Auction ORANGERIE Selected Objects No. 280
on 30 November 2017, 11 a.m.
He was responsible for the gold of the Golden Twenties: Emil Lettré. Pamela Wedekind wore his earrings (and had him in her heart). Rainer Maria Rilke's friends recognised the poet by the cufflinks Lettré had made for him. Now the goldsmith's entire estate has resurfaced. The ORANGERIE auction at Grisebach brings the jewellery to the Berlin of 2017 with photos by Larissa Hofmann, among others.
He captivated everyone with his art. After visiting Lettré's workshop in 1919, Rilke confessed: "In front of these quiet objects and the work of the craftsman, he felt that this was the right way to go". The poet then captured the goldsmith's art in verse and glowingly recommended the avant-garde shop in Berlin. For it was here, on Unter den Linden, that the old empire and the new republic met to buy silverware and jewellery.
Lettré - always in a tight-fitting dinner jacket and a guest at every party in the dancing Berlin of the Roaring Twenties - would sometimes lie eccentrically on the floor and not even look at his customers. His art was as distinguished as he presented himself: elite master craftsmanship, clear, linear, timeless, poetic, enigmatic, brittle. Everything here was unique, everything was expensive, everything breathed the great world of the twenties, to whose shimmering dynamism and free spirit Lettré paid homage.
His circle of friends included the artists of the Berlin Secession, the painters Max Slevogt, Max Liebermann and Hans Purrmann, the architects John Campbell and Eduard Pfeiffer, and the photographers Martha Huth and Waldemar Titzenthaler captured his house in photographs. There is a wealth of publications about Germany's star goldsmith and his creations, which Paul Westheim described in 1912: "These jewellery and silver items come from a workshop ruled by a gentleman. Lettré has the chic and elegance of the great world: his jewellery is as noble as a lady of good society and as seductive as she is."
Actress Pamela Wedekind, who loved her "Emilio" and brought him together with Klaus and Erika Mann and Berlin's poetry and theatre world, also appreciated the attitude to life in gold, silver and precious stones. Gerhart Hauptmann, the most famous German playwright at the time, had gold artworks made by him. Lettré was regarded by many as the "goldsmith of Europe": in 1925, the Royal Academy of Arts in London honoured him with a solo exhibition, and in 1937 he won the Grand Prix at the World Exhibition in Paris. Then darkness followed in Germany and Emil Lettré lost everything: business, dinner jacket, customers, friends, artistic poetry.
The artist's estate, which was previously thought to be lost, has now resurfaced and will be auctioned off in 60 lots of gold and platinum jewellery as well as silverware and silversmith's work at Grisebach Berlin. The extensive written legacy provided a basis for the scholarly analysis of the pieces and will be handed over to the archive of the Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus in Hanau after the auction.
Lettré's timeless creations are a silver glittering call from a golden age when the "Artisan", as Rilke called him, enchanted the poets. Now he enchants our present.