Sam Kramer: Fantastic Jewelry

S. J. Perelman covered his leaflets. This "Fantastic Jewelry" appeared in scored of articles in periodicals from Design Quarterly to Mechanix Illustrated, from Village Chatter to The Saturday Evening Post. A dozen women in green masks paraded through the Village at his bidding. He knew Noguchi and Franz Kline, spent a weekend with the Calders, sold pieces to Vincent Price. At night, a huge cardboard protozoan wired with light bulbs pulsed in his window.

A man of contrasts, Sam Kramer could dash off a mind-bending broadside or an instructional essay with equal facility. He subordinated technique to idea. Yet, he experimented continually with novel welding and casting methods. The Studio of Sam Kramer became a Greenwich Village landmark—bohemianism incarnate. Nonetheless, his jewelry reflects critical junctures in 20^th-century art.

When he died in 1964, the New York dailies devoted columns to his obituary. Ed Weiner, in Craft Horizons, remarked: "The jewelers like myself who began working after World War II walked in a well-cleared path in the wilderness of pioneering. Sam had been there." And Philip Morton, in his Contemporary Jewelry: A Studio Handbook, states flatly: "To the best of my knowledge, contemporary jewelry made its appearance no earlier than 1936, with Sam Kramer's work." He was the most notorious, arguably the most prolific, and perhaps the very best of his generation. Yet today, save for a new cognoscenti, he seems to be unknown.

Who is Sam Kramer?

The New Yorker's first issue of 1942 includes a small ad for the Homestead Spa. A beaming Negro balances a tea service on his head over the caption, "Famous for Southern Service." Boris Karloff is playing in Arsenic and Old Lace and a new thriller—The Maltese Falcon—has opened at the Trans-Lux. It is nine months before Peggy Guggenheim would present First Papers of Surrealism at her new gallery; four years before the term "abstract expressionism" would first be applied to painting.

Under the heading "Surrealistic Jeweller," The New Yorker took note of a 28-year old—one Sam Kramer. He was making jewelry from the oddest things, including molars and a bit of meteorite filched from a museum. Gas masks, embryos, spirochetes, squids and intestines were typical motifs. There was a ring "containing the cerebral bones of a perch"; another featured a glass eye. The young man's presentation was no more subdued than his pieces. The editors couldn't resist quoting his flyers advertising "Fantastic Jewelry for People Who Are Slightly Mad": "We have things to titillate the damnest ego—utter weirdities conceived in moments of semi-madness . . . Some things have morbid feeling; tortured and massive they almost cry out with hysteria." The New Yorker discerned more Barnum than Baudelaire in these handbills, for the suggestion of shared derangement seemed to be a clever ploy.

Five years later, Village Chatter (the short-lived predecessor of today's Village Voice) marks Kramer's rapid passage from oddity to luminary. Already his penchant for psychodrama has been novelized in Charles Mengendahl's Don't Wait Up For Spring:

Then we rode downtown on a Fifth Avenue bus, and went into a shop where it said "Unbelievable Jewelry by Max Rineburst" on the window, and I bought a ring from Max himself, who had a long black beard and flashing eyes. He said he was completely mad, and then he laughed. The ring was a massive silver thing with no particular design and no equal. Max said it was twisted and tortured and brought out the sadistic part in Barbara's soul.

By now, his work is in museums; imitators are everywhere, Sam and his wife Carol have been joined by Peggy Ackerly and Charles Wendell in The Studio of Sam Kramer. An impressive roster of clients including Jose Ferrer, Jerome Robbins and S. J. Perelman have discovered the shop. And Sam, who needs no prompting, renders the Christmas rush in his inimitable—and purple—prose:

Who can forget Christmas at out studio? The hubbub? The bedlam? The jampack? The hurly-burly? The break-the bonesy? The lose-the-mindsy? The exaltation of it? A stranger in baggy tweeds, plucked-up and storm-tossed from band to band over the beads of the crows to the front line, snatches a pair of earrings, and is storm-tossed back, and out the door again. A young couple from New Jersey blunders in looking for a Chinese Restaurant, and is marooned for days in the crush, as it surges from one showcase to another. And us . . . sweating, and shivering, and smiling, but sticking to our posts . . . While the air turns blue with smoke and green with currency . . . pierced by shrill cries of maddened customers and made hideous by the steady groaning of the shelves, under their holiday burden of germs and worms and amoebas and fetuses and kidneys. Yes, and fragments of whitish coral, like decayed bone, clutched by silver . . . startled eyes with teardrops dropping . . . schizophrenic dancers, pendant . . . and nightmare creatures in brutal variety.

Embryos. Semi-madness. Blue air. Germs. Schizophrenic dancers. To our sensibility, so accustomed to the glossy presentation and impeccably "correct" sheen of the image-object, this is lurid stuff. Are these the rumblings of a new art form, or a facile bit of kitsch? The answer lies in that remote moment when "contemporary jewelry" was new—before the way had been smoothed by thousands of rolls of Ektachrome, sheathes of resumes, a hundred juries, before it had been captured, tamed and administrated.

