The Gaudi goldsmith: How the House of Griegst became a Danish national treasure

“He was like the Golden Goose; whatever he created was beautiful,” Irene says of her late husband, Arje Griegst. She’s sitting in the Griegst family home in central Copenhagen, her son, Noam Griegst, at her side. Behind them is a winding wooden staircase leading up to Arje and Irene’s former studio. Walking up that narrow passage – creaking with every step, like old houses do – visitors would be greeted by the bombastic sound of opera whenever Arje was working. Inside the door, paintings piled up against the walls, pieces of sculpting projects atop workbenches. Next came the scent of heavy smoke. “He’d always have a cigar and a plate of fruits, mindlessly eating while he worked,” says Irene.

“That’s how I remember it,” Noam agrees. “He was always working, non-stop, on at least 10 different things at the same time with another 10 surrounding him using 10 different techniques.” Arje Griegst’s collection of curiosities make an impression. Gilded and carefully carved, his distinctive organic shapes set a literal gold standard for modern design. To attempt to summarise the vast collection – the lifework – of one of Denmark’s most distinguished jewellers is a daunting task, one that Noam has shouldered since his father’s passing in 2016.

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Assuming the role of creative director and working closely with his mother, Noam ensures that The House of Griegst is never stagnant while protecting its heritage. Training with silversmith Just Andersen, Arje began his career in the early 1960s. After presenting Georg Jensen’s manager, Anders Hostrup-Pedersen, with a set of 40 sketches, Hostrup-Pedersen commissioned 20 of Arje’s rings and sent him off to Paris with a handful of gemstones and pearls in his pocket. Anti-modernist in their expression, these pieces marked the origin of Arje’s meticulous approach and experiments. Over the years, he would come to develop his own wax mixture and casting technique, the very same processes used by Noam and the Griegst goldsmiths today.

“I recall standing for hours, days, weeks, months as a model for him in his studio. He would carve porcelain faces based on all of us,” Noam recalls. He is speak ing of Arje’s foray into jewellery made from porcelain in 1972. Ten or so completed pieces were finalised the following year including ‘Rosendame’, the Rose Lady, modelled after Irene. The peaceful face of his sleeping baby daughter Lia appears as a belt-buckle, while ‘Fræk unge’, Cheeky Kid, depicts a scallywag sticking his tongue out, which the jeweller dedicated to his son. Finally, the pendant ‘Egemanden’, the Oak Man, with unruly branches for hair set with gilded acorns, was a self-portrait.

It wasn't the first time Arje had explored portraiture in jewellery. In a 1967 news article, Arje explains that his jewellery at the time – melting faces with eyes and mouth made of dark opals, like gaping holes – was an expression of “the 1960s, with hashish and paranoia and such things.” “At the time, we had friends and other artists dabbling in drugs, weed, and yes, he’d tried it once or twice, but it wasn’t for him,” Irene says. “Arje never went to extremes.” All because, she explains, Arje never wanted to impede the way he could see the world.

Irene met Arje in Israel during the 1960s when he was a guest lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. In a way, she tells me, it was love at first sight. “I saw him on the other side of the street in Jerusalem, and I remember thinking, ‘This is exactly the kind of guy I would like to marry.’” Irene sought him out and the two started seeing each other. “Although it was difficult considering I had another boyfriend at the time,” she laughs. They would later marry “on the street” in Tel Aviv.

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They were “always together” and her husband was “always working”. Little by little, Irene would involve herself, offering her opinion, until finally, she asked Arje to show her how to make her own jewellery. “I had this idea of earrings I wanted to make, primitive yet feminine. Being surrounded by beautiful things, of course it will inspire you,” she says. They led to her first solo exhibition at Kunstindustrimuseet, The Designmuseum Denmark, in 1988. “I worked for two years, making tiaras. One for each season.” A telling sign of her skills, two of her tiaras were stolen at an exhibition of Danish jewellery in Malmö. “I take it as a compliment, really,” she says.

