Naum Slutzky

Naum Slutzky was born on 28 February 1894 in Kiev, in the Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine). His family emigrated to Vienna in 1905. There he trained first as a jeweller under Anton Diamant and, from 1908 to 1912, completed a formal goldsmithing apprenticeship. He then worked as a goldsmith at the Wiener Werkstatte from 1912 to 1913.

From 1914 to 1919, Slutzky studied engineering at the Technische Universitat Wien, while also pursuing formal art training, including lessons at Johannes Itten's private art school in Vienna from 1917 to 1919. When Itten and a group of students moved to the newly founded Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, Slutzky went with them and was appointed assistant master craftsman in the metal workshop. He received his master craftsman's certificate there in 1922, becoming, by several accounts, a master goldsmith who went on to lead metalwork instruction.

By the late 1920s Slutzky's work was showing in Hamburg, where he took part in Hamburger Sezession exhibitions in 1928 and 1931 and in the Hamburger Neue Sezession show at the Hamburg Kunsthalle in 1930, alongside a Deutscher Werkbund exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris the same year. He is documented in England by 1961, when his work appeared in a group exhibition at Goldsmiths' Hall in London and in a survey of his Hamburg-period jewelry at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. Naum Slutzky died on 4 November 1965 in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England.

Design historians and museum curators treat Slutzky as a central figure of the Bauhaus metal workshop, valued for combining engineering training with hand craftsmanship in objects that moved fluidly between jewelry, tableware, and industrial metal design. His standing has been reinforced through museum survey exhibitions, including Schmuck von Naum Slutzky at the Kunsthalle Hamburg in 1983 and a dedicated retrospective, Naum Slutzky, Ein Bauhauskunstler, at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, in 1995. The dossier assembled for this profile did not turn up an exact, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet, so none is reproduced here.

Slutzky's auction market is small and concentrated in the specialist design and decorative-arts field rather than in mainstream fine-art sales. His documented auction high is a coffee and tea service that sold for a hammer price of EUR 225,000 at Grisebach in Berlin on 31 May 2019, part of the house's Bauhaus centenary sales; the piece was acquired by the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. No higher publicly documented result has surfaced through 2026. Away from that peak, results for his jewelry and smaller metalwork have been far more modest, for example hammer prices of EUR 35,000 for a 1923 pendant and EUR 15,000 for a circa-1920 bowl, both at Quittenbaum, and a reported USD 365 for a group of copper etching plates. Exact sale dates for these smaller lots could not be confirmed. The pattern points to a thin, low-volume market where a single strong holloware or tableware result can sit far above the typical range for smaller jewelry pieces.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Slutzky, and no gallery or estate is confirmed to currently represent his work; pieces move through specialist design-auction houses such as Grisebach, Sotheby's, Quittenbaum, and Roseberys rather than through a representing dealer. Provenance is a central concern given the small body of surviving material: some of the Victoria and Albert Museum's holdings, for instance, trace to works acquired from Gesche Ochs in 1967, two years after the artist's death. Because his market spans both museum-grade Bauhaus holloware and comparatively low-value jewelry lots, collectors should weigh category and provenance carefully rather than extrapolate from the 2019 auction high across the full range of his output.