Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 48, 1-2, Spring 2009

Archives of Americ an Art Journ al

DESIGN

From the director

Endpapers inspired by Evelyn Wyld’s hand-knotted rug, 1930.

Since our founding in 1954, the Archives of American Art has taken a catholic approach to developing our collections. Reaching well beyond the more familiar disciplines of painting, sculpture, and graphic arts, we have also built important collections in the fields of architecture, craft, design, and more recently, performance art, photography, and film and video.

The current volume of the Archives of American Art Journal focuses on our holdings in the field of architecture and design.

The essays offer a sampling of the depth of these collections, and I am grateful to the authors for their insightful contributions.

Alexandra Griffith Winton offers an overview of the career of the modernist textile designer Dorothy Liebes. Although Liebes was a dominant figure in mid-twentieth-century design, she has fallen into relative obscurity. Winton’s essay and her forthcoming monograph on Liebes should help reveal anew her pioneering contributions to the field of textile design.

The writings of influential architectural historian Esther McCoy have experienced a wonderful renaissance, due in large part to a revived interest in West Coast mid-century architecture.

As historian Susan Morgan points out in her overview of McCoy’s career, McCoy combined talent as a writer with originality, energy, discipline, and an intellectual curiosity that was extraordinary.

In his essay on the prolific British-American designer T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, James Buresh charts Gibbings’ evolving attitudes toward modern design through a close reading of his work, which included both custom and mass-produced furniture and objects, interior design projects, several books, and writings.

Katherine Smith’s essay provides a detailed history of the relationship between Claes Oldenburg’s monumental sculpture Three-Way Plug and Robert Venturi’s design for the Allen Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Jasmine Rault explores the papers of the interior designer Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, who along with her lover and business partner Evelyn Wyld was at the center of the avant-garde design world in the first decades of the twentieth century.

And finally, in a continuation of our well-received artist’s projects, graphic designer and historian Jessica Helfand uses visual resources in our collection to re-create the life of the fictive Millicent Nesbit, an ambitious young designer from the provinces who eventually finds herself moving in the heady New York design world.

ContributOrs

Alexandra Griffith Winton is a design historian living in Brooklyn, New York. Her research interests include the history and theory of the modern interior and the role of textiles in modernist design. She is currently at work on a monograph on Dorothy Liebes, to be published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Susan Morgan is a Los Angeles–based writer and a contributing editor at Metropolitan Home. With support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, she is researching the life and work of Esther McCoy for a book and exhibition.

James Buresh is a New York City–based writer with an M.A. from the Bard Graduate Center for Study in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture. His forthcoming monograph on T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings will be published by the Acanthus Press.

Katherine Smith teaches modern and contemporary art at Agnes Scott College. Her research focuses on intersections between art and architecture, most often in contemporary American culture. She is working on a book about Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s sculpture in relation to concurrent developments in architectural theory and practice.

Cover: Alvin Lustig’s design for a pamphlet, 1948.

Jasmine Rault is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Her research is on early twentiethcentury visual culture, interior design, architecture, sexuality, and gender. She is the author of Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity (2010), and her recent essays will be published in Fashion and Interior Design: Embodied Practices (2009) and Fashion, Gender, Modernity (2010).

Jessica Helfand is partner at Winterhouse, a design studio in northwest Connecticut. She is senior art critic at Yale School of Art’s graduate program in graphic design, and a member of the USPS Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, where she chairs the design committee. The New York Times named her most recent book, Scrapbooks: An American History, best coffee-table book of 2008.

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I n T h i s ISSUE

Color and Personality: Dorothy Liebes and American Design Alexandra Griffith Winton

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Being There: Esther McCoy, the Accidental Architectural Historian Susan Morgan

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T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings: Timeless Mid-Century Modern Design James Buresh

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A Symbolic Situation: Claes Oldenburg and Robert Venturi at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College Katherine Smith

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Losing Feelings: Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux and Her Affective Archive of Sapphic Modernity Jasmine Rault

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Finding Miss Nesbit: An Imagined Biography Jessica Helfand

66

Coast to Coast: Land Work between the N. E. Thing Company and Lucy Lippard James Nisbet

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Artists in the Landscape A Project by Pamela Golden

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Color and Personality Dorothy Liebes and American Design A l e x a n d r a G r i ff i t h W i n t o n

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This paper considers the architectural textiles of American weaver and designer Dorothy Wright Liebes (1899–1972) and her contribution to the development of American modernist design. As a designer, Liebes created both hand- and machine-made fabrics for almost every kind of mid-century product, from clothes to cars to industrial textiles used in televisions and speakers. Her early hand-woven textiles, created for architectural interiors, made her a household name, and her later efforts to translate her designs for mass production placed her work in the homes of countless Americans for whom the cost of her custom work was prohibitive. Despite her stature during her career as a leading figure in modern American design, over the four decades since her death, her work has fallen into relative obscurity.

In this article, I consider the early years of Liebes’ studio in San Francisco, her focus on architectural textiles, and her move—as she gained prominence—to promote good design at all price points. Her highly characteristic use of color, materials, and textures was so influential that by the end of the Second World War it was known throughout the country as the Liebes Look. The goal of my research is to begin to recontextualize and reestablish all facets of the work of this important American designer in the history of American modernist design.

Native Californian Dorothy Wright Liebes began weaving on a regular and extensive—though largely amateur—basis in San Francisco in 1930, shortly after her marriage to Leon Liebes, whose family owned H. Liebes, a luxury department store in downtown San Francisco. In spite of opposition from her husband, Liebes opened a professional studio in 1937, having made a tacit agreement that she would not sell goods that could be viewed as competitive with those featured at H. Liebes. The couple separated a year later, primarily over Liebes’ refusal to give up her atelier, which showed great promise from its inception.

At first the designer’s weavers worked in a space on Powell Street in downtown San Francisco, and as the studio flourished, Liebes moved it to a disused ballroom in a building on Sutter Street, just off Union Square. By 1938 there were seventeen women and men working for Liebes, a number that fluctuated over the years, with a few of the weavers remaining on staff for nearly the entirety of the business’s existence.

Interviews with people who worked in the studio, particularly in the very early years, depict a warm, occasionally frenetic atmosphere, dominated by the highly

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educated and industrious women who ran the business.1 This intimacy and happy informality is confirmed by an image found in the Liebes archive of an infant girl, Dorothy Liebes Fong, who was named after Liebes by longtime studio worker Louisa Fong. The child often came with her mother to work, and the photograph shows her as a regular member of the office, patiently perching in a basket used by the weavers.

Liebes, who was trained as an art teacher, consciously chose to make textiles the outlet of her creative expression. She focused on architectural textiles early on, producing works that included wall hangings and panels, room dividers and screens, upholstery, window treatments, and other interior accessories. Liebes was passionate about architecture, which, along with the fine arts and world arts and crafts traditions, comprised her greatest sources of inspiration.2 Her decision to create one-off products for interior design reflected both the peculiarities of her personal circumstances—her agreement with Leon restricted the types of textile products she could market—and an unwavering confidence in her own ability as a business person and keen intuition as a designer. In her memoirs, the designer described the importance of the hand-woven architectural work to her career.

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Dorothy Liebes (seated, third from left) and her staff in the garden at the Sutter Street studio, 1948. Photograph

by Walt Frank.

Opposite: A gouache rendering of a textile design.

[My] first clients were architects. Working with them, two points quickly became apparent. First, I had chosen an uncrowded field.

Relatively few persons were producing hand woven fabrics for commercial or other uses in the United States at that time. I knew of no competition. Second, the one-of-its-kind article that I could produce had a special value to architects and interior decorators.

A machine-made fabric could be, and was, widely duplicated if it suddenly became fashionable. But when an architect ordered a fabric from me, to be used for a special purpose, he could be sure nothing similar to it would appear elsewhere. It was distinctive, a kind of silent trade-mark for us both.3

Among the first architects to seek out Liebes for bespoke textiles was Timothy Pflueger, who commissioned her to create a series of drapes for the Pacific Stock Exchange Building, completed in 1930.

Such one-off interior commissions were pivotal in helping her develop a highly personal approach to designing that she paired with highly structured and organized project management. First, Liebes made detailed briefs on all the materials specified by the architect and studied how and where they were to be used in a room. She noted any important information about the client, for example whether or not they had art collections. She then put her notes together, studied them, and began to choose the colors and textures of the fabrics she went on to make for specific interiors. She explained, “I learned that it was essential to me to relate to something, materials and on occasion to a person, before I could began to visualize a design and make the first cartoon.” 4 After a time, she expanded this method to include highly detailed and confidential personality profiles of a client and his or her spouse in the belief that every individual’s persona or aura must be acknowledged in the process of designing their interiors: When [architects] designed a private residence, I asked them to include, as well, written personality sketches of the owner and especially of his wife. . . . They were not always flattering, but to me they were an essential part of the process of creating exactly the right fabric in the right colors and design for the particular person who would be living with them. Color and personality are closely related, as I see it. I find myself subconsciously thinking of one person as “blue,” another “green,” etc. In fact, all shades of the spectrum are represented in the human aura.5

Dorothy Liebes working at a loom at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, 1947.

Opposite: Liebes’ husband Relman “Pat” Morin and Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in 1947.

Liebes destroyed these profiles after each job was completed. In part due to her attention to architectural context, by the late thirties Liebes quickly came to the attention of the brightest young architects working in the Bay Area, and she often worked on both commercial and private projects with Pflueger, William Wurster, and Gardner Dailey in San Francisco. She also began to gain valuable national exposure from her work with architects in the Midwest and East Coast. Her friendship with the highly influential editor of Architectural Forum,

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Howard Meyer—he coined the expression “busy as a Liebes loom” in response to the constant hum of activity that followed her day and night—also helped.

It was through Pflueger that Liebes met the celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Tim Pflueger telephoned one day and said he was bringing Mr. Wright to the studio. I went into complete panic. I had rather associated him with the Bauhaus school, the “less-is-more” group of architects who scorned the fur-belows and gingerbread of the Victorians. I felt sure that a “hair shirt,” as I would have described Mr. Wright, erroneously, would absolutely hate the vivid colors and extensive use of metal in my fabrics.

I swept up my bag and prepared to flee, “Tim is bringing Frank Lloyd Wright here,” I said. “I can’t bear to see the disaster.

Call me when he has gone.” In the hotel, I waited for the phone to ring, picturing one of the world’s most celebrated architects wrinkling his nose in disdain at everything he saw. A half hour passed, an hour. Then the telephone rang. In whispers, Ruth said, “You’d better come down here at once. He’s ordering everything in the place.” Unbelievable!

Far from rejecting my designs, he liked the metal threads and the desert-Western look of the weaving. Gesturing toward the tall stack he had chosen, he said, “Ship it all to Taliesin.” When he had gone, I said, “I can’t really believe he means it. Let’s wait and see.”

Two weeks later a curt telegram came, saying, “Where are fabrics?

Ship without further delay. Advise. FLW” 6

These were the first of Wright’s many orders from Liebes, and she counted him as a friend and client until Wright’s death in 1959.

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Another of Liebes’ architect collaborators and friends was Samuel Marx. Marx’s work was often visually very simple, even though he employed extremely expensive materials and custom designed nearly every element of his commissions. Marx was married to the Chicago department store heiress Florene Schoenborn, and he designed an apartment around their remarkable art collection, which included paintings by Georges Braque and Henri Matisse.

Around 1939, taking her inspiration from the paintings themselves, Liebes created all the textiles for the Marx apartment. The living room featured Liebes’ hand-woven full-length drapes and an unusual screen woven to conceal the fireplace when not in use. In the following decade, when American designers were gaining in stature, this type of highly refined custom commission helped Liebes build an increasingly prominent national profile.

Embargos of most European material during World War II prevented German and French designs, probably the most influential sources of modern textiles, from entering the United States. For the first time, American designers gained widespread prominence at home, and with figures like Ray and Charles Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson leading the way, American design came into its own.

