![]() ![]() ![]() Later in the same year, the same drawing was reproduced in the catalog for Alexander Girard’s groundbreaking An Exhibition for Modern Living, held at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A comic rebuttal to the design’s lack of ornamentation or sentimentality, Steinberg seems to at once be skewering both those who would find the Eames chair insufficient in its pure state as well as the modernists’ break from tradition. Within the first few pages an Eames molded plywood chair makes its appearance, with an antimacassar covering the chair’s back. These impulses were on full display in his 1949 publication, The Art of Living, where the emphasis turns to the built environment and the trappings of modern existence in post-war America. The article also includes the first incidental reference to the Eameses within Steinberg’s orbit: the author notes that “the man who so lovingly retraces the scrolls and fringes and mad ornaments of our artistic heritage, does not relish them in his own house,” and instead “put through an order for half a dozen Eames chairs.” As a “chronicler of the absurd,” Steinberg was ever-observant of America’s changing cultural landscape and seemed to delight in the widening gulf between popular tastes and the vanguard of modernist art and design. The February 1947 issue of Interiors magazine, offers “Furniture News from France by Steinberg, humoriste Américain” in the form of a series of drawings of ornate, highly decorated chairs drawn over hotel letterhead and casino ledgers. His services were wildly in demand, and seemingly no subject matter was beyond reproach. Gombrich would define as the “philosophy of representation.”īy the latter half of the decade, thanks largely to his New Yorker placements, Steinberg was widely known and had become a fixture of New York’s intellectual and artistic circles. As his oeuvre expanded beyond the world of commercial commissions, he evolved from a more cartoonish approach to make way for what art historian Ernst H. In 1946, the same year the Eameses debuted their plywood furniture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Steinberg took part in the MoMA exhibition Fourteen Americans, alongside Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and Isamu Noguchi among others. During the war years Steinberg directed his talents at creating anti-fascist propaganda for the Office of Strategic Services’ division of Morale Operations, while sending dispatches back to The New Yorker from China, India, North Africa, and Italy. While still overseas at the outset of the decade, a contact from his days studying architecture in Milan helped to get him magazine jobs from a variety of New York–based publications, and after his arrival stateside, these connections led to a commission in the US Naval Reserve-and eventually citizenship. Steinberg, a Romanian émigré and artist, rose to fame in the 1940s through his ability to sharply convey pointed, resonant commentary with an economical visual vocabulary. ![]() A momentous connection in the summer of 1950 with the artist Saul Steinberg would result in an extraordinary collaboration-and an ongoing conversation at the spearhead of modernist thought. As the Eameses’ stars shone ever brighter, they became prominent fixtures in the landscape of Los Angeles’s creative scene, and leading figures would seek them out as a part of their West Coast itinerary. For the Eameses, the city was a hothouse of opportunity, the backdrop and sometime catalyst for their work.īecause of Los Angeles’s role as a hub for filmmaking, industry, art, and architecture, the Eameses were continually put in contact with a stream of notables in a variety of fields-connections that fueled their creativity and opened new avenues for exploration. The home-an open framework unconstrained by precedents and preconceptions-represented the theme of possibility that Los Angeles offered. The year prior, the couple had completed and moved into their now iconic Pacific Palisades residence, Case Study House No. Their office was engaged in a torrent of projects, ranging from furniture design and graphics to architectural commissions and exhibitions-and the duo was exploring ideas for children’s toys and personal film projects. By 1950, Charles and Ray Eames had cemented their status among the leading modernist designers of their time and were riding a wave of success. ![]()
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