Maria Felix 2
by Jerzy Czyz
Title
Maria Felix 2
Artist
Jerzy Czyz
Medium
Digital Art
Description
“Called the supreme goddess of Spanish language cinema” by The New York Times, Félix made 47 films during her career that began in the 1940s. Her nicknamed La Doña was from the star’s title role in the 1943 film Doña Bárbara, about a strong independent woman. Félix purposely never learned English and didn’t appear in any Hollywood productions because she didn’t want to be typecast. She did, however, learn French and appeared in a handful of French films. A great beauty Félix was painted several times by artist Diego Rivera. Mexico’s Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz wrote about the star, “She’s free like the wind, she disperses the clouds, or illuminates them with the lightning flash of her gaze.”
It seems clear that Maria Félix identified with snakes for all the symbolism of creativity, wisdom and strength the creatures represent. She wore snake jewelry throughout her adult life. Note the bracelets on the star in the photo above taken in 1959. Her style became much bolder in the mid-1960s, a period when her main residence was in Paris with her third husband, a Swiss businessman named Alexander Berger. Around 1966 she visited the Cartier flagship on the rue de la Paix and commissioned a snake necklace she wanted to be the size of, well, a large snake.
Cartier took two years to make the 22-inch long serpent. A good portion of the time was most likely spent figuring out the platinum and gold armature on the interior of the design that made it fully—and I mean fully—flexible. Then the master craftsmen had to figure out how to cover the body in diamonds. There are 2,473 brilliant and baguette-cut diamonds weighing a total of 178.21-carats on the design. Similar to the way traditional Indian jewels featured enamel on the reverse, the scales on the bottom of the snake are decorated with green, black and red enamel. The colors were a tribute to the Mexican flag. When the piece was finished, apparently Félix was out of town. She was so thrilled to hear her jewel was finally complete, she chartered a plane back to Paris to get it.
While the design is extraordinary, it doesn’t look like anything else Cartier has ever created. It’s savage in a way that’s more of novelty than the refined jeweler executes in its rendition of barbaric. According to Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier’s first biographer, the piece was based on a design by Gabriel Raton. The jewelry expert who died in 1988 did not expand on who Raton was and to my knowledge his name has never been mentioned in a Cartier book again. Other layers of mystery surrounding the jewel include the question of what was the occasion for the commission? Usually an order like that is done for a reason, a celebration, something.
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September 24th, 2022
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