Liebes was a tireless champion of American work, and these wartime conditions helped her to extend her influence as a tastemaker.

In these years Liebes’ work was featured regularly in all the architecture and home design magazines, and her approachable yet authoritative personality also attracted a great deal of media coverage. She was the subject of a long, illustrated article in Life called “Top Weaver,” and Universal Pictures included her in their film short series called Unusual Occupations. Press attention popularized the glamorous aesthetic that became known as the Liebes Look, a style characterized by a vibrant color palette with a liberal use of metallics and a rich variety of textures. By the end of the war, Liebes had attained national prominence outside the world of architecture and design and, as she moved into the mass-market design that eventually dominated her work, a powerful platform to promote design for industry.

Liebes’ custom commissions for wealthy clients, published in House and Garden, House Beautiful, and other home magazines, made her famous, but it was her work on mass-produced products that cemented her position as a national style maker. The combination of her personal charisma and her direct and friendly manner made Liebes an especially appealing spokesperson, and she traveled often, speaking about the importance of modern design for the home and how to include it in home furnishing schemes—a question about which many Americans felt they needed guidance.

Throughout her career Liebes had been committed to the principles of the Good Design movement, namely that good design should be available at any price point. Before the war she had undertaken some work with the Goodall Company in Sanford, Maine. She went on to create many power-loomed versions of her hand-loomed fabrics for the company, a number of which were chosen for the

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Opposite: Dorothy Liebes designed the textiles for Samuel and Florene Marx’s Chicago apartment, 1939. Photograph

by Hedrich-Blessing Studio.

Liebes at the loom with a Goodall Sanford Mills executive, ca. 1946–1949.

Museum of Modern Art’s “Good Design” exhibitions from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s.7 It wasn’t until after the war ended, however, that economic and cultural conditions allowed these products to reach their full commercial potential, with consumers eager to sample the Liebes Look for a fraction of the price of her hand-woven textiles. As her mass-market work increased—in 1947 she became the official spokesperson and stylist for Dobeckmun’s new and wildly popular laminated metallic yarn called Lurex—Liebes came to the conclusion that industrial design was a more relevant use of her talents. By 1958 she closed her studio to the kind of hand-woven commissions

Liebes approached her own creative process with a highly personal combination of intuition, improvisation, and discipline, always carefully considering her work in the context of modern design.

A sample for a window blind used slats of wood as well as metallic ribbons and spun fibers.

Opposite: Dorothy Liebes’ window blinds often required extremely wide warps. These weavers are at work at Liebes’ New York City studio, ca. 1950.

that had dominated the early part of her career.8 For the remainder of her working life, until her death in 1972, she continued to design and consult for textile and design companies with an emphasis on interior textiles, including lines for Bigelow carpets, Dow, and Sears.

Across her career, Liebes approached her own creative process with a highly personal combination of intuition, improvisation, and discipline, always carefully considering her work in the context of modern design. Liebes’ deep interest in contemporary architecture and in creating textiles that were appropriate for modern interiors quickly became a central artistic problem for her. As an example, Liebes sought to redefine window treatments for the increasingly broad spans of glass used in modern architecture, which had, she explained in an article she wrote for the New York Times, “acquired a new place and purpose in the whole scheme of living.” 9 Her blinds were woven from a diverse range of materials including wood, bamboo, or even Lucite dowels, and in the framework of her devel-

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oping aesthetic they were intended to create both a sense of privacy and visual interest. As Liebes outlined in the article: In the contemporary home, tremendous stress is placed on “fenestration.” . . . There are numerous recent developments in blinds, both horizontal and vertical, exemplified in the “kakemono” and the roller-desk types. These are often highly decorative and they provide a welcome relief from too much curtaining. Blinds are a form of curtain which, with imagination and ingenuity, can be developed to a real structural adjunct of any window.10

Liebes’ answer to conventional window treatments was at once modern, personal, and highly distinctive. Her blinds often combined the characteristic Liebes Look—a bold palette and use of metallics— with organic materials such as wood or bamboo as a structural weft; occasionally glass or metal rods were used in place of the wood weft.

The resulting blinds provided a glamorous yet abstract point of transition between inside and outside. By the late forties and early fifties her blinds proved so popular that Liebes was approached by manufacturers to incorporate their industrial materials into her designs.

Textile samples deposited in the Archives of American Art give many examples of Liebes’ innovations with new products, including a prototype for a blind in which bamboo is replaced by aluminum rods, commissioned by Reynolds Aluminum.

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Liebes’ use of unconventional materials for her textiles, which continued throughout her career, was a practice driven initially by frugality. As she explained, early on in her weaving career this experimentation was the result of a tight budget, but it soon became an established part of her repertoire: For materials, I used everything I could lay between a warp, scraps of wool, yarn bought at the five-and dime store, even Christmas ribbons. Out of necessity, I put material on the looms not usually used in weaving. It was an invaluable lesson, although I didn’t recognize it at the time. Years later, when I was weaving professionally, it seemed perfectly natural to try anything that came to hand. Architects and decorators were intrigued when they found me using bamboo, half-rounds (of wood), crystal rods, rawhide, cellophane, metallic yarns, grasses, patent leather and just about anything that looked as though it might be promising.11

Such formal experimentation also reflected a wide visual knowledge and love of cultural fusion. Liebes enthusiastically borrowed from San Francisco’s strong Colonial Spanish, Mexican, and Asian traditions, abstracting what she took into her own unique and modern expression. Thus, the bright colors of Mexican folk arts and the intense lacquer reds and blacks she saw in her frequent tours of Chinatown, adapted and reinvented, found their way into Liebes’ work.

This way of working was typical of Liebes, and throughout her career, she relied on the larger idea that the very concept of “modern” when applied to textile design was a liberating one that brought freedom from both the formal and material restrictions of the past: What makes a fabric modern? Essentially that it is created in terms of today, with materials of today, within a whole set of conditioning factors. Chief of these are function, architecture, and related textures. . . . Emerging with the certain knowledge of the reason for the textile, the artist-designer is less shackled by tradition than ever and more free to translate his inner experiences and inspiration into concrete form.12

In an obituary, the magazine Interiors confirmed Liebes’ influence on modern design, calling her the “the greatest modern weaver, and the mother of the twentieth-century palette.”13 Today, it is equally clear that her textiles—both hand and machine made—played a key role in the success of American Modernist architecture. By using Liebes’ richly colored and highly textured drapes, screens, blinds, and upholstery, architects solved the problem of creating livable yet modern interiors in often severe spaces devoid of all ornament.

This new modernist spatial idiom required a completely reinvented textile paradigm. Not only did Liebes succeed in creating a new vocabulary for textiles adapted to modern American design, she also played an important role in defining the look of American industrial modernism for nearly fifty years.

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Liebes’ use of unconventional materials for her textiles, which continued throughout her career, was a practice driven initially by frugality.

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This paper includes research on Dorothy Liebes presented at the 97th Annual College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles, February 2009, for the session “California Design: Living in a Modern Way.” I would like to thank the organizers of this session, Wendy Kaplan and Bobbye Tigerman, for their helpful comments on my research, as well as the other participants in the session.

1 Interview with Jocelyn Gibson Allen conducted by Alexandra Griffith Winton, 27 June 2005. Studio weavers who worked with Liebes included Louisa Fong, Vanita Fong, Ralph Higbee, Tammis Keefe, Ruth McKinley, Marian Phal, and Kamma Zethraus.

2 S. Weltge, “A Legacy of Color and Texture: Dorothy Liebes, 1899–1972,” Interweave, Summer 1979, 25.

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3 Dorothy Liebes, unpublished memoir, n.d., box 10, page 185, Dorothy Liebes papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter cited as Liebes papers).

4

Ibid., 186.

9 Dorothy Liebes, “Enhancing the View: Windows Can Be Something to Look at as well as Look Through,” New York Times, 3 October 1948.

10 Ibid.

11 Liebes, memoir, box 10, page 87, Liebes papers.

5 Ibid.

6

Ibid., 197–199.

7 For example, see Good Design: An Exhibition of Home Furnishings Selected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for the Merchandise Mart, Chicago (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951). Some of these textiles are now in the museum’s permanent collection.

8 In these years Liebes had so much East Coast business that she moved to New York. Liebes made the move in 1949 and managed her California studio through voluminous written correspondence and frequent cross-country trips.

12 Dorothy Liebes, “Modern Textiles,” in Official Catalog (San Francisco: Department of Fine Arts, Division of Decorative Arts, Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939), 92–93.

13 “Dorothy Wright Liebes: Mother of Modern Weaving and of Twentieth-century Palette Dead at Seventy-four,” Interiors, November 1972, 143.

S u s a n M o r ga n

Esther McCoy, the Accidental Architectural Historian “If you lived in New York, it was proper to make fun of Los Angeles,” remarked Esther McCoy (1904–1989) fifty years after she’d left Greenwich Village to pursue life on the wrong coast.1 McCoy was a keen observer, and her sharply attentive writing was elegantly spare, unpretentious, and confident. Her short stories were featured in literary quarterlies and the best of “the slicks,” including Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. A contributor to progressive political journals, she also collaborated on several pseudonymously published detective novels and unproduced screenplays. In both her fictionwriting and reporting, McCoy was remarkably adept at portraying the contemporary moment and articulating palpable concerns about how people lived. Her story “The Cape,” included in The Best Short Stories of 1950,2 follows an afternoon in the life of a sophisticated, urban divorcee: while undergoing radiation treatment for breast cancer, the woman endures thoughtless remarks from a misogynist doctor and allows her memory to wander over her own richly complex life. For Epic News, the weekly paper produced by Upton Sinclair’s 1934 EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign, McCoy wrote about Los Angeles slum clearances and the city’s need for low-cost housing.3 In 1960 McCoy published Five California Architects, her groundbreaking book that clearly identified the significance of American modernist design and its indisputably West Coast origins.4 Through McCoy’s original and well-considered study on the varied work of Irving Gill, Bernard Maybeck, and R. M. Schindler, the richness

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Esther McCoy with Albert Robert, 1926.

“

My particular field is history, but history of a past so recent that it flows into the present.

Opposite: Esther McCoy’s passport.

Esther McCoy in Greece, ca. 1958–1959.

Photograph by Tassos Diamantis.

”

of American modern architecture was clearly recognized. In California, unbound by tradition and inspired by the region, modern architecture developed in its own specific way: houses integrated open plan interiors with easy access to the out of doors; a lexicon of non-European designs—Japanese houses, craftsman bungalows whose style originated in India, and American adobes—was evident; and there was a forward-looking attitude about building materials and engineering techniques that was distinctly twentieth century.

“It is not true that there was no California architecture before Esther McCoy,” commented critic Paul Goldberger in 1990. “But there was no one writing about it, and that made all the difference.”5 For over forty years, McCoy’s writing focused on the telltale aspects of twentieth-century living and the realties of the built environment: her first magazine article about R. M. Schindler appeared in the autumn of 1945, a month after the bombing of Hiroshima and the surrender of Japan; her last essay was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, for its remarkable 1989 exhibition “Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses.” “In Los Angeles, there was an extraordinary amount of provocative architecture within easy reach,” she recalled simply, providing a generous space for observation, historical context, and the reader’s imagination.6 “Blueprints for Modern Living” proved to be a landmark show, a thrillingly ambitious installation, an unequivocal appreciation of mid-century modernism by a cultural institution. Organized by curator Elizabeth A. T. Smith, the exhibition chronicled—through the presentation of archival material and re-creations of residential architecture—the pioneering Case Study House program, an experimental design initiative promoted by Arts and Architecture magazine under the editorship of John Entenza.

“What man has learned about himself in the last five years will, we are sure, express itself in the way in which he will want to be housed in the future,” announced Entenza in the magazine in January 1945.7 By directly addressing the atmosphere of burgeoning postwar optimism and the need for efficient, affordable housing, the program enlisted California architects—including Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, and Charles and Ray Eames—to envision and produce single-family model homes that would incorporate innovative aesthetics and recent technological advancements in such practical and often low-cost building materials as molded plywood, aluminum, and concrete block. In 1962, Entenza left Arts and Architecture to become head of the Graham Foundation in Chicago; the magazine’s new editor and publisher, David Travers, continued the program for another four years.

