of fear that they are too often out on loan. [NYT]

– Pace Gallery now represents the estates of Kenneth Noland and Richard Pousette-Dart, and will be showing both artists' work in their booth at Art Basel in Miami Beach next week. [Press release]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

Pass the Gravy: ARTINFO's Staff Draws 25 Famous Artists' Hand Turkeys

Wordplay: The Ironic Gestures of Christopher Wool

Detroit’s Creditors Demand New Appraisal of DIA’s Collection

Kunsthal Rotterdam Heist Ringleaders Sentenced to More Than 6 Years

VIDEO: 9th Vienna Art Week Shoots a Mozartkugel at City’s Stuffy Image

VIDEO: Luxembourg & Dayan Welcome César Back to the U.S.

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

Sotheby’s American art sale on December 4 will be led by a selection of seven Norman Rockwell paintings offered by the family of Kenneth J. Stuart Sr., the artist’s longtime friend and art editor at the Saturday Evening Post. The group includes several icons of Rockwell’s career: “Saying Grace” (1951), estimated at $15 million to $20 million; “The Gossips” (1948), estimated at $6 million to $9 million; and “Walking to Church” (1953), which is expected to fetch between $3 million and $5 million. The sale will almost certainly break the current record for Rockwell, which was set in 2006 when the painting “Breaking Home Ties” (1954) sold for $13.8 million at Sotheby’s New York, more than doubling the high $6 million estimate.

The seven works together are expected to bring more than $24 million. Rockwell, whose work has been enjoying a new level of respect in recent years, is the subject of a recently published biography by the critic Deborah Solomon entitled American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Kenneth Stuart’s son Jon told ARTINFO that the works had been in his childhood home in Connecticut, where he and his siblings enjoyed living with and looking at them, since 1963, when his father left the Post. For the last 18 years or so, the works were on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and some were occasionally loaned out for other museum shows. Parting with the works is difficult, Jon Stuart says, but family members agreed that a sale was best, considering the size and the maintenance requirements of the paintings. “We had a good run with them,” says Stuart. “We’re all very happy about having had them.” 

Sotheby’s has fielded worldwide interest for the works so far, including from Asia. Institutional buyers with deep pockets, like the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, founded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, are likely bidders, experts say. 

A documentary classic that slipped through the cracks is seeing the light of day. The late Dominique Benicheti’s 1973 Locarno prize-winner, “Cousin Jules,” gets its belated US theatrical premiere 
at Film Forum in a new 2K digital restoration.

Shot over a five-year period, “Cousin Jules” documents — or rather contemplates — the daily routine of two weathered peasants, blacksmith Jules Guiteaux and his wife, Félicie, on their rural farm in France. What sets the movie apart from other exercises in observational cinema is not so much the emphasis on real time and process, whether repairing a hinge, shaving one’s face, mending a shirt, or making soup, as the fact that Benicheti is recording his subjects in color, CinemaScope, and stereo sound. Indeed, while dialogue is minimal, sound and image are coequal. The filmmaker holds a close-up of the hammer that Jules has just employed and placed by his anvil until the tool stops vibrating; another scene is a kind of duet for Félicie’s coffee grinder and Jules’s bellows.

The framed monotony of this dailiness show is transfixing. Everything on the Guiteaux farm has its place — “Cousin Jules” portrays a completely ordered rational life, which although loosely structured as a single (mainly autumn) day, is quietly ruptured by the gradual awareness of absence. Jules has his solitary meal with the clock ticking and a cat perched on the other chair.

Darkness falls although the movie ends with a montage of formerly seen, now empty locations. “Cousin Jules” not only evokes André Bazin in its use of duration and pure recording but another mid-20th-century French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in documenting the lived experience of domestic space and the “poetics of space.”

“Cousin Jules” is playing at New York’s Film Forum, November 27 through December 1o.

Read more J. Hoberman at Movie Journal.

British retailer Rough Trade opened a massive record store in Brooklyn - a risky move considering how easily consumers can download music online.

