silver streak; Jeweler Art Smith's modern masterpieces are on show in an upcoming retrospective.

Byline: Lynn Yaeger

A pot of espresso percolates on the hot plate; Thelonious Monk tinkles the ivories on the hi-fi; the latest issue of Partisan Review peeks from the top of your Indian hemp shoulder bag; you're wearing woolly black tights, a batik dirndl, and a beret; and hand-_hammered copper hoops picked up in a little shop in the Village dangle from your ears.

Art historian Blanche Brown remembers the strong emotions that informed bohemian fashion decisions in the heady postwar years: "About 1947 I bought a silver square-spiral pin because it looked great, I could afford it, and it identified me with a group of my choice-aesthetically aware, intellectually inclined, and _politically progressive. That pin-or one of a few others like it-was our badge, and we wore it proudly. It celebrated the hand of the artist rather than the market value of the material. Diamonds were the badge of the philistine."

The late jeweler Art Smith, whose work is so important and distinctive that he is receiving a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum this spring, could well have made those earrings or that brooch. Smith, who graduated from Cooper Union in 1946 (at the time, there were fewer than ten other black students, he recalled in his personal papers), was one of a number of independent designers drawn to biomorphic shapes and unpretentious raw materials, their artistic sensibilities closer to Calder than Cartier, nearer Dali than Tiffany.

Smith owned a shop in the Village at 140 West Fourth Street from 1948 to 1979; customers made their presence known by a knock on the glass door, locked to keep out drug dealers who made a path from Washington Square Park to Sixth Avenue. Once inside, they were greeted by an exquisite display of black-felt-skirted tables under wall units holding seemingly endless variations on the theme of the handmade earring. In the back of the shop, Smith could be seen at his bench, his face illuminated by a welding torch. But not everyone came to buy-people hung out or talked politics while Smith occasionally emerged to press his visitors into service as models or to join in the heated discussions springing up among the brooches and bibelots. When Smith started out, a simple pair of earrings could be had for less than $5; now his rarest pieces can command $60,000.

Though he occasionally used gold for special orders, Smith, who died in 1982, preferred hand-hammered silver and copper and eschewed rare jewels in favor of ...