Serpent Bracelet

The serpent bracelet sits at the heart of Margot de Taxco's champlevé enamel-on-silver vocabulary — its sinuous silhouette a fitting vehicle for the dramatically modeled, curling forms that defined her design sensibility. Margot established her taller in 1948 and introduced the enamel line in 1955, with bracelets, necklaces, and earrings in champlevé forming the core of her identity as a maker. The serpent motif drew on the Pre-Columbian and Art Nouveau formal currents she worked throughout her career, a synthesis of the traditions she wove together.

The champlevé technique — vitreous enamel recessed into cells of sterling silver and fired to embed color within the metal — was first introduced at Los Castillo by Reveriano Castillo and Miguel Melendez, and Margot perfected it into one of her major jewelry lines (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 166). Her formal vocabulary ranged from Pre-Columbian imagery and the energetic geometry of Art Deco to the curvilinear ornament of Parisian Art Nouveau, complemented by two direct research trips to Japan in the late 1950s (Morrill, p. 168). The serpent engaged all three registers: ancient and iconographically charged, geometrically potent, and sinuously fluid enough to reward the enamelwork.

Morrill's observation that Margot's champlevé jewelry, "although made nearly forty years ago, continue to be glittering displays of color, texture, and technical perfection" (p. 166) has held.