Origins & Legacy of Art Jewellery in South Africa
Timed Online Auction, 6 - 22 October 2025
Origins
About the SessionOrigins, explores the emergence of South African fine metal artistry through pioneering immigrant goldsmiths and jewellers such as Erich Frey, Peter Cullman, Margaret Richardson, Elsa Wongchowsky, Tessa Fleischer and Birger Haglund. Many were drawn to South Africa after the Second World War, seeking opportunities to establish workshops. Their training in European institutions, such as Pforzheim, equipped them with modernist principles and technical expertise. Their works embodied modernist aesthetics while adapting to local contexts. They experimented with form, texture, and materiality, linking jewellery to broader artistic movements.
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Notes
Else Wongtschowsky was born in 1914 in Germany. As a Jewish woman, born in the Nazi era, she was barred from her chosen career as a medical doctor and so shifted her path towards metal arts.
In the 1930s she fled Germany and settled in South Africa where she became a notable figure among immigrant goldsmiths who shaped the South African jewellery design landscape in the mid-twentieth century.
She initially worked in the studio of fellow jeweller Kurt Jobst before establishing her own practice. Her work is closely associated with the 'Safari jewellery' movement that emerged in South Africa in the 1950s and which blended indigenous themes with modernist form. Her style incorporated stylized representations of South African flora, fauna and indigenous art.
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