Co-owner of Rough Trade Stephen Godfrey talks about the perks from opening a the store, “a music store, a record store is far more than simply being a place of purchase. It’s a place, it's a hangout for people of all ages and tastes to congregate and celebrate music as an art form and not simply a commodity.”

And that’s what co-owner Stephen Godfrey, says will differentiate Rough Trade from record stores of the past that were forced to shut down brick and mortar outlets when digital sales took off.

This store has a bar, a music venue and a café. And while the focus is on records, they have a room sponsored by the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, where shoppers can hop on Twitter and other social media sites and read music reviews online, “a record store, this store is about maybe having one thing in mind when you come to visit, but it’s the three, four other things that you discover while you are here that you previously didn't know existed that make the store a really, as I say, a destination that delivers a surprise and serendipitous joy.”

Godfrey may be on to something. According to Nielsen SoundScan, vinyl LP sales were up 33.5 percent in the first half of 2013. Digital album sales were up 6 percent too.

In the Internet age Rough Trade’s concept is a gamble and you can bet the industry will be paying attention, to see how this remix of old school formats and new digital and social media plays out.

Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards Tuesday, one short of “12 Years a Slave,” the leading contender. Bob Nelson, who wrote Payne’s road movie, was placed in the Best First Screenplay category, as opposed to Best Screenplay. If there’s any justice, the script by the 57-year-old former TV writer and actor from South Dakota will eventually make the cut for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Written in 2002 and optioned by Payne in 2003, as reported by The Huffington Post, Nelson’s story sends the dyspeptic geezer Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) and his patient youngest son, David (Will Forte), from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska. Woody’s attempt to collect the million dollars he deludes himself he has won in a direct-mail scam is an obvious Hitchcockian MacGuffin.

The trip, on which they are joined by the tart-tongued matriarch, Kate (June Squibb), and David’s more successful brother, Ross (Bob Odenkirk), isn’t a wild goose chase, however. It enables David and the old man to bond in surprising ways as a result of what transpires when the family visits the small Nebraska town it had left years before. David and Ross’s relationship also changes in a priceless scene involving the theft of an air compressor. And David begins to break with his inertia and meekness.

Ultimately, though, “Nebraska” is a character study of Woody that slowly unveils why he is a taciturn drunk and a bottomless well of wounded pride and disappointment, whose appearance of near-catatonia may be explained by his preoccupation with the past. Where has he gone in his mind when David tries to alert him to something happening in the present?

The power of Nelson’s script lies in its “reveals” about Woody at different stages in his life — a series of mostly offhand disclosures (though one is malicious) — that tell David why his father was a closed-off parent during his and Ross’s upbringing and what shaped him into the man he has become. Some of these disclosures carry the story back into the 1930s and invoke the faces and behavior of long-dead people.

Two bombs are dropped, ever so gently, by the kind old newspaper woman, Peg Nagy, played so memorably by Angela McEwan, whom David visits on his own. Because the reveals are so precious, I will allude to only one of them here and in vague terms.

Peg, Woody’s high-school sweetheart, privately tells David why her relationship with his dad didn’t last, using a euphemism one wouldn’t have expected her to use. Her admission not only offers insight into the Woody and Peg of circa 1950, but offers something crucial about one of the other characters. Suddenly, the film has entered “a land of lost content,” directly equivalent to that of Sonny, Jacy, and Duane before the death of Sam the Lion and the Korean War in “The Last Picture Show” (1971).

This is screenwriting so subtle and so layered it endows “Nebraska” with a novelistic depth.

Read J. Hoberman’s “Nebraska” review here and my thoughts on Will Forte’s performance here.

LOS ANGELES – Miranda Otto thought her agent sent her the wrong script when she received an offer to play Elizabeth Bishop in the new movie, “Reaching for the Moon,” in theaters November 29. “It’s such a great role and these roles are often snapped up by bigger names than myself,” she told ARTINFO. “I was like, how did I get this?”

Otto may not be a household name but some of her movies are, like “The Lord of the Rings” and “War of the Worlds.” Another film hse appears in, “I, Frankenstein,” is set for release in 2014. And yet the 46-year-old Australian native couldn’t believe her good fortune in being offered the role.

