SAM KRAMER (1913-1964)

Sam Kramer, born in 1913 in Pittsburgh, was a modernist jeweler who made his mark in New York City. Active in the Greenwich Village arts community during the 1940s and 1950s, he emerged as a pioneer of the downtown creative scene. Kramer opened his first shop in 1939, eventually relocating to his legendary studio + shop at 29 West 8th Street.

Eccentric and inventive, Kramer was known to greet customers while still in his pajamas. He described himself as a maker of “Fantastic Jewelry for People Who Are Slightly Mad,” a slogan that perfectly captured both his personality and his work. His shop embodied a spirit of Surrealism—from the hand-shaped front door handle that visitors had to “shake” to enter, to his oversized, fantastically surreal pieces featuring hallucinogenic forms and Dali-like body parts. The Surrealist eye became one of his trademarks.

Drawing inspiration from pop culture, Kramer integrated glass eyes, semiprecious stones, and shells into his jewelry for both aesthetic and emotional effect. His devotion to the bizarre was so complete that he once attempted to craft a bracelet from his wife’s recently removed gallstones. For him, creating jewelry was as much about performance as craft. Influenced by the Surrealists, he believed that art should provoke feeling and thought, and he pursued expression over technical perfection. His pieces were deliberately rough, irreverent, and organic, avoiding anything too cold or angular for fear it might seem machine-made.

Kramer’s creativity left a lasting mark, and his work is now represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. His life and career are documented in the 2020 monograph “Sam Kramer: A Jeweler on the Edge”, written by Toni Greenbaum and published by Arnoldsche Art Publishers.