Although McCoy joined the board of Arts and Architecture in 1950 and was a regular contributor to the magazine, she and Entenza had already been long acquainted. The two first met in the 1930s, both newly arrived in Los Angeles. Entenza was a Michigan native, the son of a Spanish attorney and a Scottish mining heiress; he’d attended university in the East and trained to be a diplomat before

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heading out to Hollywood and a job with MGM’s short-lived experimental film division. “We met at a time when Los Angeles was the wrong place to be. San Francisco was all right, but in 1932 L.A., even Santa Monica was déclassé,” wrote McCoy. She also remarked that “never” would she have imagined then that “both of their paths would lead to architecture.”8 “Blueprints for Modern Living” opened on 17 October 1989 at MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary; the exhibition space itself—a former municipal warehouse designed by Albert C. Martin, Sr., in 1947, that was converted into a spectacular 40,000-square-foot gallery by Frank O. Gehry in 1983—reflected California design’s visionary daring. The show’s catalogue opens with McCoy’s essay, a finely balanced mix of memoir and scholarship.

As architectural historians Robert Winter and David Gebhard first stated unequivocally in 1965, “Our present awareness of Southern California architectural heritage has been due almost to a one-woman crusade upon the part of the critic and historian, Esther McCoy.”9

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R. M. Schindler and Theodore Dreiser.

Schindler’s draftsmen: l–r Carl Sullivan, Esther McCoy, Edward Lind, Vick Santochi, Rodney Walker.

McCoy’s ardent commitment to modern architecture was unparalleled, but her identity as a writer always remained foremost. “My particular field is history, but history of a past so recent that it flows into the present,” McCoy stated, “Flow may be an inexact word, for often the transition was tumultuous. But having started with the period from 1900, and having been engaged in writing about architecture for almost a quarter century, I was able to watch the present become the past. It is in terms of the present, the ever-shifting present, that I approach the past.”10 As McCoy’s career evolved, she became an almost accidental architectural historian. “I wrote about people I knew, contemporaries,” she explained wryly. “And because history has speeded up, they became history soon.” 11 At the end of 1989, just a few months after the opening of “Blueprints for Modern Living,” McCoy died at her home in Santa Monica, California.

Born in Horatio, Arkansas, in 1904, Esther McCoy grew up amidst a large book-loving family in Coffeyville, Kansas, and was educated in the Midwest.12 While still a student at the University of Michigan, she had sent a fan’s note to Theodore Dreiser, that fiercely American writer, a rough-hewn product of the “push and shove of the Chicago of the 1890s.”13 Dreiser’s raw, ungainly novels and his erratic political allegiances attracted and infuriated a wide range of American readers. Generally regarded as a great novelist who wrote badly, his work also displayed a reverence for frankness, “unpoetic reality,” and social justice.14 Dreiser liked McCoy’s bright, enthusiastic letter and told her so: “And I think I can tell you what you are going to be eventually—eventually if not now, —or right soon. A writer. Your mental compass seems to point thusly. You have such a flare [sic] for the visible scene & present it with so much simplicity & force.” He was fifty-three, a denizen of Greenwich Village, a proponent of feminist causes as well as a “varietist” promiscuously advocating free love; she was not quite twenty, living in Arkansas, and considering a move East. “How old are you, anyhow?” asked Dreiser. “You have the brain of a person thirty-five or—if you are by any chance still a kid—a most precocious brain.”15 By the time McCoy was twenty-two, she had fearlessly transplanted herself into the avant-garde bohemia of lower Manhattan.

During her first days in the city, she rode around on the bus, observing neighborhoods, and imagining where she might live. “Gramercy Park looked good,” she wrote in a an unpublished memoir. “So I picked the house I liked best, walked up the brownstone steps and rang a bell.” She asked to rent a room and the astonished homeowner agreed.16 McCoy clerked at Brentano’s bookstore and, having definitively eluded Dreiser’s “varietist” tendencies, went to work as his researcher and remained his lifelong friend. She moved to Patchin Place, a nineteenth-century mews at the heart of Greenwich Village, a cultural hothouse for writers, artists, and radical thinkers. Among her writer neighbors was Boyne Grainger (a journalist-poet, she was an ebullient character born Bonita Ginger in Colorado), who introduced her to editors and publishers, helping her to find work as a

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copy editor. McCoy began to write fiction and move freely among various literary circles: she spent five months in Key West and nine months in Paris. Back in Greenwich Village, living on Leroy Street, she was hospitalized with double pneumonia. Her recovery was slow, and Grainger urged her to leave the city, go to Southern California, and recuperate in a warmer climate.17 “I started liking California in March 1932 when the train stopped in San Bernardino in the early morning and I stepped out on the platform,” she recalled. “There was an overpowering perfume in the air. ‘What is it?

What is it?’ I asked one person after another until someone said, ‘The orange groves.’” 18 In Santa Monica she was enchanted by the curve of the coastline and the way that the mountains tipped down into the sea.

At the height of the Great Depression, McCoy embarked on the itinerant life of a freelance writer, acquiring assignments, part-time work, and temporary homes. While living in a rustic cottage on an empty stretch of beach ten miles north of Malibu, she wrote to writer Josephine Herbst: “It is a desolate swell-looking place for a pauper. I got it through some crazy fluke, and may stay here most the winter though I am always ready to move at a moment’s notice.”19 In 1941, she found a turn-of-the-century bungalow, sited on a rise with a view of the sea, in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica; the selling price was $1,500. With money she’d saved from working for Dreiser, she bought the house and lived there for the rest of her life.20 During World War II, McCoy found a job as an engineering draftsman at Douglas Aircraft; her immediate supervisor was Rodney Walker, an architectural designer and building contractor who had previously worked in R. M. Schindler’s office.21 As the war was ending, McCoy hoped to study architecture at the University of Southern California.22 Founded in 1916 as the first architecture school in Southern California, the USC architecture school was established as a college in 1945 and introduced a newly developed curriculum focusing on new materials and construction techniques, progressive social theories about urban planning, the immediate affordable-housing crisis, and developing a distinctly Californian residential style.23 However, as a woman over forty, McCoy’s application was “discouraged.”24 Upon hearing that Schindler’s only draftsman had been called into the armed services, she went to his studio with her drawings and applied for the job; braced for rejection, she was stunned when he spoke to her as a fellow designer and hired her on the spot.25 Schindler’s 1922 studio-house at 835 North Kings Road in West Hollywood remains the inspired prototype for classic California

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23

Esther McCoy, ca. 1945.

“

I started liking California in March 1932 when the train stopped in San Bernardino in the early morning and I stepped out on the platform...

”

Above and opposite: Plan for, and interior of, R. M. Schindler's studiohouse, 1922.

modernism. As the Vienna-born architect told McCoy in 1952, “When I first came to live & work in California, I camped under the redwood, on the beach, the foothills & the desert. I tested its adobe, its granite & its sky. And out of a carefully built up conception of how the human being could grow roots in this soil—unique & delightful—I built my house.”26 With its wide sliding doors, patio living areas, glass walls, and concrete slab floors, the Schindler house—“four studios for four working artists”—presents a lyrical manifesto about how to figure enclosed spaces and acknowledge the natural surroundings.27 From the spring of 1944 through 1947, McCoy worked at Schindler’s office. Her mornings were reserved for writing fiction, but by eleven she was at North Kings Road, drafting architectural plans and welcoming the camaraderie of the studio.28 Schindler initially teased her about the painstaking precision of her drawing technique: he preferred loose sketching with a soft pencil and great flourishes; she drew with a sharpened, hard pencil point. “Don’t etch!” he ordered, cajoling her.29 In 1945, the East Coast-based magazine Direction asked McCoy for a story about Southern California. Direction, founded in 1937 with a stated anti-fascist editorial position, was as an independent cultural magazine dedicated to “the arts and letters of the left.” Published and edited by Marguerite Tjader Harris, a writer and former literary assistant to Theodore Dreiser, the magazine was produced irregularly over a period of eight years. Among Direction’s contributors were John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Le Corbusier,

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25

Top: Shot that shows a bedroom and patio of Craig Ellwood’s Case Study House no. 16, 1952.

Above: Steel frame and perspective drawing for John Entenza’s Case Study House no. 9, 1949.

and Bertolt Brecht; Paul Rand, the graphic artist greatly responsible for the refined look of twentieth-century American print media, designed the magazine’s covers.

McCoy replied to this open invitation by deciding to write about Schindler. In Schindler’s dynamic designs, she noticed how shapes pivoted and new forms were created.

“His houses are wrapped around space,” McCoy noted with admiration. “A Schindler house is in movement; it is in becoming. Form emerges from form. It is like a bird that has just touched earth, its wings still spread, but at once part of the earth.”30 Through her firsthand understanding of Schindler’s work, McCoy realized with wonder that space itself was one of architecture’s essential building materials. After her story was filed, Schindler asked why she hadn’t submitted it to him for approval. “Don’t you want it to be right, he demanded,” she recalled later. “No,” she answered. “I want it to be mine.”31 “Schindler: Space Architect,” her first architectural feature, appeared in the autumn issue of Direction.

During the last week of 1945, Theodore Dreiser died at his home at 1015 North Kings Road, where for five years he’d been living in a neo-colonial Spanish house with a red tile roof just two blocks north of Schindler’s studio. McCoy was a regular visitor and later recalled the loss of her friend with an achingly plain poignancy: “He carried luck pieces in his pocket,” she wrote, “Sometimes we exchanged pennies, silver dollars, or Chinese luck pieces when he went on a journey or I was hopeful about something. After he was dead and his wife handed me his suit to lay in the pasteboard carton for the undertaker, I found two nickels in the vest pocket, which are now in the spool case in my sewing kit. I have dreamed several times that I spent them, but whenever I look they are still there.”32 In the years following Dreiser’s death, a steady wave of Dreiseriana, biographical studies, and critical texts have appeared.

Among the more idiosyncratic volumes was My Uncle Theodore, a memoir by his niece, psychologist Vera Dreiser Scott. When she recounts one of her author-uncle’s conversations, the anecdote seems to glow with the spellbinding exactitude of a fairy tale: Once when we were alone Uncle Theo told me a story which I thought was a fiction. It was the story of a writer-architect who had neither much money or worldly goods. She lived as a squatter on a beach, nibbling stale crackers and sitting on wooden crates, sleeping on bare floors or the sandy shore. She became ill, suffering from malnutrition and the agonies of poverty . . . over the years, her health and writing improved considerably. “A lovely fantasy,” I thought, until one day Uncle Theo took me to the lady’s house in Santa Monica. She was brilliant, charming, sensitive. 33

And as fiction turned to fact, the indelible presence of Esther McCoy came clearly into view.

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1 Esther McCoy, unpublished memoir, n.d., box 6, page 4, Esther McCoy papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter cited as McCoy papers).

2 Martha Foley, ed., The Best Short Stories of 1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 308– 316.

3 A Finding Aid to the Esther McCoy Papers (Washington, D.C.: Archives of American Art, 1993), 4.

4 Esther McCoy, Five California Architects (New York: Reinhold Book Corporation, 1960).

5 Paul Goldberger, “Architecture View: Learning to Take California Seriously,” New York Times, 14 January 1990.

6 Esther McCoy in Elizabeth A. T. Smith, ed., “Thirtysix Case Study Projects,” in Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 16.

7 John Entenza, “Announcement: The Case Study Program,” Arts and Architecture, January 1945, 39.

8 Barbara Goldstein, ed., “Introduction” and “Epilogue,” in Arts and Architecture: The Entenza Years (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), n.p.

9 David Gebhard and Robert Winter, A Guide to Architecture in Southern California (Los Angeles: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965), 17.

