In 2014, Noam Griegst, a Danish photographer and videographer, was working in Shanghai on a campaign for Cartier when he decided to open an Instagram account for Griegst, the cult — but dormant — brand founded by his father, Arje.
“I couldn’t keep it on the shelf,” Noam said, and in 2018 — two years after his father died, at 78 — he began commissioning artisans to reproduce its vintage jewelry and decorative objects from archival molds.
After all, the 54-year-old said during a recent interview, he had photographed beautiful things in his career, but “none of them came close to the Griegst universe.”
Arje Griegst was born in 1938 to a middle-class Jewish family in Copenhagen. The son of a talented goldsmith and engraver, he trained with his father’s contemporaries, and, in 1961, the silverware company Georg Jensen granted Arje a kind of sponsorship. He was given a bag of precious gems and told to go find himself in Paris.
“After traveling in Spain, too,” Noam said, “he came back doing a melted-brain look with raw rubies and emeralds.”
He said his father’s “baroque-punk vision” — “which was just bananas” — broke from the spell of modernism on Denmark at the time and secured him a following as a “bad boy” designer. Arje’s instinct, his son said, was for opulent Art Nouveau and Surrealist aesthetics, similar to those of Gaudí and Dalí.
And now, the brand’s revival is a “parallel to the Schiaparelli revival we are seeing,” said Nina Hald, the editor of Au.Clock, a goldsmith and watch trade publication in Denmark.
Kerstin Wickman, a professor emeritus at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and the author of the 2013 book “Griegst: Goldsmith, Designer and Sculptor,” said that Arje was a “technical virtuoso” whose works display his own sense of humor as well as horror.
One of Arje’s most celebrated pieces was a modern tiara of flowers visited by a spider, butterfly and beetle, made in the 1970s for Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. For many months he had hammered poppy petals from sheets of 21-karat gold, carved dewdrops from a hunk of moonstone and fashioned buds out of a chunk of Baltic amber given to him by the queen.
Margrethe, who abdicated in January, has worn the tiara, named Danish Morning, during state visits. She recently described the avant-garde ornament as “lovely,” if “a little tricky to wear.”
Family Faces
In 2018, the revived brand rented a showroom a five-minute stroll from the Royal Danish Ballet’s theater in Copenhagen. Noam, now the brand’s creative director, said it felt as if the company were “fated” to occupy the space as his father had made some important early work — delicate pieces with gold wire and kinetic charms — for Anna Laerkesen, one of the company’s prima ballerinas. And that was where Noam, who regularly photographed its dancers, met his wife, Amalie Adrian.
Amalie, 34, works as an adviser for Griegst and often is the model for the brand’s dreamy imagery, which Noam photographs. (He has a younger sister, the painter Lia Griegst, who is not involved with the company. It now has two other employees: an assistant and a sales and production person.)
At the showroom one afternoon in June, Noam brought out two pieces designed in the 1960s: Burning Flower, which his father created while teaching art in Jerusalem, is a gold brooch in the shape of a trippy, tormented poppy (“See the bee coming at its face?” Noam asked), and Face of the Night, a necklace with a drippy, open-mouth figure that recalled Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”
Face of the Night, set with opals, pearls and diamonds, sold at the time for $10,000, roughly the equivalent of $100,000 today. It could be recreated for about $115,000, Noam said, considering the labor and the cost of gems.
Arje’s decorative works and jewelry often had faces, self-portraits or portrayals of family members. For example, the reissued 18-karat gold necklace called Flowerbud Face ($15,361) was modeled in the image of Irene Griegst, Arje’s wife and Noam and Lia’s mother. She had met Arje in Jerusalem, where she was studying enameling.
It was Irene who in 1978 insisted on opening a jewelry store and workshop in central Copenhagen, which she ran. She also had her husband teach her his craft.
Noam said that Arje’s early delicate gold-wire pieces reminded his mother of traditional embroidery in Morocco, where she was born, so she called her own style “sewing jewelry.” She made a name for herself with earrings and headpieces of tiny pearls, coral, and turquoise and spangly elements, all connected with gold wire. “My mother was the queen mother of the tingle-tangle, wingle-wangle,” Noam said.
Though Irene participated in the brand’s revival, Noam said that her protectiveness and fear that their work would be copied had made her deeply reluctant to engage in modern commerce. He said that his mother used to say, “You don’t know what you have between your hands.”
“I’d tell her, ‘Mommy, we need to be on Instagram,’” Noam said. “‘We need a website. We can’t hide.’” Irene was still making jewelry when she died unexpectedly last year, at 78.
Noam and Amalie cleared the couple’s apartments in Jerusalem, Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, as well as an old workshop in Copenhagen, and the showroom’s vast basement now stores what they found: a trove of finished and unfinished pieces, prototypes, wax leftovers, molds, gems, and gold. The showroom, Noam joked, is “now sitting atop this actual Ali Baba cave — and my parents’ ghosts come and go.”
“New Potatoes”
The couple said they were aware of the difficulty of blending fine art and business. In addition to sales from the showroom, the brand’s website and a relationship with four of the Dover Street Market stores that began in 2018, their retail efforts are focused on galleries and trunk shows. “We have to be careful,” Amalie said. “Griegst is too personal.”
The brand is working with artisans, whom Noam declined to identify, in the same cities and regions where Arje’s work was originally produced. Bronze items such as patinated branch- and brushstroke-like candlesticks designed in the 1960s and the 1990s are again being made by foundries in Tuscany (from $3,800).
The high-karat gold jewelry is being made by a bisque molding and casting partner in Copenhagen, while another local artisan has made the solid silver pieces that the brand calls catchalls, and which Arje made in bronze for his own use as cigar ashtrays.
The brand’s Spira cutlery, which Arje began sketching as a boy, was released by Georg Jensen in 2002 and reissued in collaboration with the silverware company in 2021; a seven-piece place setting sells for $3,880. And Xanadu, a glassware series produced by the Danish glass factory Holmegaard from the 1980s to the 2000s, was revived last year when a retired glassblower helped create two editions of the series’s large vase, now sold in cyber-yellow, brown and several shades of blue or green (from $4,090).
Noam said sometimes the brand’s mold maker can include specific stones requested by clients in vintage jewelry designs such as the Stardust collection, inspired in the 1990s by the Hubble Space Telescope’s galactic imagery and recently reissued.
Griegst’s best seller across all its categories is the Spiral jewelry collection, created in the 1970s, with 18-karat gold rings, earrings, necklaces and bracelets in snakeish swirls that Noam said was inspired by caramel (starting at $512 for a single stud earring).
This month Noam had a preliminary meeting with the Danish porcelain company Royal Copenhagen to discuss reissuing his father’s glazed porcelain jewelry, which included personified ocean waves, oak trees, tulips and a seedling-like fetus based on his daughter as a baby (it was added to a belt that Queen Margrethe wore in celebration of the porcelain maker’s 200th anniversary in 1975).
During the last decade of his life, Arje had developed Parkinson’s disease and was unable to work, but, his son said, he wanted to make furniture and wallpaper. So the brand has been working with the Danish color house Bleo to develop one of Arje’s wallpaper designs, and it intends to reproduce some of Irene’s earrings with artisans in Jaipur, India, next year.
“And I want to turn the earth — get some new potatoes in there,” Noam said, explaining that he has started to look for a jewelry designer with what he called a “compatible voice” so Griegst might offer new work as well as heritage pieces.
“There is a whole new world waiting,” he said.
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