Happy 2009!

Ubangi mask pin by Frank Reba­jes, circa 1950, copper

While away on hol­i­day in warmer climes, I did a bit of thrift­ing about, which means I went shop­ping — how­ever instead of walk­ing the ele­gantly appointed floors of Neiman Mar­cus, my nineteen-year-old son and I perused the dusty cav­erns of resale shops, antiques malls, and even a large, well lit, and quite busy Sal­va­tion Army store with a nifty lit­tle sec­tion called The Vin­tage Shop. My son, a graphic design stu­dent, looks for prac­ti­cal items that speak to him in the lan­guage of line and form, not so very dif­fer­ent from his mom, but of course we part ways briefly to scour the case dis­plays of our respec­tive inter­ests and then come together to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­i­ties. I have to say that he is, with­out a doubt, my best good luck charm. Nine times out of ten I find some­thing worth­while when we go together.

I dis­cov­ered this notable Frank Reba­jes pin in an antiques mall in Del­ray Beach, Florida; it was a design cre­ated in the 1950s and as far as I have researched it is referred to as the Ubangi woman, part of a group­ing of pins rep­re­sent­ing African masks. Rabe­jas came to New York City from the Domini­can Repub­lic in 1922, earn­ing money by work­ing as a bus­boy at the Automat. Dur­ing the Depres­sion he lost his job and was forced to pan­han­dle and sell apples on the street. Deter­mined and cre­ative, Reba­jes sculpted whim­si­cal ani­mals from tin cans and metal scraps he found in a friend’s base­ment work­shop. With the pro­ceeds of the sale of the col­lec­tion to the direc­tor of the Whit­ney Museum of Amer­i­can Art, he now could start a busi­ness of his own. From there, Reba­jes’ took his silver-plated objects and jew­elry trans­formed them into a com­mer­cially viable enter­prise. After sell­ing his wares from a dirt-floor shack that stood between two build­ings, he had earned enough money to move into a tra­di­tional shop at 184 West Fourth Street in 1934.

In 1942, he opened a sleek retail store and fac­tory at 377 Fifth Avenue; Reba­jes designed every ele­ment of this breath­tak­ingly mod­ern space. Orna­ments were con­structed mostly of cop­per or silver-plate, or on occa­sion, sil­ver. Accord­ing to the book, Mes­sen­gers of Mod­ernism, Reba­jes was the first Mod­ernist arti­san jew­eler to open a shop in New York City. He pur­posely kept prices low, and his pieces were sold through­out the coun­try by pres­ti­gious retail­ers like Saks Fifth Avenue.

There are still many fine exam­ples of Reba­jes’ work float­ing around, from horses to fish to African and South Amer­i­can masks which were worked in the lex­i­con of mod­ernism: Cubism, Sur­re­al­ism, and Biomorphism.