12 McCoy, “Family Reading: Circa 1919,” Los Angeles Times, 30 March 1958. “In a house with seven children, evenings could be pretty noisy and my father—a rugged man with delicate nerves—the kind who would leave the table if a plate was dropped—hated turmoil. We were packed off to our reading after super so he could have a little peace. He did his own reading sometime after midnight.” Between 1950 and 1968, McCoy frequently contributed essays and architectural stories to the Los Angeles Times and its Home magazine.

13 McCoy, “The Life of Dreiser’s Last Party,” Los Angeles Times, 21 August 1977.

14 Saul Bellow, “Dreiser and the Triumph of Art,” in Stature of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Survey of the Man and His Work, eds. Alfred Kazin and Charles Shapiro (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955), 146.

15 Theodore Dreiser in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, New Letters, ed.

Thomas P. Riggio (Urbana and Chicago, Ill.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 2: 181.

16 McCoy, unpublished memoir, box 6, page 1, McCoy papers; also see, Esther McCoy, “Patchin Place,” undated text with note “New York in the mid 1920s,” box 7, McCoy papers, later published in Grand Street 7, no. 2 (Winter 1988), 73–85.

17 McCoy, unpublished memoir, box 6, page 4, McCoy papers.

18 McCoy to Denise Scott Brown, 2 November 1988, box 1, McCoy papers. Architect Scott Brown (b. 1931), principal Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, interviewed McCoy for Progressive Architecture.

McCoy responded to an early draft of the story, sent to her before publication, with a list of corrections and comments.

McCoy’s remarks are organized with such droll topic headings as “Money,” “Smoking,” and “Hair.” Under “Poverty,” she noted: “The house, by the way, I bought before I met Berkeley, from earnings from work for Dreiser.”

McCoy also corrects Scott Brown’s misrepresentations regarding her relationships with Schindler and Dreiser and McCoy’s writing career. “There is a suggestion on p. 4 that my relation to Schindler and Dreiser was sexual when you jump directly from queries about what men were to me to a quote from me (apocryphal) about sex. The picture of me handing over to someone else an inheritance is very funny.

19 McCoy to Josephine Herbst, Erwinna, Penn., n.d., box 4, page 2, McCoy papers.

20 Anna Underhill to “Mrs. Esther Robert” [McCoy], 9 July 1941, regarding receipt of $25 for purchase of house at 2424 Beverly Avenue, Santa Monica, California, box 4, McCoy papers. See also McCoy to Scott Brown, 2 November 1988, 2 November 1988, box 1, McCoy papers.

21 Esther McCoy, Case Study Houses: 1945–1962 (Santa Monica, Calif.: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977), 209.

10 McCoy to Graham Foundation, 17 April 1971, box 26, McCoy papers.

11 McCoy quoted in Paul J. Karlstrom, A Finding Aid to the Esther McCoy Papers (Washington, D.C.: Archives of American Art, 1993), 2.

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22 McCoy, interview conducted by Makoto Watanabe, n.d., box 24, page 1, McCoy papers. “I was very interested in architecture; during the war I had been working as an engineering draftsman on a postwar plane, C-74, detailing wings and other parts of the plane. I worked there two years, decided to study architecture, and was discouraged at USC, so I got a job, instead, with Schindler, who happened to need someone then.” See also McCoy, “Happy Birthday RMS,” box 6, page 2, McCoy papers, “After VE day I concentrated on fiction and on shifting from engineering to architectural drafting. I had learned to draft in the first place because of my passion for architecture. Now I set up a drafting board next to my typewriter and began to design a house.”

23 In a tour brochure, Pasadena Modern (Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Heritage, March 2005), writer and architectural historian Barbara Lamprecht notes that the USC College of Architecture, under the leadership of Dean Arthur B. Gallion, was transformed in 1945 and became “the region’s flashpoint of agile curiosity.” Barbara Lamprecht and Daniel Paul also report that “the circumstances in postwar Southern California provided young, eager, and mutually supportive architects the opportunity to develop a new design direction and construction system that continues to influence architecture today” in Barbara Lamprecht and Daniel Paul, “A Report of the National Historic Places: Residential Architecture of the Recent Past in Pasadena, 1935–1968,” filed with the United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Los Angeles, 2 April 2008, Section E, 15.

24 “Happy Birthday RMS,” box 6, page 6, McCoy papers.

“I said in apology, ‘I tried to get into USC but they discouraged me.’”

“The less to unlearn,” he [Schindler] replied. “Come in tomorrow at eleven.”

“It took some courage to go ask for a job. . . . What did I expect? A cool dismissal.”

27

25 Transcript of keynote speech, “Schindler: From Vienna to Los Angeles, The Colloquium,” 21 May 1988, box 28, page 6, McCoy papers, “One day [Pauline Schindler] phoned me to say that Schindler’s only draftsman had been called up into the armed service and so I might want to try.”

26 Schindler to McCoy, 18 February 1952, Collection of Rudolph M. Schindler, Architecture and Design Collection, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, California.

27 McCoy, “Vienna to Los Angeles,” box 28, page 8, McCoy papers.

28 Ibid., 10; Joseph Giovannini, “A Chronicler of California Architecture,” New York Times, 21 June 1984.

29 McCoy, “Happy Birthday RMS,” box 6, page 7, McCoy papers.

30 McCoy, “Schindler: Space Architect,” Direction: A Magazine of the Arts Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Fall 1945), 14–15.

31 McCoy, “Happy Birthday RMS,” box 6, page 18, McCoy papers.

32 McCoy, “Outward Journey,” handwritten note “sent out xmas 1946 after TD’s death,” box 8, page 2, McCoy papers.

33 Vera Dreiser, My Uncle Theodore (Plainview, N.Y.: Nash Publishing, 1976), 205.

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Esther McCoy and the fight for the Dodge House

“ Losing the Dodge House is like seeing a Braque kicked to pieces ...”

The 1916 Dodge House, designed by Irving J. Gill (1870–1936), was regarded as the first truly modernist residence in the West.

Commissioned by Walter Luther Dodge, a wealthy patent medicine manufacturer (creator of “Tiz” for tired feet), this sprawling house beautifully sited within nearly three landscaped acres was located at 950 North Kings Road just opposite the Schindler studio and only a block from Theodore Dreiser’s last home in West Hollywood.

Esther McCoy was a longtime devotee and compassionate supporter of Gill’s work: during the 1950s, she researched his influential and generally overlooked buildings; with the photographer Marvin Rand, she organized a major Gill exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1958); and, with the 1960 publication of Five California Architects, she placed Gill securely in the pantheon of early modernist architects. “He was one of the small band of men at the turn of the century who spoke for the future,” she wrote. “The Dodge House surmounts style and period, while like all works art, reflecting intimately the times which produced it.” 34 Gill designed with enormous refinement and an austere grace.

He relied on the pure integrity of essential forms—the horizontal line, arch, cube, and circle—and used ornament sparingly. His interiors were luminous; he knew how to deftly balance natural light and anticipate shadows. A talented builder, he was dedicated to practicality and modernity: reinforced concrete walls, labor-saving kitchens complete with garbage disposals, doors without moldings, and steel-framed casement windows. The Dodge House was considered the fulfillment of Gill’s ideals and one of “the fifteen most significant American houses.” 35 In 1965, McCoy wrote and produced a short film about the house. The property, then owned by the Los Angeles City Board of Education, was for sale and slated for demolition. McCoy, along with the Citizens’ Committee to Save the Dodge House, campaigned to preserve the landmark building. “The Dodge house,” declared McCoy, “is the record of a genius which blossomed in this climate, this place.”

By 1970, however, all of the committee’s efforts had been defeated and the Dodge House was destroyed.36

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29

Opposite: Irving Gill’s Dodge House, 1914–1916.

Photographs by Marvin Rand.

Above: Demolition of the Dodge House, 1970.

Photograph by Harvey Steinberg.

Pullquote: McCoy to Los Angeles Times, 4 February 1970, box 25, Dodge House correspondence 1967–1970, McCoy papers.

34 Esther McCoy, “The Dodge House” film typescript, 26 November, box 26, page 7, McCoy papers.

35 Professor and architectural historian William Jordy, Brown University, quoted in Historic American Buildings Survey, National Parks Service, San Francisco, Calif., 1970, HABS No. CAL-355, http://memory. loc.gov/pnp/habshaer/ca/ ca0200/ca0221/data/ca0221. pdf , 1 (accessed 27 April 2009).

36 McCoy, “The Dodge House,” box 26, page 8, McCoy papers.

© Condé Nast

T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings

James Buresh Timeless Mid-Century Modern Design

In a period spanning four decades of the mid-twentieth century, British-American designer Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings (1905–1976) produced a prolific body of work. During his long career Gibbings established a rather varied practice in which he created numerous interiors, wrote many articles and four books, lectured, and designed copious amounts of furniture and furnishings for both custom and mass-scale production. One of Gibbings’ main focuses was his adaptation of the forms and decorative motifs of classical Greek furniture for twentieth-century use, work for which he is widely known today. Less well known is that Gibbings also looked to a wide range of influences, kept a keen eye on current developments in design, and was both a practitioner and popular polemicist of modern design.

Gibbings’ responses to the modern design movement in America changed over time, though, evolving from early, if idiosyncratic, advocacy to growing disenchantment in the mid-1950s as he saw aesthetics become institutionalized, impersonal, and uninspired. An examination of Gibbings’ designs, writings, and treatment in the press can help to chart this progression, which can be difficult to understand because his exact opinions on the subject varied over the course of his career. Careful scrutiny can also give a better sense of how Gibbings operated in the larger context of the surrounding American design world and how he evaluated the work of his contemporaries.

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Opposite: T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings’ watercolor renderings of the Straus residence interior, ca. 1946.

Book cover for Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale, 1944.

Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings came to the United States from London in 1936 to establish his career as an independent designer, having already made connections working at the New York office of antiques dealer Charles Duveen a few years earlier. Standing a lean six-foot tall, with grey-green eyes, pale complexion, and thin blond hair meticulously combed back, Gibbings radiated a sense of precision and purpose. Opinionated, articulate, and witty, he quickly and easily won social popularity and professional success in society circles. When he arrived, Gibbings was well versed in the visual vocabulary of classicism, knowledge likely derived from his studies, travels in Europe, and time spent examining ancient artifacts exhibited at the British Museum. Confidently deploying his erudition to distinguish himself from his American peers, Gibbings established a reputation as a modern classicist.

Gibbings set up an office on Madison Avenue, installing in his showrooms a mixture of ancient and modern elements. These he orchestrated to create what would become the signature style of his early career, which he branded with the French phrase for “timeless,” sans époque. In 1938, Harper’s Bazaar succinctly described Gibbings’ sans époque approach to modern design: “He feels that the modern should stem direct from the very ancient. . . . He likes exaggerated space, frescoed walls and beautiful hand-woven materials specially done for him. Greek chairs copied exactly from antique designs—of bleached oak and birch, huge stools, rawhide screens, crocodile screens and floor decorations of skins or mosaics.” 1 This list of favorite furnishings and materials might seem to reveal a romantic and somewhat glamorized interpretation of ancient forms instead of a typical early or mid-twentieth-century modernist interior. Gibbings, however, did not see the two modes as contradictory, at least not in his own work. In fact, he consistently maintained— and proselytized—that contemporary design should be grounded in an understanding of the past. To Gibbings, the “timeless,” universal appeal of classical Greek furniture stood out as something of both aesthetic merit and greater truth, having achieved perfection of form over the course of centuries—form that could be used as the basis for modern designs. For him, connection to the classical world imbued his work with a lasting beauty that was at once modern and impervious to fashion.

Gibbings expanded beyond his increasingly prominent work as a society designer in 1944, when Alfred A. Knopf published his first book, Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale. In the book he delivered an amusing but shrewd rant against the antiques trade and its effect on the American mass-market furniture industry. While ultimately making an appeal to American consumers, he used his platform to develop his ideas about historicism, appropriateness, ancient form, and timelessness. His aim was the reform American taste, creating a market for better designs. Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale sold well and went into multiple printings.2 Gibbings began his argument by railing against the “cult of antiques,” chiding Americans for wasting money on European

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33

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Gibbings’ responses to the modern design movement in America changed over time.

