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Design Matters with... Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos

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As ABASK partners with renowned authority in the world of sourcing, collecting, exhibiting, and cataloguing modern-vintage jewelry, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos, the founder of New York’s acclaimed gallery, Mahnaz Collection, shares her approach to building a collection of rare treasures.

Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos
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What makes the jewelry at Mahnaz Collection so special?

Everyone thinks their jewelry is special and rightly so because each of us is driven by our passion. Our jewelry gallery is unique because we collect rather than buy. Collecting is more systematic; it requires intentionality and concentrated research around eras or types of jewels. We are best known for the jewelry made in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, while we also sell other unique jewelry, Italian and Brazilian art jewelry dating from the 1940s, and Nordic jewels from the 1950s, for example. But all our other jewelry purchases somehow connect to the era at the center of Mahnaz Collection.

What is special about collecting jewels? 

We collect because it allows us to present clients with jewels as part of a larger living culture, moments of transformation, or as a sculpted memory of a person’s life rituals. We build jewelry collections so that our clients can learn about jewelry design more broadly, and, importantly, know more about the work of the designer, artist, or goldsmith who produced the piece. 

Andrew Grima

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Why do you think that vintage and antique jewels are a good investment for people?

You barely see that quality of handwork or craftsmanship anymore. You sometimes see
it in contemporary High House jewelry, but how many people can access it? With mid-priced vintage and antique jewelry, or even a low-priced great find, you can find superior design, the hand of the maker, and a quality of craftsmanship that elevates the jewel to a much higher level than its peers today. If I could find a unique vintage jewel with a good story at a low price for a young or new collector, I’d be thrilled. While they certainly are that, I often try to escape the jewel as a pure commodity. I prefer to think of jewels as ravishing design objects. They become jewels only once they attach to some part of our human bodies. That’s when they develop purpose and activate as
beautiful jewels.

Why do you think the story of a maker is so important to share when collecting
jewels? 

Jewelry is not disconnected as an outlier from cultures or the sacred. It must be understood as linked to them. It can open up an entire world, so we discuss the maker. Let me give you a quick example from London of the 1930s to 1950s. Moshe Oved—whose animal rings, some with Hebrew inscriptions, are coveted today—was an immigrant watchmaker and owner of a little shop called Cameo Corner where he specialized in cameos and antique jewelry. He was also a sculptor, erudite, a founding member of the historic Ben Uri Society, and a collector and good friend of the sculptor Jacob Epstein. Through Oved’s storytelling, he explains why he made the animal rings and much more: a ring and its times are created for you. When you look at a ring in the Mahnaz Collection, I hope you get an introduction to the maker, the larger body of work he introduces us to, and his world, which might engage you as a visit to a museum, an art gallery or online. It’s history that becomes yours, and you make it anew.

“Jewelry has to be understood. It's really part of a culture. It takes you into a whole world and that's why we talk a lot about the maker. The maker is very important.”

Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos

 Ursula Andress in Andrew Grima jewelry, London, 1966
 Linda Pétursdóttir in David Morris jewelry

How do you present your renowned collections?

We develop two kinds of exhibitions. Significant formal exhibitions are when we feel we have something to contribute to the field of jewelry history overall and sufficient jewelry to match and have something to say. These take years to plan, and as examples, I would cite our London Originals exhibit and our Material Beauty show. Both made contributions to the field. A second type of exhibition is more informal and of shorter duration. It takes place when we want to make a particular point not explicitly covered in our significant collections: cover a single jeweler’s career or draw attention to the design elements in the particular school of jewelry making. 

Can you tell us about your famous catalogues? 

I am a scholar and author. We write original essays and publish catalogues whose clients are primarily scholarly institutions, scholars and collectors and jewelry lovers. We hire an excellent design director and editors pay close attention to good photography, and also bring in photos from the era. Our first was called London Originals, and it was about a group of jewelers working in London in the 1960s and 1970s who transformed the world of jewelry and made a dramatic leap from the jewelry of the 1950s. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon provided a cachet to these jewelers and helped the artist jeweler emerge and thrive in Swinging London. We did another one on the transformation of Indigenous Native American jewelry since the 1960s. While we showed several jewelers’ designs, we focused on two particular jewelers, Charles Loloma and Richard Chavez, whose work represented a Modernist transformation in very different ways. 

“Like us, ABASK looks for handwork in a way that's focused on being interested in preservation, while also being interested in the future.”

Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos

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Noma Copley by Man Ray

How would you describe your approach to collecting jewelry?

