Vienna has always understood that civilisation expresses itself most completely through the things it makes. The birthplace of Sigmund Freud and the city that shaped Gustav Klimt, that housed Mozart and Beethoven in the same streets, and that elevated the applied arts to a philosophical position through the Wiener Werkstätte, it is a place where the relationship between beauty, intellect and craft has never been treated as incidental. It felt entirely fitting, then, to continue a journey through Van Cleef & Arpels’ creative universe here, this time not through the lens of a new collection, but through something older and more expansive: a conversation between the Maison’s jewellery and the full sweep of the decorative arts.
GLANZSTÜCKE: Van Cleef & Arpels High Jewelry × Masterpieces from the MAK Collection opened on 10 June 2026 at the MAK, Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, and I was among those present on opening night. Founded in 1863, the MAK is the world’s second-oldest museum of applied art, with holdings ranging from medieval textiles and the Wiener Werkstätte archive to design, architecture, and contemporary art. The exhibition brings together approximately 500 objects across six thematic chapters, drawing on around 350 pieces from the Van Cleef & Arpels patrimonial Collection alongside some 160 from the MAK, the result of a collaboration that began as an intellectual proposition and resolved itself, in the rooms, as something genuinely revelatory.
The scenography, conceived by Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects, takes the form of a maze. It is the right choice. Moving through it produces the sensation of discovery rather than display, of turning a corner and finding an unexpected affinity between objects that were never designed to occupy the same space. Among the earliest and most quietly astonishing of these: one of Van Cleef & Arpels’ most unusual early commissions, a scale model of the sailing yacht Varuna, made in 1906 in gold, silver and jasper. Its detail renders the impression of movement in precious materials with remarkable fidelity. More remarkably still, it conceals within its funnel an electronic bell system for summoning the butler. It is the kind of object that reframes your understanding of what jewellery making, at its furthest reaches, can produce.
For those who follow Van Cleef & Arpels closely, two moments in the exhibition carry particular weight. The first is the opportunity to see some of the earliest and most impressive examples of the Mystery Set, the Maison’s patented technique of setting stones so that the gold mount disappears entirely beneath them, first patented in 1933. Seeing the technique in its historic context, against the decorative backdrop of the MAK’s collections, gives it a different quality of significance. The second is the presence of pieces that anticipate what is now the iconic Perlée collection: early creations featuring spherical gold beads, which the Maison referred to at the time as the couscous collection. The name did not survive. The design intelligence behind it clearly did.
The six chapters, Wanderlust, Architecture, Rhythmic Designs, On Stage, Metamorphoses, and Nature & Cosmos, each produce their own discoveries, but what the exhibition argues most forcefully as a whole is that excellence in design generates its own cross-cultural vocabulary. The obsessions of the Wiener Werkstätte find their counterparts in the structural imagination of Van Cleef & Arpels. A 1553 armillary sphere, with its rotatable rings calculating astronomical coordinates and its outer ring engraved with zodiac imagery, speaks across five centuries to jewellery in which the same celestial themes recur.
The evening concluded at Steirereck, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant set within the Stadtpark and ranked among the world’s finest tables, where herbs from the rooftop garden and citrus from the imperial orangery at Schönbrunn arrive at the table with the same depth of provenance that characterises everything Vienna does well. It was a fitting conclusion to a night that had moved between centuries, disciplines and materials without ever losing the thread. Vienna, it turns out, is exactly the right city for this kind of conversation.
GLANZSTÜCKE: Van Cleef & Arpels High Jewelry × Masterpieces from the MAK Collection runs at the MAK, Stubenring 5, Vienna, until 27 September 2026. Full details and tickets at MAK.at