“He feels that the modern should stem direct from the very ancient.”

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35

examples on the grounds that such furniture had been created for a different time and location and was not suitable for the twentieth-century American home. The market for antiques, according to Gibbings, encouraged the American furniture industry in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to manufacture historical revival furniture in lieu of designs more appropriate for contemporary needs. Gibbings highlighted a situation that illustrated the challenges of contemporary design and the industry’s failure to meet them. During the war, he wrote:

Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale was featured in a Chaucer Head Book Shop window display, 1944.

Preceding pages: Robsjohn-Gibbings, watercolor sketches of original classical furniture.

The housing schemes that were to accomplish this vast undertaking [of housing wartime workers] were in contemporary design and were well advanced when it was discovered that there was no furniture in existence that would be really suitable for these new houses. . . . There was practically no contemporary American furniture to be found. The entire commercial furniture industry had become rotten to the very core by reproducing the antique furniture of Europe and Colonial America, a fact which few people realized until the needs of the war brought the grim facts into the open.3

Gibbings then addressed American consumers directly, exhorting them to embrace the virtues of “contemporary” furnishings. He recommended that Americans educate themselves by subscribing to Architectural Forum and Pencil Points, learn to “overcome a fear of empty spaces,” and develop an appreciation for new designs.4 He included a discussion of European advances in modern design, from Art Nouveau to the Bauhaus to the “international style,” but went on to say that he saw little progressiveness in American design, with the exception of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the engineers of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Gibbings must have been aware of the work of numerous American manufacturers that were creating nonhistorical furnishings. He was probably familiar, for example, with Gilbert Rohde’s designs for Herman Miller, Donald Deskey’s designs for Heywood-Wakefield, and Russel Wright’s designs for Conant Ball, all of which had been available to the trade by the mid-1930s. His motives for not acknowledging this work in print are unclear, although the omission adds a sense of immediacy to Gibbings’ argument and allows him to be the lone romantic voice for reform.

Toward the end of Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale, Gibbings delivered his prescription for the mass market. He proposed the antidote (already in use in his own high-end work) to the passing fancies of bygone eras, as he characterized the historical styles that preoccupied American manufacturers: the heritage of classical Greece and its timeless forms perfected over the course of centuries.

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In Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.—the meridian of Western art — the furniture designers, like the architects, confined themselves to a few generic types, and devoted their energies to developing and perfecting these, rather than inventing new designs. The Greek chair called the klismos, perhaps the most beautiful chair ever made in the world, was a design in use for at least three hundred years.

In the ages which follow Greek democracy, this custom of slowly perfecting basic models begins to disappear, and there is an ever-quickening desire to change designs, not with the idea of improving them, but simply to follow the whims of the ruling class, or the fashionable.5

Gibbings suggested that this legacy offered a potential starting point for contemporary mass-market designers who needed to expunge centuries of historical elaboration from their repertoire and go back to the Golden Age of Greece for guidance.

In 1946 Robsjohn-Gibbings had the opportunity to follow his own advice when he was hired to create a line of mass-produced furniture for middle-class American consumers, to be manufactured by the Widdicomb Company of Grand Rapids. Gibbings continued

“ The Greek chair called the klismos, perhaps the most beautiful chair ever made in the world, was a design in use for at least three hundred years.”

T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, klismos chair, 1936. Photograph

by Richard Garrison.

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Dining room furniture from T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings' collection for the Widdicomb Company, 1950.

America’s sense of democracy is one that “levels up from the bottom,” and “our idea of democracy is to make better things available to more people.”

his production of custom pieces for Robsjohn-Gibbings, Ltd., but he now expanded his output to include a much larger audience that had become familiar with him from frequent appearances in the popular press, speaking engagements, and radio broadcasts.6 From 1946 to 1957, Gibbings turned out annual collections, with successful models remaining in continued production.7 He also put some of his earlier custom designs into industrial production.

Gibbings’ designs for Widdicomb maintained a distinctly elegant idiom in the mass marketplace. In particular, his tables and chairs shared a characteristic lightness achieved by a dowellike treatment of legs, arms, and stretchers, often with a delicate swelling effect. His designs included elements clearly derived from Greek furniture, such as curved crest rails and saber legs that arched outward. The designer’s work for Widdicomb received wide media attention, in particular in the pages of House Beautiful, under the leadership of its progressive editor, Elizabeth Gordon.

In December 1946, Gordon published promotional spreads on his first line for Widdicomb, something the magazine continued to do through his last collection in 1957.8 The article showcasing his models of 1950 demonstrates how the Gibbings look was communicated to middle-class consumers in the context of Gordon’s own vision. Entitled “The American Ideal of Leveling Up,” the article explained that America’s sense of democracy is one that “levels up from the bottom,” and that “our idea of democracy is to make better things available to more people.”9 The Gibbings collection

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was thus presented as an all-American offering, one at a reasonable price point that still maintained a high level of quality. The furniture types were identified as familiar to Americans — “There is the sawbuck table, the slat-back chair, the spindle bed, the rocking chair.”10 As such, these were types that had proven themselves to generations of Americans as functional, if not “functionalist.”

House Beautiful explained: “If you have come to think of ‘functional’ as a word that describes the trickiness of a Rube Goldberg invention, you may miss the true functionalism of this furniture.

Indeed, it has no tricks. But it is furniture that works — in the simple sense that Americans want everything to work.”11 Gibbings’ designs were thus packaged as reinterpretations of a familiar vernacular— “classics” that evoked quality and time-tested validity.

Retail dealers used similar language to market the collections; as one furniture store representative wrote in 1951, in the more conservative version of “modern” designs for Widdicomb, Gibbings had translated modern into the American idiom, made it warm and livable. His furniture has strength, it has grace. Nor is pure line enough. Widdicomb has executed every piece in sorrel walnut, the tawny brown of the first autumn leaves, a new and welcome finish not in the modern spectrum. Every piece is finished in stain and heat-resistant lacquer. All chests are on casters so you can clean with dispatch. The group is magnificent, for every room in the house. It’s open stock and there are over 50 pieces from which to choose.12

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T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings’ 1936 interior with furniture inspired by fifthcentury B.C. Greek furniture forms.

Photograph by Richard Garrison.

The Museum of Modern Art’s “Good Design” exhibition catalogue for 1950 listed the selected items, their designers, and approximate prices. (Cover opposite.)

Gibbings’ work for Widdicomb was a critical success. In June 1950, pieces by Gibbings were selected for a series of exhibits sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and the Chicago Merchandise Mart.13 The “Good Design” initiative was created to promote highquality modern design by convincing retailers to stock their department and furniture stores with well-designed furnishings. Every six months during the early 1950s, a MoMA committee of rotating members headed by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., selected products from both American and international manufacturers that they felt represented both beauty and economy. The winning designs were exhibited at the Merchandise Mart for a year in settings conceived by prominent architects and designers.14 From 1950 to 1953, an annual review (with fewer objects due to space restrictions) was displayed at MoMA—two of Gibbings’ items appeared in the 1950–1951 review show15—and an “anniversary” show was held in 1955.16 The Good Design shows generated wider exposure for Gibbings’ new work. Good Design exhibit visitors in Chicago, voting on their ten favorite pieces, chose two of the Widdicomb designs in 1950 and 1951.17 In the next few years, several regional museums followed MoMA’s lead to open Good Design–inspired exhibits, and many

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exhibited work by Gibbings.18 Local department stores also included his works in tie-in exhibits of “MoMA Good Design selections” set up to promote modernist wares to retail customers.19 By the mid-1950s, as promotions of this kind propelled modernism into the mainstream, Gibbings’ conditional enthusiasm for modern design waned, and he distanced himself from his public embrace of the style. In his 1954 book Homes of the Brave, published

by Knopf, Gibbings took a humorous look at the excesses of modernist design. The book traced the development of the modern movement in America from “The Organic Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright” to “Interplanetary Modern” (a gimmicky futuristic take on modern).

In between, Gibbings treated the story of modernism as a series of fads such as “‘Moderne’ Modern,” “‘Back to Nature’ Modern,” and “‘Machine-for-Living’ Modern.” Ultimately, he concluded, modernism was yet another historical style whose time had come and gone, becoming more tiresome and played out the longer it persisted. More seriously, Gibbings saw modernism as having failed to meet the individual needs of people and society: Just as the last generation of architects and designers was governed by the past, a large part of the present one is enslaved by fear of it. It is this fear that has given many modern houses a look of mindless novelty, that makes them seem unrelated not only to their inhabitants, but to the whole human race, for a composite international style that aims at anonymity and impersonality will never find a human type equally composite and impersonal for whom it would be an appropriate environment.20

Gibbings had concluded that the generic quality of mid-century modernism was doomed to create this sense of alienation in people.

Undercutting his earlier blanket rejection of any historical style in American design (except the classical), in Homes of the Brave Gibbings reconsidered bringing elements of the past into contemporary design as a direct response to a human need. He credited the work of contemporary Swedish designers for taking the “tradition of anonymous furniture,” by which he meant Swedish vernacular furniture forms, and successfully reinterpreting them for modern life.21 Gibbings continued to voice his dissatisfaction with the course he thought modern design was taking. In his public statements on the subject, Gibbings tended to treat “modernism” as a unified body still closely associated with the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, even though decades had passed since modernism’s early theorists inspired the movement. The actual target of his criticism at this time, in fact, remained the largely bland designs being mass produced and designs that relied on novel features to give an impression of “modernity.”

Gibbings’ mid-1950s disaffection with modern design should not be viewed as a complete negation of his earlier polemics; in Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale he had promoted “contemporary” design but warned his readers not to be seduced by the novelty of “the Futurama of World’s Fairs” for its own sake. He just wanted “contem-

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Homes of the Brave was featured in the Chaucer Head Book Shop window display, 1954.

He publicly announced that “modernism is dead” and that MoMA’s influence “has caused much of the monotony in modern furniture and architecture.”

porary design” to meet certain tests of form, quality, and spirit that he thought radical modernism failed.

Gibbings maintained his retreat throughout the decade, pulling away where before he had participated. In 1954, he declined to submit designs for the MoMA-sponsored Good Design show. He publicly announced that “modernism is dead” and that MoMA’s influence “has caused much of the monotony in modern furniture and architecture.” In an interview with Retailing Daily, Philip Johnson, director of the museum’s department of architecture and design, responded that MoMA was “grateful” to Gibbings for “recognizing the influence the Museum has had for the last 25 years.”22 Johnson went on to praise Gibbings’ designs but questioned his position against the museum’s program. “We have often considered his work as among the best modern design produced in this country. We continue to admire his designs, while wondering at his semantics, which makes opposition between the excellent individual furniture designs of today and ‘modern.’”23 Johnson’s response shows that the curator was unmoved by Gibbings’ attitudes toward modern design, and his wry tone perhaps implied that he thought Gibbings was being glib to attract attention.

In fact, Gibbings used his critique of “high” modernism as a point of promotion for his 1954 collection for Widdicomb. The collection was published in House Beautiful with the title “Is Modern Dead?” Editor Joseph A. Barry introduced the collection in a voice sympathetic to Gibbings: Yes, modern is dead. It was assassinated by the modernist cult.

They disposed of it in a formula. They embalmed it as a style and a fashion. But before traditionalists celebrate, let them bury their own dead—their own dead styles and fashions of the past. For they too have killed the thing they love.24

The collection featured forms similar to those from previous collections, but with more decorative flourishes, including optional tulipshaped chromed metal finials that fit on the ends of drawer handles or around the corners of chair arms or headboards. The “furniture with a positive beauty that marks the end of modern’s negative revolt” was styled with printed fabric in woodgrain and cherry patterns.25 Gibbings continued his public anti-modernist campaign and raised fresh criticisms as he did so, criticisms closely related to ones he had already offered. In a 1957 speech to a group of designers in California, Gibbings complained that If you live in a contemporary house, [chances are] you are living in a design atmosphere that closely parallels modern offices, air terminals and hotel lobbies. . . . [This proves that] the modern house no longer fulfils the emotional needs of the inhabitants.

