Fine Jewelry Inspired by Centuries-Old Paintings at the Met

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Since it opened in 1958, Venice’s historic Hotel Cipriani — set away from the crowds on Giudecca Island, with great views of the floating city and its waterways — has long been a paragon of life well lived, the sort of place where you might’ve seen creative luminaries like Sofia Loren, Catherine Deneuve and Yves Saint Laurent hanging around. But like all good old hotels, the 67-room property eventually needed a refresh, one that reflected Venice’s more contemporary architectural and artistic character and a new era of luxury; as far as its owners at Belmond saw it, the person to do that was the Queens-born architect Peter Marino, who first started renovating projects in Venice some three decades ago. “You see pictures of Gloria Guinness at the hotel, her hair teased up past heaven, and I wanted to get that feeling here of almost impossible glamour,” he says. “It’s not palazzo glamour or old Venetian glamour but a very 1960s look.” Indeed, unlike many of the city’s other esteemed hotels, this one was installed not into a former palace but was built from the ground up, with squarer proportions that Marino wanted to loosen up with graphic midcentury paintings by the likes of the Italian American artist Conrad Marca-Relli and handblown Venetian vanity mirrors. Although he kept the handsome original lobby intact — “Over 50 people grabbed my arm in town and said, ‘Please don’t change it,’” he says — Marino will fully reconceive the interiors during the off-season over the next few years. The first phase of it, including a new airy, double-height lobby and 13 suites that feature lots of glass and gold-toned detailing, will open May 27, just in time for summer. “I’m not doing walls of brocade,” he says, “but hopefully people in Venice will think it’s hip.” From about $2,000 a night, belmond.com.

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“Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama,” a recently opened exhibit at Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, features a selection of works on paper and canvas by the two Japanese artists. They’re from the same generation — Kusama was born in 1929, Tanaka in 1932 — and both “hit their stride with abstract painting using repetitive motifs,” says Anthony Allen, a partner at the gallery who organized the show, but “they likely never met.” Kusama, who is famous for her polka dots and weblike “Infinity Nets” series, arrived in New York’s downtown art scene in her late 20s, whereas Tanaka, who fixated on circles and lines (which were prominent shapes in her 1956 “Electric Dress” performance), stayed in Japan and became a core member of the avant-garde Gutai movement. Both used performance, textiles and installations in their oeuvres and “dealt with similar obstacles,” Allen says. By showing Tanaka and Kusama together, he hopes to “dislodge each artist from the context in which they’re usually presented.” On display are several of Kusama’s early career pieces, including one of her lesser-known sticker collages, and a broader selection of Tanaka’s works spanning 1956 through 2001. The show also includes three short films — two of Tanaka’s, one of Kusama’s — and a series of documentary photos that capture each artist at work. “Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama” is on view through June 14, paulacoopergallery.com.

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For the Los Angeles jewelry designer Jess Hannah Révész, a stroll through the painting galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is a treasure hunt. Where some might linger over the blue silk dress in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s “Princesse de Broglie” (1851-53), Révész zooms in on the subject’s stack of gold rings. One of these, a weighty band like coiled rope, has now been reimagined in wearable form as part of a new J. Hannah jewelry collaboration with the Met. “I’ve always taken inspiration from the past,” says Révész, who previously created a capsule collection for the museum focused on the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. In addition to the Princesse ring — offered in brushed 14-karat gold or polished silver, as well as a hoop earring version — Révész has reinterpreted jewelry from three additional masterworks. “Judith With the Head of Holofernes” (circa 1530), Lucas Cranach the Elder’s dressed-up take on the biblical tale, sees the heroine in a gilded collar decorated with tiny pearls, one of which Révész transposed onto her Quatrefoil pendant. The pile-up of rings in “Portrait of a Woman of the Slosgin Family of Cologne” (1557), by Barthel Bruyn the Younger, manifests as two designs: the dainty two-gem Diptych and the Quatrefoil, available as an engravable signet or with a single rectangular stone — “unisexy,” the designer quips. Hans Memling’s wedding portraits of Tommaso and Maria Portinari (circa 1470), who are shown with hands clasped in prayer, inspired J. Hannah’s Devotion rings, with puffy gold bands and one or two prong-set stones. The pieces in the collection are made to order with era-appropriate carnelian cabochons or faceted sapphires. Révész added recycled diamonds as a third option — for fun, she says. “That was a me thing.” The Subjects of Adornment collection launches May 25; from $440, jhannahjewelry.com.