Arje’s porcelain portrait ‘The Oak Man’ was presented to Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II as a gift as part of Royal Copenhagen’s bicentenary celebration in 1975. The Danish Queen was already a patron of Arje’s work at the time, following a long tradition of Royal families supporting craftsmanship. The royal relationship culminated in the 1976 commission for a modern tiara, with the Danish goldsmith granted free reign. The result was a summer meadow, with sprouting gilded poppies – petals made from pearls, its centre dotted with diamonds. Amber, which Arje thought of as the ‘gold of the Nordics’, hang off the tiara on filigree threads, like drops of honey.

The couple’s travels came to heavily influence his work, especially Gaud i’s surrealist architecture and art, which they witnessed on their visits to Barcelona. “After that, all of his work became very organic,” says Irene. “He’d look to the world around him and explore it deeper. Taking a shell, for example, and being fascinated by the way it closes and opens. Studying it.” She’s speaking of the 1970s, when Arje gathered 30 or so large conch shells on the shelves of his Royal Copenhagen studio to study. He dissected everything from the swirling texture to the curling closures.

The result was the ‘Konkylie’, the Triton dinner service, with the star of the set being the ‘Havterrin’, the Sea Tureen. Its glossy sea-green glaze required six different shades of cobalt and iron to achieve the right effect. Unfortunately, such a time-consuming process could not be financially justified, and only 10 or so pieces were produced. "We never knew how rare the porcelain would become. When we got some samples, we gave them away as gifts,” Irene says. Today one of the few remaining sea-green tureens can be seen at the National Museum in Stockholm.

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In the 1980s and 1990s, Arje returned to his lifelong fascination with the universe. “We lived in Paris at the time – really on and off for 20 years – when he first made the Cosmos ring. It took him three or four years to finish,” Irene says. The result was a swirling nebula of glittering gold. “My dad was ill for the last 16 years of his life, getting very sick towards the end,” says Noam. With his illness, the workshop slowed down. “During that period, I saw my father slowly deteriorate. I thought, ‘What is going to happen to all of his things’ without even considering getting involved.”

At the same time, organically shaped jewellery similar to Arje’s work was gaining popularity. Noam points out that one of the reasons why he started working in the family business was because he felt angry at the lack of recognition for his father’s work. “I wanted to put the flag back on the map. One of my main goals is to have people recognise it internationally again.”

Noam, who worked independently as a photographer before stepping into the role of creative director in 2017, realised the importance of his father’s creations while doing commercial jobs for other brands. “I slowly figured out that I had never seen anything quite like my father’s work – like what I grew up with. I realised how beautiful and unique his heritage was,” he explains. “And then the process of ‘should I or shouldn’t I’ began.” Many things were speaking against Noam taking over as creative director, chief of all that he himself was not a goldsmith. It took 10 months of consideration before he finally decided to step in. “It didn’t matter that I didn’t know; what mattered is that I knew where I came from,” he says.

“It was very complicated to start. There was this whole process of figuring out the value of something,” Noam explains. "I saw my father’s work not in the context of a fancy shop but in our home on a daily basis. Lying on a table. And to then try and understand how this, for me, ordinary object could be worth an insane amount of money was all about understanding the materials with the help of my mother.” Irene smiles. “I enjoyed taking a step back,” she says. “It’s wonderful that I don’t have this big responsibility to continue Arje’s work at my age. Instead, I can sleep in until 11 o’clock,” she says with a laugh. “And she does every day,” Noam adds.

Arje was an alchemist, he would tinker and experiment, making the impossible possible. As a result, there is hardly anyone who could walk in his footsteps. “You can’t really touch his work, because it's so fulfilled, so full circle that it doesn’t need to change. The work we do now is more about how we reframe these designs in a new time,” Noam explains. “The showroom is part of this. We just opened this year, and it’s a way to invite people into our universe. It’s a fine balance though, of combining old and new together without it feeling like a museum.” An Arje Greigst universe, which, like our own, continues to expand.