Just because the public appreciates serviceable materials, built-in light fixtures and furnishings, and simple, usually clinical forms incorporated in an institutional room doesn’t mean they want

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these features in their homes. . . . There is a subconscious rebellion taking place in the minds of people. Immediate evidence is [an] accelerated interest in clutter derived from the inclusion of accessories in the home. It is not enough to have a kitchen and plumbing that work if people are in an enclosure that starves them emotionally. . . . Architects should make a concerted effort to be less strident.26

“Strident” was, to Gibbings, a euphemism for dictatorial.

The stark space that might otherwise have a valid use in public places was, for Gibbings, inappropriate and impersonal for the domestic context. The caricature of an architect inflicting emotional pain on the homeowner reflects Gibbings’ tendency at this time to treat modernism as a monolithic and potentially sinister force. In another speech of the same year to the Home Fashion League, Gibbings stated that “Modern houses have three major faults . . . and the worst is the open floor plan which forces you to sit in an emotional draft where every sound is heard by the entire family.” He continued: Today’s greatest problem is how to think like an individual. A house is the most complete expression of individuality. We don’t encourage this enough; we operate on what people think is fashionable. Tell people not to be afraid to think and choose from deep inner prejudices. . . . Don’t be intimidated by modernity. Reject what you don’t like and take what you like. . . . We’ve grown up politically . . . but not in our personal lives. We must learn to resist sales pressures and buying what is fashionable. We should choose things we like as individuals.27

But by these later stages, Gibbings had begun to redirect his attention to his classicist roots. His last collection for Widdicomb was rather conservative in character, and a 1961 line for the Baker Furniture Company of Grand Rapids had a pared-down neoclassical feel. He began his work with the Saridis firm of Athens recreating ancient Greek furniture types (still in production) for the high-end market, and in 1963 his approachably academic Furniture of Classical Greece was published by Knopf. Gibbings had circled back to embrace the idea of timelessness in design that he had first formulated in the late 1930s: Timeless design has one magnificent endowment—nobility.

Nobility in design is very moving. It is the greatest attribute we can receive. When a designer possessing spiritual nobility projects it into an object, he believes implicitly that all who see or possess that object are worthy of nobility. Timeless design is noble because people are worthy of nobility.28

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T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, ca. 1960.

A Modern Work by Robsjohn-Gibbings

Robsjohn-Gibbings introduced a string of compellingly, and recognizably, “modern” furnishings, including a coffee table that he designed in 1942, comprised of an ash wood base with three vertical points that supported a thick glass top with round, organic form. In the 1940s, the custom order table had considerable exposure in the print media and later achieved success in mass production. It should be noted, too, for the record, that there was a dispute over the inspiration for this piece with Isamu Noguchi. In 1939, Noguchi had designed a dining table with free-form top for A. Conger Goodyear, the president of the Museum of Modern Art. According to Noguchi, the next year he showed Robsjohn-Gibbings a model of his design for a coffee table with an undulating glass top. The artist claimed that Gibbings modified the design and presented it as his own in 1942, without his permission, while he was detained in an internment camp. Noguchi did not have documentation to verify the claim, however. The table was successful in both custom and mass-market versions, and authorship was understood by both design and lay public to belong to Gibbings. As an important example of modern (and biomorphic) design associated with Gibbings’ early career, this table must be included in any treatment of his work as a modernist. Gibbings was quick to promote the innovative character of this and his other designs, including the use of slanted drawer fronts that didn’t require separate pull hardware and a 1953 collection for Widdicomb that featured slanted brass legs.

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1 “I Don’t Like a Dog That Wags Its Tail,” Harper’s Bazaar, February 1938, 136.

9 Mary Roche, “The American Ideal of Leveling Up,” House Beautiful, May 1950, 128.

2 T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944).

10 Ibid., 133.

3

Ibid., 6.

4 Ibid., 103–106.

5

Ibid., 79.

6 Gibbings and his work were featured in hundreds of articles until this point, including both society publications and the popular press. For an example of the latter, see: T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, “Put Your House on a Diet,” Mademoiselle, January 1943, 74, 134. He also appeared on radio shows, such as in the CBS series “Americans at Work,” no. 26, “The Interior Decorator.”

7 Robsjohn-Gibbings resigned in the fall of 1956, having designed his 1957 collection for Widdicomb.

8 The magazine’s progressive editor, Elizabeth Gordon, was responsible for this long-term support. The May 1950 issue, for example, was themed “The Emerging American Style” and noted that “American Design has finally matured into an unmistakable style”; Gibbings’ work was singled out as a successful example of this trend. From 1939 to 1964 Elizabeth Gordon used her role as editor to educate the American public about contemporary design and new architecture. She had strong opinions regarding what was appropriate for the American home, favoring a softer side of modern design that allowed for individual expression.

In the April 1953 issue, she published a scathing essay, “The Threat to the Next America,” that criticized doctrinaire, International-style modernism and its advocates, whom she described as “a self-chosen elite who are trying to tell us what we should like and how we should live.”

11 Ibid.

12 Edward Drayton, “Fashion Introduces Pep Up Promotions,” Retailing Daily, 3 October 1951. Quote from an unnamed representative at Sunniland Furniture in Houston, Texas .

13 In June 1950, the jury selected a Double Dresser (cat. 173), Bookcase with Sliding Glass Doors (cat. 174), Refreshment Cart (cat. 175), and Armchair (cat. 176); in January 1951, a Double Top Table (cat.

54), Tub Chair (cat. 55), DropLeaf Butler’s Table (cat. 56), and Table Lamp (cat. 57).

14 Charles Eames in 1950, Finn Juhl in 1951, Paul Rudolph in 1952, Alexander Girard in 1953, and A. James Speyer and Daniel Brenner in 1954 for the “Anniversary Show.”

15 Drop-Leaf Butler’s Table (cat. 56) and Table Lamp (cat.

57) were on display at MoMA in the 1951 “Good Design” show (cat. nos. 34 and 295, respectively). The tripod lamp was acquired for the MoMA collection after the show by a request for donation.

16 MoMA exhibitions, cat. 463, 21 November 1950–28 January 1951; cat. 494, 27 November 1951–27 January 1952; cat.

520, 23 September 1952–30 November 1952; cat. 542, 22 September 1953–29 November 1953; cat. 570, 8 February 1955– 28 January 1955.

18 For example, the 1950 “Living Up to Date” exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art (see Audrey Bishop, “Design for Modern Living,” Baltimore Morning Sun, 23 September 1951); or the “Contemporary Living” exhibit held in 1952 at the Union Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin (“Contemporary Living Opens the Union,” Capital Times, 1 March 1952).

19 Such as the 1950 exhibit at Frederick and Nelson in Seattle, Washington, “Good Design Features ‘At Home’ Week,” Seattle Times, 6 October 1950.

20 T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Homes of the Brave (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 110.

21 Ibid., 54–57.

22 “Top Museum Aids Hit Designer on Modern,” Retailing Daily, 11 January 1954.

23 Ibid.

24 Joseph A. Barry, “Is Modern Dead?” House Beautiful, May 1954, 152.

25 Ibid., 153.

26 Judy Muma, “RobsjohnGibbings Raps Modern Architecture,” Home Furnishings Daily, 11 April 1957, 10.

27 Elinor Lee, “Designer Criticizes Open Floor Plan,” Washington Post, 30 April 1957.

28 T. H. RobsjohnGibbings, “Timeless Design,” Environment, Autumn 1962, 50.

17 “They Pick These in Good Design Poll,” Retailing Daily, 6 October 1950. Other designers whose work was well regarded included Eero Saarinen, Henry Wright, and Carl Strobe.

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A Symbolic Situation Claes Oldenburg and Robert Venturi at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College K at h e r i n e S m i t h In August 1970 Claes Oldenburg (b. 1924) installed his large-scale sculpture Three-Way Plug (Cube Tap) on the grounds of Oberlin College’s Allen Art Building (today the Allen Memorial Art Museum).

Plug was an important commission, one that significantly extended the sculptor’s characteristic practice of representing common objects in ever-increasing sizes. Oldenburg had initiated this artistic strategy in the Store sculptures of the early 1960s and continued it in his “soft” sculptures, many of approximately human proportions.

By mid-decade he broadened his work further to include proposals for colossal monuments that resemble the public sculptures for which he and his wife and artistic partner Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009) are best known today.

Plug (1970) was the sculptor’s first such large-scale sculpture to be completed and permanently placed in a public space.1 When the piece was installed, however, it was clear that the chosen location near the museum was likely temporary, because soon an addition proposed for the museum would alter the existing building and site. In 1973 Oberlin College commissioned the architectural firm of Venturi and Rauch (today Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates) to undertake the extension. Planning for the new building started within months of the commission. Three-Way Plug had to be moved for construction, but it maintained a conspicuous presence in Venturi’s early thinking about the design and reinforced ideas about architectural symbolism that he had been developing with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour were garnering a great deal of attention for their contributions to architectural theory. In publications like Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) by Venturi and Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, the architects elaborated on their influential ideas about contemporary vernacular architecture and its symbolic communication. The 1972 book,

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Claes Oldenburg, Three-Way Plug (Cube Tap), 1970.

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in particular, focused on the function of ornament in architecture, a study that informed the designs for the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s addition.

The planning of Venturi and Rauch’s building was undertaken in collaboration with members of the museum staff, and Ellen Hulda Johnson was among those closely involved. Johnson had been instrumental in acquiring Oldenburg’s Plug, and it and other important acquisitions demonstrated her keen knowledge of and appreciation for contemporary art.2 Johnson’s papers in the Archives of American Art include a vast amount of correspondence and rare ephemera that testify to her farsighted commitment to advanced art and artists. In the collection is an unpublished sketch by Venturi that reveals an intriguing connection between Plug and the architect’s thinking about the museum addition, a connection whose influence extended beyond his work at Oberlin.

The tiny sketch in brown ink, apparently dashed off by Venturi and given to Johnson during the planning for the addition, likely in 1973, shows three possible positions for Plug when the building was finished. The sketch departs from the published elevation and site drawings, and a note written by Johnson on the bottom margin explains the difference.3 At some early point, apparently, Venturi conceived of a more radical integration of sculpture and architecture than the final designs show: “Venturi’s drg. Where he’d like to put the plug (on top is where he’d really like it[)].”

Venturi’s sketch speaks generally to his ongoing consideration at this time of Oldenburg’s art, and, specifically, the little drawing constitutes one of the earliest and most direct links between the sculptor’s work and one of the firm’s built projects.4 It is also a creative application by Venturi of his and his coauthors’ recent theories on commercial architectural symbolism, namely, the idea of a sculpture or sculptural element topping a building. Last, Venturi’s projected assimilation of Three-Way Plug into his building—the firm’s first museum commission just as it was one of Oldenburg’s first completed object-monuments—inaugurated on paper a design strategy that he and his colleagues developed in projects done after the completion of the Oberlin addition.

In January 1969, when Oldenburg was commissioned to execute a sculpture for the Allen museum, at first he envisioned other possible objects and locations, such as a large ice bag sitting at the museum’s northwest corner, near the intersection of Main and Lorain streets.5 He settled instead on Three-Way Plug, a subject that was common in his oeuvre, appearing in numerous manifestations, in both two and three dimensions, in hard and soft sculptures, at different scales, and in disparate materials.6 Such a variety of media signals the degree to which Oldenburg had already experimented with the three-way plug’s expressive potential and considered the form in relation to a number of specific contexts.7 Having already explored various impli-

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Robert Venturi’s drawing showing three possible placements for Oldenburg’s Plug, ca. 1973.