Journey through a Cultural Underworld

In 1947, under the title "The New Abstract Vision," the Art News Annual published a series of arresting images. Included were an oscillograph record of uranium fission, Edgerton's photograph of a splash's "coronet," and the x-ray of a pyrite crystal. Each advance in optics and photography increased the sheer visual plenum available to artists. It was as when the great travelogues had fueled the imagination, save this voyage occurred in the laboratory.

Awe was mingled, however, with dread. The same exquisite organization that could parse the secrets of the cell had incinerated cities and stacked corpses like cordwood. These images, too, were widely circulated. Perhaps, we had only a captive science—tethered to the irrational. Or perhaps our calculated cruelty was prefigured in the microbe's casual savagery. Hans Arp, in Tiger's Eye, comments on this situation and the advent of bizarre imagery:

Confusion, unrest, nonsense, insanity and frenzy dominate the world. Foetuses with geometric double heads, human bodies with yellow hippopotamus heads, fan shaped monsters with trunk like elephants, stomachs with teeth on crutches, corpulent or emaciated pyramids with dragging feet and fear in their eyes, clods of earth with sex organs, etc., have appeared in statuary and painting.

The collage/montage principle—on a monstrous bender—was assembling new phyla with glue pot and scissors.

What had been vaporized at Hiroshima and cremated at Dachau were the assurances of Western civilization. Much art of the 40s and 50s can be situated in the turn from light to darkness, from the familiar to the strange. Paralleling a world of ominous creatures and terhis weblike structures. One can discern as well the "linear maze and labyrinth," "rhythmic homogeneity," and "pulsation" that William Seitz would use to describe some abstract expressionist painting, particularly Jackson Pollock's. Or, like the frottage of the Surrealists, it is an indeterminate screen, a field for the play of the subconscious. As in the great ecclesiastical bronzes of the Quattrocento, one can see a tangle of figures, climbing, falling, struggling.

The Search for Origins

Sam Kramer and his studio did not spring whole from a cleft in Greenwich Village. His style evolved from a variety of sources; his techniques from courses, work experience, trial and error. The search for origins will lead us to the Surrealism he avowed, as well as the artistic ferment that swirled around him in New York. It begins when a budding journalist, enrolled at USC during the Great Depression, decides to take a course in jewelry.

The course was taught by the chairman—and founder—of the ceramics department, Glen Lukens. In a well-publicized discovery, so reminiscent of the 20s appetite for tomb searches, ancient "secrets" and the like, Lukens had reconstructed Egyptian blue glaze. His articles appeared frequently in Design and Ceramics Monthly. A constant innovator, his name was linked to an array of "juicy" glazes, a versatile new clay body and an early electric kiln.

Yet Lukens was one part Edison, one part John Cage. The man who could wade through a library of abstracts on alkaline pastes was fascinated by chance effects and the uses of the unconscious. To him, the crackled, dripped or pooled glaze was an asset. Even the most mundane tasks could be vitalized by opening them to the psyche:

The student would start with this raw useless clay, then blend it with a little silica, a little talc. You see we word empirically . . . we did it from an emotional level; the intellect guided us , but is was not the work of the intellect. It was the deep self coming up, penetrating the surface consciousness, just as surrealist people paint.

The accidental made normative? The prosaic imbued with process? This heady mix would have appealed to young Kramer, whom "a friend recalls as the most picturesque figure on the USC campus. He lived in a shack, wore dock hand's clothes, and spent hours poring over modernist paintings and avant-garde books." It was as if his old high school favorites—machine shop and jewelry making—had met up with his new passions: literature, psychology and art. Just think of the jampack! The lose-the-mindsy!

Kramer's subsequent interest in crafts would be global and lifelong, encompassing ancient, primitive and ethnic sources. A resume lists: "Careful study of Navajo and Indian Jewelry" in 1937; four trips to Mexico in the 40s for the "Study of Mexican Art, archaeologoy and jewelry"; and a 1952 tour of "Italy and France, the study of historical examples of craft, jewelry and art." In response to an ACC questionnaire, he stated:

"Almost yearly, I have travelled through Mexico, our own Southwest, Cuba, Spain, Italy, and France . . . always studying the crafts of native peoples, the techniques, the traditions, the materials, etc, etc. These traevels and studies have proved to have a very stimulating influence on my work."

From the Navajos, he derived his use of heavy-gauge silver, the crude feeling of his bezels. One can see the primitive, as well, in his rough finish, the large scale and heft of his work, in the "wrapping" of stones with metal wire and in those staples of aboriginal adornment: shells, tusks and quills. Thus, the tableaux of the modern consciousness—The amorphous creature, the polymorphous psyche, the frieze of matter—are the first stratum in Kramer's underground. Beneath it lay a vast substructure—the primitizing tendency—which, like bedrock, would support the edifice of modern art.

A similar relationship among the primitive, art and jewelry was at work at the Museum of Modern Art. Pre-Columbian, African, Prehistoric, Mexican and American Indian material

(incomplete scan)

By Mark Foley

Metalsmith Magazine – 1986 Winter

In association with SNAG‘s

Metalsmith magazine, founded in 1980, is an award winning publication and the only magazine in America devoted to the metal arts.