Poet laureate from 1949 to 1950, Bishop went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 and a National Book award in 1970. “Reaching for the Moon” chronicles her long-term affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares during a 15-year stay in the country.

Here, Otto talks about Bishop’s poetry, performing same-sex intimate scenes, and the circumstances surrounding Soares’s suicide.

In addition to being a brilliant poet, Bishop was a feminist and a lesbian, yet she bristled at the label.

She just didn’t want any label. She would have behaved like a feminist but she would not take that word on. She didn’t want to be defined. She didn’t want to be a female poet. She wanted to be a poet.

Can a movie like this hope to avoid labels?

I really wanted people to watch the movie and just see two people fall in love and just feel that as a very natural thing and not even think so much about that. They were both such incredible women in their own right and defined by so many other things. I didn’t want it to be wholly focused on the fact that it’s a relationship between two women.

Were the love scenes necessary? Often in movies such scenes are a distraction.

Sometimes it takes it out of the story. I think you needed to know that they had a sexual relationship. It would have been coy not to have something in there. I wanted to open them up to people but not so it was exposing. I just wanted the love scene to be about that moment of falling love with somebody. That is a really joyous moment full of laughter. I wanted to get that across in some way rather than just make it a sexy kind of thing. I wanted it to be a very emotional moment for them. But I also wanted people to understand in that moment that I had a strong feeling that though Elizabeth was quite discreet in all those things, she knew her way around.

Soares obviously impacted Bishop’s life, but what about her work?

She had a huge impact on Elizabeth’s work. The fact that she’s in some of the work, but also the fact that she did give her a kind of a home for the first time. She was able to give her that kind of sanctuary and support and love. Trying to make a living as a poet is not an easy thing. In that period, Lota really believed in her and was such a strong person, created that studio for her and gave her that space to write.

What about the poetry? What makes her work so singular?

She had such an economy in the way she used language. The form was so important to her, finding the form of the poem. The “One Art” poem is actually a villanelle, that is a notoriously difficult form to work in. She would often be very interested in the structure of the poem. She would sit on poems sometimes for 10 years until she found the exact, right word that she wanted to use. Nature plays very predominantly in her poems. There are images of water and fish. She’ll often go from some very small observation in nature, some very small event, and then pull it out like ripples in a pond into something extremely profound and universal.

On Monday night at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, a panel gathered to discuss the newly re-drafted “Equity for Visual Artists Act,” a proposed amendment to the federal Copyright Act that would include a resale royalty provision to enable visual artists to collect payment for future sales of their work. In essence, it aims to let artists profit from the growing value of their work, as collectors, dealers, and auction houses already do. A version of the bill was first introduced by New York Democratic representative Jerrold Nadler in 2011, but died at the close of the 112th Congress. In a matter of weeks, a revised version will be completed and the bill will be re-introduced.

Hosted by the International Foundation for Art Research (“IFAR”), the discussion was convened to address both the merits of the bill and the complaints against it. The panelists included Congressman Nadler; Theodore Feder, founder and president of the Artists Rights Society; Karyn Temple Claggett, director of policy and international affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office; Sandra Cobden, general counsel at Christie’s; and Philippa Loengard, the assistant director of the Kernochan Center at Columbia Law School. Sharon Flescher, executive director of IFAR, moderated.

Congressman Nadler’s original bill called for a seven-percent royalty fee on sales of art exceeding $10,000, when the sales took place at auction houses with annual revenue over $25 million. The money would be paid to a collection society, which would, after covering administrative costs, would split it 50-50 between the artist and a fund to help museums purchase the work of living artists.

Many criticisms of the last bill came to the surface when it was circulating, and during a public roundtable discussion held this past April this year. Some commenters complained that the seven-percent rate was too high; others, including some museums, criticized the provision that gave half the money to museums. Some criticized the bill for only applying to sales for works above $10,000, which they believed would exclude too many artists.