Opposite: Site Plan for the Allen Memorial Art Museum addition, 1973–1977.

Oldenburg’s design and placement of Three-Way Plug demonstrated his interest in the visual intersections between sculpture and architecture

cations of the plug form, Oldenburg embraced the opportunity to realize a larger version as a site-specific public sculpture.

The sculptor designed Three-Way Plug to respond closely to its intended location at Oberlin. He selected a place near the museum, which reinforced the sculpture’s connection to and formal correspondences with the building, an Italian Renaissance-style structure in buff and red sandstone designed by Cass Gilbert and built between 1915 and 1917. As Oldenburg affirmed in a speech he gave when the sculpture was installed, “I’m especially happy with . . .

[Plug’s] relationship to this building, because it does have . . . a sort of a Renaissance aspect, I think. It is reminiscent of architectural etchings that I’ve seen . . . [of] what I’ve taken to be imitations of Renaissance buildings.”8 After it was first installed, Johnson described the sculpture’s relationship with its surroundings in greater detail: The site, chosen by the artist, is perfectly appropriate to the qualities of the work. On a softly sloping lawn, surrounded by trees and bushes, it lies between the Renaissance-style museum and the freer-formed auditorium by Harrison and Abramowitz.

Physically closer to the museum, the sculpture plays with and against the architecture as it does with and against the natural setting. Like a drum of an octagonal column transversed by a cylinder, the Plug matches the Renaissance design in its combination of rectilinear and curvilinear elements and in its strict bilateral symmetry, which is, however, hidden, almost denied, by its partly submerged, dropped position. Its rusted Cor-Ten steel . . . earth-red in color and slightly abrasive in surface, contrasts with the smooth, brightly polished brass of the prongs. In August the Plug’s only companion coloristically was the red of the linear decoration on the walls of the museum and its tiled roof; but in the autumn it joined with the bright red berries hanging on the bushes. It will continue to change in winter under deep snows [to] come, and in spring when delicate pinks and whites of the flowering crabapple trees appear.9

Oldenburg’s design and placement of Three-Way Plug demonstrated his interest in the visual intersections between sculpture and architecture, but van Bruggen wrote a few years later that he also intended the work “to strongly contrast its banal contemporary context—due to its mass-production origin—with the glorification of the past that the Museum’s design suggests.”10 Oldenburg’s embrace of the complex coexistence of the sculpture’s contemporary subject and the architecture’s historical symbolism closely paralleled Venturi’s approach to his own commission at Oberlin.

When Venturi and Rauch were hired to design the Allen extension, the project was to include a renovation of the existing museum and the addition of a gallery for contemporary art, a new art library, a conservation laboratory, studios, and study spaces. The architects sought not only to fulfill the programmatic requirements of

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the building but also to orchestrate a formal dialogue between old and new through their use of structure and, especially, ornament.

Their first solution was to use decoration that complemented the Renaissance style of Gilbert’s museum. On the exterior of the gallery, which directly abuts the original building, the architects repeated the colors of the earlier façade.They used pink granite and red sandstone squares that compose an irregular checkerboard pattern, which both echoes and extends the rectilinear decoration of Gilbert’s façade into a more elaborate, repeating pattern and all-over composition. To promote visual unity between old and new, the red sandstone for the addition was quarried from the same site as that on Gilbert’s building; the white striations apparent in the stone, according to Venturi, gave the appearance of wear and age, heightening the dialogue the architect so deliberately crafted between the structures.11 Venturi has remarked particularly on the museum’s place in the neighborhood’s eclectic architecture, using terms that echo Oldenburg’s thoughts about Plug’s diverse sources and symbolism.

As Venturi has famously noted, the original museum “is not high art with a vengeance. If it is a symbol of high art midst mid-America, it forms a poignant rather than a condescending image, not a separation between great art and everyday life, but a contrast.”12 He has reiterated elsewhere that Gilbert’s Allen Art Museum achieves harmony through contrast, heightening the quality of its [wider] context through jarring juxtapositions such as terra-cotta friezes with molded plastic signs; della Robbia tondos with Citgo logos; decorative wrought-iron grilles with gingerbread wooden trellises; pilasters and urns with gas pumps and signs; and a front porch completing a classical axis.

Diverse elements give context for, and against, each other, like Pop Art beer cans in a white-walled gallery. One Allen Memorial Art Museum does not a Fiesole make; on the contrary, it makes Oberlin more what it is.13

The final plan at Oberlin took up one of two divergent ideas of architectural expression framed in Learning from Las Vegas, in which buildings with symbolic sculptural form (famously, “ducks” in the book) are contrasted to buildings that communicate via attached ornament (the book’s “decorated sheds”). Both methods aim to draw attention as they communicated through exaggerated forms, whether dimensional or textual, structural or applied. With its simplified boxlike form and prominent checkerboard pattern, the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s new gallery epitomized, as Venturi has acknowledged, a decorated shed.14 However, the gallery’s façade serves more to complement the original structure than to advertise the building’s particular function. Venturi’s sketch in Johnson’s papers indicates that he envisioned, even if only at an early stage in the design process, a much bolder symbolic role for Three-Way Plug as a kind of readymade sign or found-object duck.

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Claes Oldenburg, Three-Way Plug, 1970.

“Not ducks, precisely, these examples of superior roadside architecture were more like highly physiognomic and explicit billboards.”

The drawing depicts a schematic site plan, including outlines of Gilbert’s original museum and Venturi’s addition, labeled “old” and “new,” respectively, as well as Oberlin’s Memorial Arch, which already stood at the front of the site, and rerouted sidewalks. Three circular forms indicate, as Johnson’s inscription notes, possible new placements for Oldenburg’s Three-Way Plug: at the northwest corner adjacent to Gilbert’s building; in front of the addition; and what seems at first to be inside the new gallery space, but which Johnson’s note makes clear is actually on top of the addition’s roof.

Each location offered to the sculpture a different role in the architect’s composition. The first increased its visibility to passing cars by locating it on a busy corner. The second repositioned it near its original site (and duplicated the foreground location most commonly found in Venturi’s final site and elevation drawings). The third made Plug part of the addition itself. Relocating Plug either in front of the building or on the roof would have strengthened its relationship to the building. Placing it on the roof, however, packed the added punch of advertising part of the extension’s function as a gallery of modern art in a way that would have transformed Oldenburg’s work into an integral ornament at once literal and provocatively symbolic.

Venturi’s sketch provides tangible evidence that Oldenburg’s Three-Way Plug at Oberlin helped advance his concept of an architect-designed building topped by a symbolic sculpture, or sculptural element.15 It is also a prime example of a more general influence of Oldenburg’s art on the architects.

It is clear from Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s projects and publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s that they already recognized the significance of Oldenburg’s work to contemporary architecture and urban design.16 They first mentioned his work in the architecture studios that preceded the publication of Learning from Las Vegas: Learning from Las Vegas (1968) and Learning from Levittown (1970), both taught at Yale. In the notes for the Levittown studio, for example, the architects used Oldenburg’s art to illustrate a research project, and they directed their students to “do for housing what Oldenburg did for hamburgers” explaining that Oldenburg has essentially made us look at hamburgers in another way because he has portrayed them in an unusual way: big, lacquered, and in an art gallery. Does he hate them or love them and should we? Probably he feels some of both, but that doesn’t matter—at least, not yet. The first thing is the shift in vision and understanding which an Oldenburg can induce, and the re-interpretation and reclassification of our cultural artifacts which he provides.17

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour were equally intrigued with Oldenburg’s choice of banal subject matter and the effects of scale in his sculptures, artistic choices that paralleled subject matter and conventions of display used in the vernacular architecture

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they were studying. In Learning from Las Vegas, they explicitly compared Oldenburg’s sculptures to the roadside signs they saw in the Nevada city, writing that a sign at Caesars Palace was “not so high as the Dunes Hotel sign next door or the Shell sign on the other side, [but] its base is enriched by Roman centurions, lacquered like Oldenburg hamburgers, who peer over the acres of cars and across their desert empire to the mountains beyond.”18 Another photograph in the book—a hamburger stand in Dallas that bears uncanny resemblance to Oldenburg’s sculptures of the same subject—again highlights the significance of size and symbolism in the architects’ discussion of the contemporary vernacular landscape and hints at the relevance of Oldenburg’s objects to architectural design.19 By 1977, the year the Allen Memorial Art Museum was dedicated, the architects’ scholarly comparisons of Oldenburg’s sculptures to Las Vegas signage were beginning to extend well beyond mentions of surface shine and grand scale. In fact, a number of projects began to include the type of design Venturi jotted down in the sketch for Oberlin, a sculptural element on top of a rather uninflected box. In 1977 and 1978, the firm designed three buildings (a science museum, a regional center, and a jazz club) that integrated sculptural symbolism, plain shelter, and applied decoration, which Venturi described around the time of the projects as “decorated shed[s] with . . . duck[s] on top,” making them hybrid examples of the symbols in Learning from Las Vegas.20 More recently, architectural historian David Brownlee has elaborated on this design concept, noting that these buildings are not exactly a fusion of the two primary modes of symbolism Venturi and his coauthors identified in commercial architecture, not least because the sculptural elements in all examples were purely symbolic. “Not ducks, precisely,” Brownlee stipulates, “these examples of superior roadside architecture were more like highly physiognomic and explicit billboards.”21 Venturi has specifically linked other projects from the mid- to late 1980s, all of which incorporated similarly oversized objects, to Oldenburg’s art. In the firm’s Big Apple for Times Square, the architects included a large apple on the roof of an information

Venturi, Scott Brown's Hartwell Lake Regional Visitor Center, Hartwell Lake, South Carolina, 1977–1978.

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Venturi, Scott Brown’s rendering for an information kiosk at Times Square, 1984.

kiosk, which Venturi explained in his project notes had a specific relation to Oldenburg’s large-scale works as “a piece of representational sculpture which is bold yet rich in symbolism . . . popular and esoteric—a Big Apple symbolizing New York City . . . a Pop-art monument in the manner of Claes Oldenburg.”22 The monumental sculpture, over ninety feet in diameter, creditably vied for attention with the group of controversial high-rise buildings proposed for the redevelopment of the famous Midtown site. The Westway Urban Design Project (1985), a plan submitted for the rehabilitation of a riverfront park in Manhattan, also included sculptures of oversized apples as plinth decorations. A later plan for the Hudson River Waterfront Project, a band pavilion at Battery Park in New York (1989) in the form of a large apple, was likewise, Venturi noted, “somewhat like the representational sculpture of Claes Oldenburg but [it is] . . . also architecture and provides shelter.” 23 These unbuilt projects have a poignant similarity to Venturi’s concept for the Allen Memorial Art Museum, demonstrating the enduring influence of Oldenburg’s art on his and Scott Brown’s practice.

Plug’s new location, finalized in October 1976, did not conform to any of Venturi’s suggestions; indeed, when Oldenburg relocated his work, he placed it around the side of the façade, in a position much less central and visible than any Venturi imagined. If Venturi’s witty idea to site Plug on the top of the addition had been implemented, the sculpture would have been literally elevated to a unique symbolic prominence. The result would have been an artistic collaboration that was simple and complex, complementary and contradictory, banal and allusive, all at the same time.

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This essay is based in part on Katherine Smith's dissertation, which was supported by fellowships from the Institute of Fine Arts and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

1 Oldenburg had previously installed Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks in Beinecke Plaza, Yale University, on 15 May 1969. This sculpture was commissioned by a group of graduate students and professors called the Colossal Keepsake Corporation and offered to Yale upon its installation. The university did not accept this gift, and Oldenburg removed the work in March 1970. Lipstick was reinstalled at Morse College at Yale in 1974.

2 Johnson’s scholarship on Oldenburg’s art generally, and on Plug more particularly, demonstrated her understanding of the sculpture’s significance in Oldenburg’s career, for Oberlin’s collection, and in contemporary art in general.

