Winter 2004 Style & Design
Yurman's sculptures nestle here and there throughout the Tribeca space. Made of bronze so textured it looks primitive, they depict graceful and exquisite abstractions of the human form. In one, a pair holds hands, suspended buoyantly in the air—joyful and free and full of life, and romantic and dancing. Like Matisse's dancers. "It is," Yurman says. "Well, it's Sybil and me, but it's based on Matisse." "He is a poet," Sybil says later. "The way he thinks, the things he says, his sculpture. And the jewelry."

Yurman's outlook was deeply influenced by Jacques Lipchitz—the renowned sculptor and colleague of Picasso and Modigliani—under whom Yurman apprenticed. Lipchitz created imposing Cubist human forms out of bronze, until suddenly his sculpture changed course. "It occurred to him it was going nowhere. He was reducing the human spirit to a cube," Yurman recalls. "One day he said, 'I'm going to go back to Expressionism and what expresses the human condition.' He said that ultimately you must find what your point of view is, really define it. That's the most important thing for an artist, to express his feeling and his point of view. So I listened to that."

Having created a procession of protest art—angry displays made of concrete and bullets—Yurman returned to his romantic sculptures, many of them angels. Sybil—whom Yurman had met and fallen in love with when they were working for the same artist—asked him to turn one of the angels into a belt, and that was the beginning of their jewelry.

The first sketch of that first angel clasp was done in pencil on a Ramada Inn notepad. It now sits behind glass among other memorabilia that line the headquarters' walls. Yurman calls the switch to jewelry "entering the mainstream." (He did a stint at Cartier, designing under the Cartier stamp. And when his own designs saw some success, he approached Tiffany about designing under its auspices. "Thank God they said no," he says.) But his poetic vision and Beat recklessness show up in every piece. The signature cable bracelet—twisted silver and gold strands with gemstone tips—made him a phenomenon in the mid-1980s, and while luxurious, it's unintimidating, even familiar. The same design was all the rage in ancient Minoan, Scythian and Egyptian civilizations. "It references history," Yurman explains. "I think we're comfortable with something we kind of know we've seen before. Maybe it was in our collective unconscious."

A mishmash of strands—a chunky silver chain, a loose-link silver chain, a microfine silver chain and a string of small cultured pearls—is tossed together into a hip and harmonious tangle of necklace. "For me, it's a very relaxed form of luxury," Yurman says. "I always go back to saying it's your favorite pair of jeans. Worn jeans have this authenticity about them."

In this season's cocktail rings, a single, brilliant cushion-cut stone—lavender amethyst, blue topaz, champagne citrine—gets a relaxed look with a side doodle: a strip of inlaid diamonds, rubies or multicolored sapphires along the band. And for day to evening, Yurman takes Tahitian black pearls and subtly mixes in diamonds, yellow sapphires and rubies. "The luxury is really in making the material the hero," Yurman explains. "It kind of allows you to feel 'This is my piece,' rather than walking in and expecting to have 50 horns blowing."

Yurman is much more partial to the blues than to blowing horns. His CD player is stacked with Elmore James, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner. "A group called the Campbell Brothers comes from Rochester and sings gospel," says Yurman. "They're so great, your hair stands up and you jump up and you dance."

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