In light of such complaints, Nadler has made a few changes to the new bill. The limit on sales has been reduced from $10,000 to $5,000, and the flat rate is to be cut from seven percent to something in the range of five percent (the exact number has not yet been determined). The threshold amount of business that an auction house must do to be covered by the bill is also being reduced, from $25 million to a still-to-be-determined lower number, in order to include more than just the major houses. And the new bill also does away with the provision that split the resale royalty with museums. (“We heard from some museums,” Nadler said on Monday night. “They didn’t want that money.”)

But other provisions of the act that were criticized will remain the same. Some people thought the royalty fee should apply to gallery as well as auction sales, but it remains limited to auction houses because they offer the most transparency and are thus seen as a good place to start. “In terms of passing the bill,” Congressman Nadler said, eliciting chuckles from the audience, “it eliminates an entirely new source of opposition.”

Resale royalty rights (also known as droit de suite) have their roots in France in the 1920s, and by now some 70 countries around the world have provisions for them, including Australia and members of the European Union. But the U.S. and China, the strongest art markets in the world, have failed to pass similar laws. Of American states, only California has enacted a version, the Resale Royalty Act of 1976, which was found unconstitutional this year in a case brought by various artists including Chuck Close, Laddie John Dill, and the estates of Robert Graham and Sam Francis against Sotheby’s and Christie’s. That case is still on appeal. (Interestingly, the artists involved in that suit have not spoken up in the federal resale royalty debate, according to Congressman Nadler.)

Other countries have instituted the resale right in a variety of ways. Most of the E.U., for example, introduced a regressive version in 2006, under which works get “taxed” at lower rates the more they sell for. That version also caps the fee at $12,500 euros.

By far the biggest bone of contention over the resale right in the U.S. is its potential impact on sales. Several people on the panel seemed to agree that there has been a dip in the European market since the resale royalty was introduced, though some also said that there are so many factors affecting the market that that it’s impossible to blame just one. Many invoked statistics to back up their often conflicting points of view

Claggett, from the U.S. Copyright Office, discussed how her agency had reviewed several government studies in considering the “perceived inequities” of resale right systems.  For the most part, it did not find significant harm to the existing markets. She referred to studies done in the E.U. and the U.K. (which has somewhat different rules from the Continent) between 2002 to 2012, and cited findings like an increasing market share for living artists in the E.U.  “There was no discernible pattern to suggest that member states that did not levy the royalty performed better than those that do,” Claggett said.

Feder, of the Artists Rights Society, took a similar position. “So little does the resale royalty affect the nature of the market,” he argued, that “a number of NY based galleries have opened up ambitious operations in London, including David Zwirner, Gagosian, and Pace.”

Arguing that the resale right does hurt the art market, Cobden, Christie’s general counsel, threw out her own numbers, from a survey by Clare McAndrew of the independent research company Art Economics. Looking at the recovery from the recent recession, McAndrew noted that during the year that art markets rebounded most vigorously, 2009 to 2010, the U.S. market rebounded by 120 percent, and the Chinese one by 121 percent. The E.U. art market, in contrast, rebounded by 39 only percent, and while Cobden conceded that the resale right couldn’t be wholly responsible for the difference, she said it was a contributing factor.

Perhaps the most apt observation came from Claggett, . Noting how difficult it is to come by specific data about the market—given both how little it is regulated and the secrecy that pervades it—she pointed out almost everyone uses the same sources.

“It’s like a Rorschach test,” she said. “Everyone is looking at the statistics and seeing what they want to see.”

