Happy Friday POU!
OK, here is a movie in the making for sure. The story is just incredible. You may recall that Art Smith, a featured designer from earlier this week, began his career working for a well known jewelry designer in New York, Winifred Mason. I began researching her and it was very sketchy, but after finding out her married name, I found more at Modern Silver magazine and the story just blew me away. Its long but well worth the read (click link to page 2 below)!
Winifred Mason Chenet
An announcement in The Crisis Magazine showed that Winifred Mason graduated from New York University with a degree in education (1936). She worked for awhile as a teacher for the WPA and later as a crafts instructor at the Harlem Boys Club, but a different career awaited her.
Mason’s first piece of jewelry was made in 1940–a pendant in bronze, copper, and silver. The pendant created quite a bit of interest among her friends and orders for similar pieces soon began to arrive.
Mason is described as being petite–five feet, two inches and “possessed of a relentless energy that kept her working ten to fourteen hours a day.” She credited her mother for fostering her interest in working with her hands: when she was a child, growing up in Brooklyn, her mother, who was well-skilled in needle arts, taught her to sew, knit, and embroider.
Mason never copied designs–each one was unique. She said that she would “duplicate” with variations if a customer wanted an odd piece of jewelry matched.
Because she didn’t find standard jewelry tools necessary to her craft, Mason created her own tools. “A lot of jewelry that comes out of my shop is made with a simple ball peen hammer and other improvised tools,” she said. “And it is because we depend so much on improvised tools and methods that our products have not been restricted to standard effects and designs…..as long as the desired effect is achieved and the end product is the one you want then methods are unimportant.”
Like Art Smith, she believed that jewelry was individual–that it should conform to the body of the wearer–to give it greater lasting value.
In July of 1945, Mason traveled to Haiti where she spent five months studying the island’s art and folk culture. She was received by the president at that time, Elie Lescot, and touted in the Haitian press as “une distinguée congénère.” “When I got to Haiti,” she said, “I started a few investigations into the origins of basic patterns used by the Haitian people in arts such as weaving and jewelry. Whenever I found a design I sought to discover its meaning and roots. Everywhere there were primitive designs in the native dress, on the voodoo drums and decorating native musical instruments.”
First, here is what Ebony Magazine wrote about Winifred Mason in 1946, article titled “Copper Christmas”
Biggest part of the $1,300,000,000 that the American public spends each year for jewelry will be handed across the counters of thousands of fine shops this month. It’s Christmas time and favorite gifts for centuries have been trinkets, ranging from extravagant diamonds and rubies to bargain-basement 98-cent items.
Between the five-and-ten and Cartier brackets, the great American sucker finds himself in a tight vise, caught by his “smattering of ignorance” about which bauble is worth a C-note and which should sell for a dime in the world of jewelry. To most buyers, jewelry is a “blind article.” Each year more phony diamonds are sold than is the ever-rube-enticing Brooklyn Bridge.
For the sane and sensible shopper this Yuletide, however, there’s a foolproof buy in big, handsome, simple-lined jewelry that is rapidly becoming the rage in fashion. It is smart and thrifty custom-made jewelry in copper, a wonderfully pliant, warm-toned metal for gift earrings, necklaces and bracelets.
Some of the most stunning handmade copper pieces found in leading stores like Bonwit Teller and Lord and Taylor are being turned out in a small, somewhat bare Greenwich Village shop by a youthful, petite Negro girl. She is Brooklyn-born Winifred Mason, who sells her unique copper creations all over the nation from San Francisco to Miami.
Although she made her first medallion only six years ago, she has already zoomed to the top of the highly competitive custom-made jewelry business. Despite growing financial success, she insists on maintaining artistic integrity and still finds her greatest joy in making her jewelry fit a woman’s personality and appearance. She frowns on mass production methods and never copies designs.
As her business grew, Mason was concerned that the necessities of producing in quantity would divert her from “her original purpose, which was to turn out specially-designed custom-built creations.” She wanted to concentrate on individualized pieces–if they received an order for a dozen pins or so, they would make each one slightly different.
By the late 1940s, she had an expanding clientele that included many famous entertainers and actors and there had been ten exhibitions of her jewelry including one-woman shows in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
In 1945 she was honored with a Rosenwald Foundation Award to “gather folk material and basic art patterns used by the West Indians and to express these feelings in jewelry.
(Now this is where the story got really interesting, she met a handsome Haitian who was also an artist, sometime in the 40s)
chenet d’Haiti
Jean Chenet was a gentle man, doted on by his mother, Mrs. Reine Figaro-Chenet who, though she was married to Mr. Evan Chenet Sr. (Haitian consul in Cuba and the Dominican Republic), toiled long hours with her daughter, Eugenie Chenet and their employees, in the Chenet’s renowned patisserie in Port Au Prince. The money she made was used to educate her five sons (including Jean) who all grew up to be either engineers, artists, or teachers.
Before becoming interested in jewelry-making, Jean was a street muralist employed by the Haitian government for special events, such as expositions. Supposedly, he first met Winifred Mason in Mexico City, at a school for jewelry making. It is also possible that he met Winifred in Haiti in the mid 1940s when she was there on a grant to study Haitian folk art. Before the two were married, while Jean was visiting New York City, he and his brother, Jacques, went to visit Winifred Mason at her shop in Greenwich Village—this suggests that they knew each other in New York and were reunited in Haiti.
After their marriage, Jean and Winifred settled in New York City, in the St. Albans area of Queens. Later, they returned to Haiti where they had a jewelry shop and a factory for creating jewelry that they sold through Haitian stores such as Belle Kreyol. This was during the 1950s.
There is a story that Winifred tried to reclaim the Chenet family ancestral property in Gonaives Haiti from the peasants who had resided there for years. The peasants warned “the skinny lady” that they were going to cut off her legs with a machete. Winifred then withdrew any efforts to reclaim the land in Gonaives that belonged to Evan Chenet Sr., her father-in-law.
In 1963, at the age of forty-five, Jean Chenet was murdered by the Tonton Macoutes. He had no political agenda and was not involved in rebellion against the Haitian dictatorship, but he was handsome and business savvy and this may have incited jealousy in some. It was rumored, at the time, that the Tonton Macoutes wanted to demoralize all the families in Haiti, especially the wealthy mulatto ones, so they chose to kill a certain number of people. There are different versions of how Jean was killed, but it is said that he was shot in the head, after which an ambulance quickly took him away. No one in the family was ever given the opportunity to view the corpse.
After the killing, Winifred disguised herself as a peasant and fled to the U.S. embassy. Jean’s business was then taken over by one of his employees and Winifred returned to the United States, to her mother’s house in New York City.
In 2011, Marbeth Schon of Modern Silver magazine interviewed Jacques Chenet, Jean’s brother. More details were revealed about Winifred and Jean’s time in Haiti and the creation of the chenet d’Haiti line of jewelry. (continued on page 2)