First and foremost, I am trained as a scholar and researcher with a bachelor’s degree Phi beta Kappa, a Master’s and a PhD.  I marry that with a deep emotional connection to the jewels my female ancestors left to me. That is a strength Mahnaz Collection owns in building collections. I have a boundless passion for and boundaryless pursuit of jewels and don’t limit myself to the conventions of the jewelry industry. We sell almost no diamonds. The mantra is no silver. No silver? How can anyone say that when so much great jewelry design emerged in silver? My approach to collecting does not assign value by grams or carats but by the beauty emerging from concept and design.

What would you consider some of your best buys? 

I’ve already spoken about our collecting, but I will also say that so many of my best buys have been intuitive. My eye is drawn towards a necklace. I have no idea who made it, but I must have it. It is right. It is stunning. Turns out to be by Elisabeth Treskow. Fabulous. I buy it. Overall, I bring to the business an experience of cultures around the globe as well as a global cosmopolitanism. I am from the East, have traveled across the continents, lived mainly in the West for over four decades, and for now, collect the jewelry of the West and Latin America—including of indigenous peoples. I’m not necessarily trapped by established French or American jewelry hierarchies. I hope to share my knowledge with others who are interested in our perspectives and mix of jewelry.

Line Vautrin
Line Vautrin outside her boutique at 63 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré

Why do you feel you share a “kindred design spirit” with ABASK?

ABASK is interested in a small production and looks for curious minds and producers—and it’s an intelligent selection. Like us, ABASK looks for handwork in a way that’s focused and interested in preservation. ABASK recognizes that good design is timeless. We both carry a luxury product, yet we try to make some of it accessible. I'm very lucky, I have an amazing team, and I think ABASK has that, too. 

“We share the same passion for sharing truly unique, one-of-kind objects with our customers and erudite collectors around the world.”

Tom Chapman, ABASK co-founder

Ilias Lalaounis

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What are your early memories of jewelry?

I'm part South Asian and part Persian. Jewelry is an enormous part of our culture. We grow up with jewelry. Every woman, rich or poor, will have a bangle or a bracelet. It’s an economic resource, and it's very much a part of your daily life. My grandmother taught me a great deal about Persian turquoise by giving me rings, earrings, and later full parures plus all the superstitions, such as how to wear a certain kind of turquoise for protection and health. My mother was a stunningly beautiful woman with a very individual style and would wear family emeralds with wildly colorful and huge Mexican costume earrings in the 1960s. She pulled it off stylishly and gave me the courage to do so later. She gave me my first Andrew Grima watch, and I didn’t know what it was, but she did. So, I had an upbringing that was suffused with jewelry.

What brought you back into the jewelry world?

I had a diamond engagement ring, and it cracked down the middle. I wanted to replace it and that got me going to a lot of jewelers after a long time. I learned two things; one is that you can't replace your engagement ring because it's not about the ring, it's about the moment, so I never replaced that ring. The second thing that came back to me was how much I loved being around jewelry and going to all these stores and looking at all this work again. Then, I had a daughter when I was in my forties, and I realised that I didn’t want to be in a field where I constantly had to hide my professional work—the faces of war—from my child. And so, the thought came to me, why not work with our more creative side? As human beings, we’re capable of creating great beauty.

What led you to establish Mahnaz Collection?

First, I became an academic, because my family lived through two very brutal revolutions in Bangladesh in 1971 and in Iran in 1979. As a result, I became a student of war and peace studies, and I did my doctorate in international security studies. For the next 25 years, I wrote books and worked in institutions that dealt with international security policy. I worked for a decade in professional philanthropy at the Ford Foundation. I didn’t collect a lot of jewelry at that time. Still, wherever I traveled in the world—I worked in the Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, West Africa, Central America, and other places—I would collect small, sculptural objects, anything portable, which is something I also love about jewelry.

Is there a particular era that you can’t resist?

I think I may be stuck in the late 1960s and 1970s. The explosion of women coming into the workforce, and design and jewelry making. Wendy Ramshaw invented the stacking ring in 1972 when no woman would ever think of stacking a ring. She invented that. She invented the concept of jewelry as sculpture by making stunning individual stands for each set of stacking rings. It was a time of enormous change in art, politics, economics, pop art, the youth and musical revolutions, man went to the moon. And jewelry, that stodgy 50s dame, became part of all that! Still, I’m always looking at jewelry, reading more books, and looking for my next “holy grail” of jewelry design.

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