— Conductor James Levine returned to the Metropolitan Opera this year. If you weren’t able to catch him at work, why not dip into this luxurious box set: “James Levine: Celebrating 40 Years at the Met.” Spread across 21 DVDs, the set includes 11 complete operas and features Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, among others. [Metropolitan Opera, $180]

— Need to catch up on the final season of “Breaking Bad?” The whole season is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, featuring tons of special features. [Amazon, $29.99]

— Reggae music legend Lee Perry has a new collection out, “Roaring Lion,” released through the Pressure Sounds label. The 16 tracks take us through his best work at the Black Ark, his famous studio, and features Augustus Pablo, The Upsetters, and more. [Pressure Sounds, $15.69]

— The play to see in New York this week is the rep production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, at the Cort Street Theatre. [Tickets, $40-$137]

Thanksgiving is supposed to be a celebratory holiday. Get together with your family, stuff your face with turkey and sweet potatoes, and give thanks. But that all gets old pretty quickly, right? The joy of seeing your loved ones becomes remembering the reasons why you don’t see them that often. There’s always that one family member who eats too much stuffing, leaving everyone else with small portions, not to mention that cousin who manages to get too drunk every year and embarrass your grandma. After a few hours, you’re ready to escape. So give praise to streaming television! When your family is annoying you, grab your laptop, find a quiet room, and start catching up on those shows you’ve been meaning to check out for ages but never had the time to get around to. Here’s your chance. Below, ARTINFO suggests five shows, streaming on Netflix, that will knock you out of your Thanksgiving slump.

Dexter

Now that this serial-killer drama is over, what better time to start watching it? The show gets ridiculous pretty quickly, but even then it’s good for a few (unintentional) laughs. Michael C. Hall plays the titular character, a forensics expert who sidelines in killing killers.

Peep Show

A little-known show but a favorite around here, and probably not what you’re expecting based on its title. The British comedy is about two roommates, one stuffy and the other outlandish, who navigate their daily lives while trying to not go insane. The episodes are short, so you can probably knock out a season or two before your family notices you left the dinner table.

House of Cards

One of our favorite shows of 2013, and one of the most compulsively watchable. Kevin Spacey stars as the swindling congressman, Robin Wright plays his conflicted wife, and Kate Mara is a journalist caught up in her own story. It’s the first Netflix original series, and it was so great they are doing another season.

The Walking Dead

Ready to jolt yourself out of the Thanksgiving doldrums? Start watching “The Walking Dead.” Beware: This will not cheer you up. Unless zombies chewing human flesh is your thing, of course.

Twin Peaks

If you really want to be freaked out, why not dip into David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks?” This murder mystery stars Kyle MacLachlan as FBI agent Dale Cooper, who visits the town of Twin Peaks to investigate the death of teenager Laura Palmer. Nothing will ever be the same after watching this show, and you might be convinced your grandmother looks like the Log Lady.

SHANGHAI —The inaugural edition of theArt021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair opened its door to the fair’s invited collectors on November 27 in Shanghai with much poise and style.

The one hundred or so VIPs chatted and bargained with gallerists from the participating 29 galleries without the usual bustling crowd. The galleries are mostly from China, including established names likeShangART, James Cohan Gallery, Long March Space, and Chambers Fine Art, as well as new and upcoming galleries like Antenna Space and Leo Xu Projects. International galleries such as Galerie Perrotin and White Cube also set up impressive booths bringing big names like Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, JR and Takashi Murakami.

“We want to provide the big collectors with a first day preview with less people around, so that they can really view the works and talk with the gallerists in a comfortable setting,” said Bao Yifeng, one of the fair’s founders.

Art021 occupied all six floors of a beautifully restored art deco style building by the Bund, which used to be the National Industrial Bank. The building recently hosted the travelling photography show of Chanel’s "The Little Black Jacket."

ART021 opens its door to the public from November 28 to 30. Throughout the fair, there will also be several forums and symposiums mainly on the topic of collecting with speakers ranging from some of the top private museum direcors in China and the lengedary Japanese "salaryman collector" Daisuke Miyatsu.

Here are some quick highlights of what you can see at Art021 in our series 60 Works in 60 Seconds. 

To watch previous videos in our series, click HERE.

— Craig Hubert wonders how Katy Perry could have given such a tone-deaf performance at the American Music Awards.

— J. Hoberman reviews“Cousin Jules,” a documentary currently playing at Film Forum.

— We pick the best television shows to binge watch over the Thanksgiving holiday.

— Graham Fuller documents a once-hidden Holocaust documentary that was guided by director Alfred Hitchcock.

