Vintage Copper Jewelry

When it comes to jewelry, copper is the poor cousin to gold and sterling silver. Indeed, many people associate copper with speaker wire, plumbing supplies, or, at best, its alloys, which are brass (copper and zinc) and bronze (copper and tin). But copper is a handsome metal in its own right, whose malleability makes it easy to form into bracelets, bangles, earrings, necklaces, and brooches. Whether polished to a high sheen, enamelled, or chosen as the backdrop for one or more signature stones, copper can hold its own in even the most gold-and-silver laden jewelry box. Among collectors of vintage costume jewelry, some of the most sought copper pieces are associated with Jerry Fels, who founded Renoir of California in 1946 and Matisse Ltd. in 1952. While both lines made copper their dominant metal, Renoir pieces tended to use the material exclusively while Matisse pieces added colorful enamels to many of their surfaces. Although copper jewelry is generally considered costume or fashion jewelry because copper is a base metal rather than a precious one, some fine jewelers and artists have made copper their own. Foremost among these were New York modernist jewelers Sam Kramer, Art Smith, and Francisco Rebajes. Like many of his postwar contemporaries, Kramer worked primarily in silver, but he also fashioned rings, earrings, and pins out of copper, which he sometimes combined with found objects such as buttons and even ancient coins. Kramer also paired copper with semi-precious stones such as garnets or opals in his surreal pieces. One of Kramer’s Greenwich Village neighbors, Art Smith, was known for his copper cuffs, especially the “jazz” cuffs with musical notes applied to their outside surfaces. Other sculptural Smith cuffs were patinated to create differences in tone and color on the cuff’s surface. Rebajes often took a more figurative approach, producing some copper pins and earrings that resembled primitive mask-like faces. One example of his economical use of his chosen material was the way he created hair from a long dogleg of copper attached to the rest of a face. Sometimes the dogleg would be coiled tight, as if to suggest a curl at the top of the head, other times it would dangle by the side of the face, crimped to resemble waves.