Another of my mother's necklaces. This one has always fascinated me because of the way the the copper leaves are formed to join together. From the 1950's, the necklace was made by the Modernist master Francisco Frank Rebajes.
Rebajes was a forerunner in producing copper jewelery. He was born in the Dominican Republic in 1906, and emigrated to New York in 1923 when he was 16 years old. In 1932 he was out of work, and collected some tin cans, took them to his friend's workshop and fashioned the scraps into animals. He displayed his work outside on an ironing board at an Art Festival, where Juliana Force (Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art) saw it. She liked his work and purchased the whole lot on display for $30 - a lot of money in those days!!
With this windfall, Frank Rebajes' rented his first workshop and store. His pieces were signed simply "Rebajes'". In 1942, he opened his first retail store on Fifth Avenue in New York, employing forty workers, and a National sales and distribution network was set up. His work was featured in Saks of Fifth Avenue, and was advertised in top fashion magazines. The rest is history!!
In the early 1960's, he sold his workshop, and moved to Spain, where he lived until his death in 1990.
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