— Craig Hubert speaks with two of the actors from the currently running production of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Public Theater.

Billed as the biggest jewelry exhibition ever held, “Cartier: Style and History” opened December 4 at the Grand Palais in Paris to convey an art historian’s perspective on the evolution of Cartier’s creations — with a focus on the role of women within historical and social contexts from 1847, when the house was founded, to the 1970s.

The show pays tribute to how the jeweler had the vision from very early on to work with a specific style, while celebrating the generations of strong women linked to the house, including Princess Mathilde, one of Cartier’s first clients, and Daisy Fellowes, a key figure in the so-called Café Society, who boasted one of the most important collections of jewelry in the interwar period.

“At Cartier, we have two missions: one is to create, and the other is to share. I think people will understand what are the secrets of the history of Maison Cartier and what are the secrets of the [house’s] style,” said Stanislas de Quercize, the house’s chief executive officer, in an interview with Blouin ARTINFO France.

On the subject of the house's legacy, he cited a famous quote by King Edward VII of England: “King of jewelers and jeweler to the king. It means a lot. How is it that a member of royalty says that you’re the king of jewelers? And how come after him 26 royal houses in Europe gave authorization of official supplier to Cartier? No other maison has this fame or recognition.”

Organized by the Réunion des musées nationaux, and co-curated by Laurent Salomé and Laure Dalon, the show opens with a collection of archive drawings and creations representing Cartier’s signature neo-classical “garland style” from the late 19th century, during which Louis Cartier created the first jewelry pieces made from platinum, opening up radical new possibilities for jewelry design.

Intermingling with antique props linked to their era, such as elaborate evening gowns, oil paintings, sketches, and magazines, a total of 630 pieces are on display, of which 530 come from the house’s own collection of antique Cartier pieces amassed since the late 1970s. The rest are made up of private and official loans, including from the principality of Monaco.

The creations are presented in windows set in a network of dark gray walls within the cavernous hall of the site’s Salon d’Honneur, whose own walls are enlivened with kaleidoscopic living digital frescos comprised of colored Cartier motifs and textures.

The event’s venue is particularly symbolic for Cartier, which presented its first-ever exhibition of archive pieces in the museum of its sister venue, Le Petit Palais, in 1989. Since then, Cartier has staged over 25 exhibitions in major institutions around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, and the Kremlin in Moscow. 

Also apparent in the new Paris exhibition is Cartier’s pivotal role in the history of the decorative arts, from a group of early 20th century tiaras presented on a rotating pillar at the start of the show, to the house’s visionary designs from the so-called “style moderne” era, which saw the introduction of abstract, geometrical designs in contrasting colors, starting with black and white and later folding in green then red. “The evolution of that style makes Cartier the pioneer of what later will be called Art Deco — 20 years before [the movement],” noted Pierre Rainero, the house’s image and heritage director. “That is why Cartier is considered the jeweler of modernity.”

Time was also of the essence at the turn of the 20th century, with a push into wristwatches by the house, known for its Tank watches. One delightful window showcases boxes of antique desk clocks and wristwatches, including the “Borne Desk Clock with Strut” (1924) and the Tortue wristwatch (1913).

A section dedicated to the 1920s, the house’s richest period, shows the convergence of diverse sources of inspiration, from literature to architecture, from across an exotic range of cultures, including India, China, the Far East, and ancient Egypt. Highlights include a series of bold turquoise scarab brooches, their bejeweled wings spread wide, and a restored version of the breathtaking 1928 necklace commissioned by the Maharaja of Patiala, replete with a replica of the original 234.65-carat De Beers diamond at the piece’s heart. Accessories are also prominent, from jeweled purses to a striking cigarette packet-shaped vanity case in carved emerald edged with coral and black enamel.

