Art: Diamonds for Sale

“Kissing your hand may make you feel very good, but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.” Thus wrote Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes} in the speakeasy 1920s. Since then the U. S. diamond market has faded away like hocked bracelets. Aiming to get it out of hock again, N. W. Ayer’s advertising agency (which holds the account of Kimberley’s De Beers diamond syndicate, biggest in the world) last year decided that the somewhat flawed diamond trade needed association with the higher things of life.

Pioneers in the use of high-brow art in advertising (they had already got the Dole pineapple people to hire top-flight U. S. artists to paint pineapples in Hawaii —TIME, Feb. 12), N. W. Ayer suggested that the De Beers syndicate buy paintings by famous modernists, reproduce them in color alongside their diamond ads. The De Beers syndicate obediently bought about $20,000 worth of modern art by such headliners as Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Derain, Dufy, Marie Laurencin, got ready to reproduce them, by expensive color processes, as diamond ads.

This week, at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria, the De Beers collection of modern art was put on public display. The eleven canvases shown had nothing obvious to say about diamonds : most pictured women, one a man with a guitar, one a bunch of flowers, one the façade of a cathedral.