Wife of former Cartier owner’s jewelry heads to auction

Brecken Branstrator

The wife of one of the former owners of Cartier Paris is auctioning off some of her jewelry, and she has tapped Bonhams New York to do it.

On Sept. 19, fine jewelry from the personal collection of Gigi Guggenheim Danziger will go under the hammer as part of the auction house’s Fine Jewelry sale, marking the first time the jewelry has appeared at auction.

The collection features 32 pieces of fine jewelry, including a number of signed Cartier pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, when the Danziger family owned Cartier Paris. The earliest lot dates back to 1957.

Edward and Gigi Guggenheim Danziger in Monte Carlo, circa mid- to late-1960s

Gloria (Gigi) Guggenheim Danziger was born in Cambridge, Ohio, to businessman Frederick Daniel Guggenheim (distant relation to the mining magnates) and Ethel May Lewison.

She attended Ohio State University from 1941 to 1944, majoring in education, and then moved to Atlanta and finally New York.

She met native New Yorker Edward J. Danziger at a society wedding in 1951. The two married later that year in Mexico and then went on to have two sons, Danny and James.

Edward and his brother, Harry Lee Danziger, were prolific film producers, creating more than 140 feature films in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as hundreds of hours of television. Then in 1958, the Danzigers acquired London’s Mayfair hotel, Grosvenor hotel and the Metropole hotel in Monte Carlo.

Gigi-and-Edward-J.-Danziger

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Source National Jeweler