Among the countless rare highlights of the show, Rainero pointed to the show’s central podium of 16 mystery clocks — so called because their hands look like they are floating in rock crystal — saying, “Once in a lifetime you will be able to see such a collection presented together.” The event also proved the specialist’s first encounter with two creations on loan from the personal collection of Queen Elizabeth II: the 1936 Halo Tiara worn by Duchess of Cambridge for her wedding in 2011, as well as a flower brooch that Cartier made for the Queen in 1953 using a 23,60-carat Williamson diamond gifted to her by Dr. Williamson, a Canadian geologist, for her wedding in 1947.

One could pore over a culminating series of windows dedicated to celebrity Cartier clients for hours, be it the simple gold “Coffee Bean” necklace of Grace Kelly or the supersize 1968 serpent necklace and two bejeweled 1975 crocodile bracelets that can also join to form a necklace of María Félix (the extravagant actress is said to have taken a live baby crocodile to Cartier’s flagship on Rue de la Paix for the latter order).

Also showcased is Cartier’s visionary legacy for figurative jewelry, notably flora and fauna and animals. The show ends with a section dedicated to the jeweler’s strongest symbol: the panther. There, iconic creations such as a 1949 panther clip created for the Duchess of Windsor, are presented among works of art, including a bronze panther sculpture by Paul Jouve and a 1925 panther tapestry.

The legendary Jeanne Toussaint, who served as the house’s director of fine jewelry from 1933 to 1970, sparked the vogue for figurative jewelry in the late 1930s, according to Rainero, going on to create the house’s first panther — a 3D yellow gold cat with black spots on top of an incredible cabochon emerald — for the Duchess of Windsor in 1948. “It was very new as the reproduction of animals in jewelry, especially, was not admitted in society. In general, ladies wearing figurative animals were actresses or courtesans,” explained Rainero. “Jeanne Toussaint was at the origin of a new freedom for women to wear [such designs].”

Few metaphors might be as fitting to Miami Art Week as a high-speed, art-packed madcap race through downtown to Miami Beach; making a one-night exhibition inspired by '60s hot-rod culture an appropriate way to close out the week. “Too Fast For Love,” at LMNT Galleria, showcases new work by upstart artist Tom Dash, which, in his traditional mode of collage elements and paint on canvas focusing in on pop culture and nostalgia, hone in on vintage hot-rod culture from the '60s.

Running from 9 p.m. to midnight tonight, the exhibition also caps off a hectic week for his New York gallerist Mark Borghi, who, while manning an Art Miami booth, showcased an exhibition of works by John Chamberlain and Willem de Kooning on a superyacht. Those in Miami can RSVP to the show and party here. To see works from "Too Fast For Love," click on the slideshow here. 

— Our team was all over Magic City this week for Art Basel in Miami Beach and its various satellite fairs and collateral events. Meredith Mendelsohn provided a breakdown of all the newcomers and returning players at this year’s fairs, while Eileen Kinsella provided a cheat sheet of major works to watch out for at the main fair. Judd Tully reported on the biggest sales from day one; Daniel Kunitz mapped a handy guide to getting through the mega-fair efficiently. And Eric Gonon toured the Nicholas Baume-curated outdoor sculpture area.

— In addition to the main fair, we made the rounds of the satellite affairs: Ashton Cooper noted the influx of galleries at the expanded Untitled fair; Eileen Kinsella reported on the eclectic offerings at Art Miami and Context; Ashton Cooper noted a lot of transactions during the VIP preview of Miami Project’s second edition; and Eileen Kinsella gained insight into the Brazilian art scene at Art Brazil’s inaugural outing.

— On the design front, Janelle Zara noted the dominance of Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé at Design Miami, Herzog & de Meuron’s new Pérez Art Museum opened its doors, and Jacques Herzog talked design with Kanye West and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

— Since Miami’s art week is, of course, as much about parties as it is about art, Rea McNamara provided a handy list of the week’s biggest parties, and Art+Auction threw a bash of its own to celebrate the “Power 100” issue.

— Meanwhile, Coco Fusco weighed the pros and cons of pursuing an MFA, for Modern Painters.

— Laure Prouvost won the Turner Prize for 2013.

— And Anna Kats spoke with conventions-upending architect Greta Hansen.

Watch this week’s videos: