Frank Rebajes is the artist whose work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum, whom Malaga had left in a draw.

Friday, 7th November 2025 at 14:51

Every weekend, he stopped by Tiffany’s. The legendary nightclub of Torremolinos, not the Fifth Avenue in New York where Audrey Hepburn filmed the classic Audrey Hepburn film. First, he visited the Calle San Miguel gallery of Frank Rebajes to admire the other jewels.

In the shop window were pieces of innovative and modern work created by the goldsmith. Two white kittens walked around them in a very choreographed manner, so as not to step on anything. Their creator also brought copper necklaces, pendants, and brooches to Torremolinos. He had worked on Fifth Avenue with clients like Jackson Pollock and Peggy Guggenheim.

Frank invited a young man who he’d seen loitering outside his shop on several occasions in to his shop one afternoon. The young man didn’t even have a dollar to his name, and he didn’t purchase anything. But the American jeweller and artist of Dominican and Spanish descent opened his doors to the visitor. The refuge that he sought to escape from success. Few people were able penetrate it.

Diego Santos, an artist and collector, has returned the favor. His current exhibition at Mucac La Coracha is From the Egg to Origin. A Journey in Reverse (Del Óvulo al origen. Un viaje al inversa), which revitalizes the works of an artist whose most exclusive pieces were donated to Malaga and then left in a drawer for 35 years.

Diego Santos said, “The townhall has a very valuable collection of Frank’s work. It contains more than 200 pieces. Any museum would be willing to pay anything for it, because Frank is up there with the best creators in the world.” Sin

Since 1988, Rebajes, born 1907 in Puerto Plata, and died in Boston in 1990, donated his collection to Malaga. The collections were stored in the museum of Picasso’s birthplace, but now they are being displayed in their full glory – a display of over 60 sculptures.

The sculptures from the Óvulo series are the main highlight of the collection, which in this exhibition is also joined by the curator’s own personal collection of jewels belonging to Rebajes’ American period. Hence the title ‘Del Óvulo al origen’ (From the Egg to the Origin), is based on his final works, telling the story of how he made his way back to Malaga from New York’s Fifth Avenue as a successful jeweller and goldsmith.

Santos pointed to a brooch in antelope shape, explaining that he had the most difficulty finding it. He has not revealed how much he spent on this jewel, which bears the stamp of Rebajes. This artist had more than 100 goldsmiths in his New York workshop and was the pioneer of the use of copper.

The turning point of his career was reached, and he fled from New York to Torremolinos, seeking refuge. “He left New York because he was tired of the success. He started out in poverty, sleeping on cardboard. But he managed to open a very small jewellers that took him to Fifth Avenue. His clientele was spectacular because it was the most innovative shop in the city.

He also said that Rebajes “came here to Torremolinos to find happiness and another lifestyle, opened his shop, and turned his third floor workshop into a sacred space, which very few people were able to access”.

His most exclusive work, in Malaga

It was in that studio, which smelled of “saltpetre and rusted metal”, that for several decades he produced his most complex and decisive work, the sculptures of the ‘Óvulo’ series.

“In New York the simple becomes essential and his jewels have their own voice, inspired by cubism, surrealism or Dadaism, while the Torremolinos period inspired the most intimate and philosophical Rebajes, who emerges with his most enigmatic work inspired by the Möbius strip, without beginning or end, from white to black or yin and yang as references,” explained the curator. Each sculpture becomes “a labyrinth”, an “tactile poetry, a meditation on metal”. The artist’s world is explored in this journey, which ends with the recreation of an old Torremolinos room and nine watercolour paintings by Diego Santos. These were inspired by his collection.

Santos emphasized the fact that Frank Rebajes’ groundbreaking work was part of the Metropolitan Museum (MET), and Brooklyn Museum, in New York. To the Mayor of Málaga, Francisco de la Torre, and the director of the agency that manages the Pablo Ruiz Picasso Birthplace, Luis Lafuente, he stressed that since the city council has custody over his most exclusive work, “it should be exhibited” permanently.

Santos recalled that Frank Rebajes was the 153rd member of the Ateneo de Málaga cultural association and that, two years before his tragic death, he donated his work to Torremolinos which at the time was still part of the municipality of Malaga. Santos, without intending to, ended up telling the sad goodbye of the jeweller, goldsmith, and sculptor.

“I’m not going to tell the ending because his wife, Pauline Schwartz, died in 1989. She had suffered from Alzheimer’s for five years. Frank never recovered from the tragedy and committed suicide after a talk at MIT, Boston, in 1990.

“His friends Diego Moya, and Enrique Brinkmann said to me that he had taken the poison from Malaga in a ring” and as a consequence the cyanide used to oxidise the sculptures he created was what he also chose to use to end his own life. The curator said, “Death was just another part to life. It was his way out. But here his work is full of light and alive,” about the necessary resurrection of an artist whose work remains radically contemporary 35 years after he died.