Johnson included Oldenburg’s work in the exhibition “Three Young Americans,” Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1963. Her publications on his work include Ellen H. Johnson, “The Living Object,” Art International 7 (January 1963), 42–45; Ellen H. Johnson, “Claes Oldenburg,” in Dine Oldenburg Segal (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario; Buffalo: Albright-Knox Gallery, 1967), n.p.; Ellen H. Johnson, “Oldenburg’s Poetics: Analogues, Metamorphoses, and Sources,” Art International 14 (April 1970), 42–45, 51; Ellen H. Johnson, “Oldenburg’s ‘Giant 3-Way Plug’,” Arts Magazine 45 (December 1970–January 1971), 43–45, republished as “Oldenburg’s ‘Giant ThreeWay Plug’,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 28, no. 3 (Spring 1971), 223–233; Ellen H. Johnson, Claes Oldenburg (New York: Penguin Books, 1971).

3 Throughout the text I will be referring to Venturi’s designs for the addition. Such references are not intended to discount the contributions made by other members of the firm, such as the project manager, Jeffrey Ryan, whose efforts were substantial, but instead to acknowledge that Venturi was the member of the

firm primarily responsible for the project.

4 In several elevation drawings from 1973 in the Venturi Scott Brown Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Venturi also showed several positions for a relocated ThreeWay Plug, including on the roof of the gallery.

5 Oldenburg proposed two other objects to Ellen Johnson and Athena Tacha, Curator of Modern Art, before arriving at the three-way plug. The first was a maple seed; the second was an ice bag to be placed at the corner of the lot. Tacha, phone interview by author, 2 April 2009. See also Johnson, Claes Oldenburg, 48.

6 For an overview of Oldenburg’s uses of the threeway plug, see for instance, Claes Oldenburg, “U.S.A. Three-Way Plug,” in Barbara Haskell, Object into Monument (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 114–119; Claes Oldenburg, “Log of the ThreeWay Plug,” in A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 112–127; and Oldenburg: Six Themes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1975), 35–45.

7 By the time he got the Allen job, for example, Oldenburg had often envisioned common plugs in monumental architectural form. “The architectural character and potential of the Plug became apparent the moment it was imagined in colossal form,” the artist recalled in 1988, and “because of its crossed vaults it suggested a cathedral, having even a sort of resemblance to the Hagia Sophia.” Seeing the plug as “a sculpture with an interior and with windows, led to a series of buildings in the form of plugs.” See Oldenburg, “Log of the ThreeWay Plug,” 112. Indeed, by the time he undertook the Oberlin commission, Oldenburg had made several drawings in which he specifically conceived of different types of plugs as functional buildings: an English extension plug, square in shape, became a crematorium (Building in the Form of an English Extension Plug, 1967, private collection); a Swedish example, with a vaulted, axial

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structure, became a chapel (Proposed Chapel in the Form of a Swedish Extension Plug, 1967, Collection Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana); and a three-way plug became a Brutalist-style college building (Notebook Page: Design for a Mathematics Building at Yale University [New Haven, October], 1969).

8 “Transcript of speech

by Claes Oldenburg at the inauguration ceremonies of Giant Three-Way Plug (Cube Tap), Allen Memorial Art Museum, 14 September 1970,” 4. Allen Memorial Art Museum records 1916–1967, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Oldenburg underscored a similar resonance between ThreeWay Plug and its architectural environment when a second version of the sculpture was installed at the St. Louis Art Museum, another building designed by Gilbert in a Renaissance style. “If you look at the forms in the plug, you will see the architectural forms in the building itself.

St. Louis is a city of arches, and you see archlike forms repeated again and again in the plug.” Quoted in John Brod Peters, “Oldenburg’s Plug ‘Turns On’ Art Fans,” St. Louis GlobeDemocrat, 14 September 1971.

9 Johnson, “Oldenburg’s ‘Giant Three-Way Plug’,” 43.

10 Coosje van Bruggen, “PlugBuildings or Alternative Proposal for an Addition to the Allen Memorial Art Museum,” in Claes Oldenburg: Large-scale Projects, 1977–80, ed. R. H. Fuchs (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 40.

11 Oral History Interviews with Robert Venturi and Richard Spear, Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1997, box 6, Oberlin College Archives.

12 Robert Venturi, “Plain and Fancy Architecture by Cass Gilbert at Oberlin and the Addition to the Museum

by Venturi and Rauch,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin

55

34, no. 2 (1976–1977), 88.

13 Ibid., 90–91.

14 See Venturi’s comments in “Plain and Fancy” and “Learning the Right Lessons from the Beaux-Arts,” both reprinted in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio, Selected Essays, 1953–1984, ed. Peter Arnell, Ted Bickford, Catherine Bergart (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984), 58 and 82, respectively.

15 The idea of putting a symbolic element on the roof of a building occurred in the Guild House (Philadelphia, 1961–1966), where the architects installed a monumental, anodized gold (and nonfunctional) antenna. See Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966; reprint 1996), 116.

16 I have previously explored Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates architecture in relation to Oldenburg’s sculpture in this context in “Mobilizing Visions: Representing the American Landscape,” in Relearning from Las Vegas, ed. Aron Vinegar and Michael Golec (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 97–128.

17 Denise Scott Brown, “Remedial Housing for Architects’ Studio,” in Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates: On Houses and Housing, ed. James Steele (London: Academy Editions, 1992), 54.

18 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), 51.

19 Ibid.

20 The projects were Discovery Place Museum of Science and Technology (1977) in North Carolina; the Hartwell Lake Regional Visitor Center, Hartwell Lake (1977–1978) in South Carolina; and Nichol’s Alley Jazz Club project, Scheme A (1978), Houston, Texas. The quotation is from Venturi, “Learning the Right Lessons from the Beaux-Arts,” 82.

21 David Brownlee, “Form and Content,” in Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associations, Architecture, Urbanism, Design, ed. David B. Brownlee, David G. DeLong, and Kathryn B. Hiesinger (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2001), 80. Brownlee’s statement reinforces Venturi’s own contention that such combinations produce designs that are “ good advertisement[s] from the highway” (Venturi, “Learning the Right Lessons from the Beaux-Arts,” 82–84).

22 After architect Philip Johnson proposed a series of high-rise office buildings that some critics believed would diminish the commercial character of the area, Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown (as the firm was known at the time) were asked by the lead developer of the Times Square renovation plan to design a center that would integrate the proposed buildings and maintain some of the square’s characteristic atmosphere.

Quoted in Stanislaus von Moos, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown: Buildings and Projects (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 134.

23 Quoted in Stanislaus von Moos, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, 1986–1998 (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999), 188.

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J a s m i n e Rau lt

LOSING FEELINGS E L I Z A B E T H E y r e d e L an u x anD H E R A ffe c ti v e A r c hi v e of S a p p hi c M o d e r ni T Y The blurry image on the opposite page is a photograph of Evelyn Wyld (1882–1973).1 At least I think it’s Wyld. I’ve never seen a picture of her, but after years of research on her relatively better-known design partner and friend, Eileen Gray (1878–1976), after countless hours of patient imagining over the archival ephemera that constitute the “sources” of sapphic modernity, I hope it’s she. It’s in an envelope, along with several other intimate photographs of someone who might resemble her, upon which is hand-written the name “Evelyn Wyld,” and housed in the Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux archive in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. She sits facing us on a cleanly made bed, her body draped in shadow, naked but for what seem to be swimming shorts (or underwear?), hands entwined below her knees, her arms pressed over her breasts shaping a V that descends between her thighs, her body shading a silhouette across the sheet behind her to the pillows, her slight smile and one eye inviting us, tempting us to imagine this moment of intimate history.

Image: 2 de lanux Cannes card

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Advertising flyer for Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux and Evelyn Wyld’s shop in Cannes.

Opposite: Eyre de Lanux (above) and Wyld.

Wyld and Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux (1894–1996) were lovers and, between about 1927 and 1932, design and business partners as well. Along with designing, Eyre de Lanux worked as writer and artist, splitting her adult life between New York, Paris, and Rome, with frequent stays at Wyld’s house in the south of France. The two met in Paris, apparently around 1927, when Eyre de Lanux was writing an article on Gray and Wyld’s designs, and with Wyld’s encouragement, Eyre de Lanux joined her Atelier de Tissage. They went on to work and periodically live together, showing modernist interior design schemes in Paris at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs (1928, 1929), the Salon d’Automne (1929), the Union des Artistes Modernes (1930), and the Curtis Moffat Gallery in London (1930). They opened a shop in Cannes in 1932, which they closed the following year, effectively ending their collaborative work but by no means ending their relationship. While their names show up in the margins of research on other modern women writers, artists, and designers, very little has been written about either Wyld or Eyre de Lanux; their lives and works, like the cultural history of sexual dissidence of which they were part, remain largely unknown.2 The vague provocation of the image introduces us, specifically, to the cultural field of sapphic modernity with which Wyld and Eyre de Lanux were linked: that is, a loose network of women who cultivated an intimate connection between female nonheterosexuality and modernity itself, women for whom becoming nonheterosexual was synonymous with becoming modern. On the one hand, as a photographic portrait, the image reminds us that photography and the genre of portraiture played crucial roles in the emergence of modern lesbian identities and culture by both documenting queer female artists, writers, designers, musicians, performers, friends, and lovers and by creating the aesthetics, sartorial codes, cultures, and spaces of sapphic modernity.3 On the other hand, as a photograph that lacks focus, a hazy and shadowed snapshot of a woman whose image has never been published and whose name few readers will recognize, it provides a glimpse into the private life of a love that stretched forty-six years and whose existence the dreamlike blur of the photo seems even to call into question. The photograph poignantly represents both the presence and absence of queer histories, what Ann Cvetkovich describes as the “traumatic loss of history” that marks contemporary queer subjects, politics, and publics.4

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The Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux collection is a remarkable assemblage of personal ephemera constituting something akin to what Cvetkovich calls “an archive of feeling.”5 In diaries, letters, photographs, and sketches, we find an archive of emotion that documents moments of intimacy, sexuality, and love stretching from the 1920s to the 1970s; that is, an archive that traces the affective contours of queer histories, lost, repressed, or cast, like the unnamed, undated photograph above, as miscellaneous. Despite over thirty years of recuperative research to “prove” the existence of queers in history (to prove that queers have a history) and to interrogate the place of sexual dissidents and dissidence in the cultural history of modernity itself, these histories and this field of scholarship are constantly on the brink of being lost.6 The Eyre de Lanux archive works, on one level, then, simply to affirm the early twentieth century viability of these epistemologically disadvantaged queer existences and desires. It contains loving correspondence with her husband of thirty-seven years, Pierre de Lanux; intimate letters from male lovers; unambiguously erotic diary writings about and sketches of female lovers; and suggestively sexual photographs of and letters from lovers such as Wyld, Natalie Barney, and Consuelo Urisarri. On another level, however, it works to chronicle the costs of having been “discovered.”

Scholars of sapphic modernity have shown that the wide circulation of photographs of Radclyffe Hall during the mass media coverage of the 1928 obscenity trials of her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) resulted in a momentous shift in the history of female sexual dissidence.7 Following the trials, modes of female masculinity and same-sex intimacies that had been widely perceived as avant-garde and highly fashionable were reduced into one static and stubbornly persistent lesbian identity. During the earlier 1920s, many women’s participation in and production of cultural, social, and artistic modernity was predicated on their ability to make lives and identities outside the bounds of conventional heterosexuality. After Hall’s trial, these lives and identities were less likely to be read as chic, avant-garde, and modern than degenerate, dangerous, and lesbian.

In a curious kind of doubling, the traces of the lost affective history that we find in the Eyre de Lanux archive are marked by a haunting sense of loss—nostalgia, regret, longing, disappearing.

We can read the sense of loss permeating the Eyre de Lanux archive as what Heather Love calls “feeling backward.”8 Nostalgia, regret, longing, and loss can be understood as elements of negative affect that characterized many early twentieth-century representations and experiences of queerness—feelings tied to “the corporeal and psychic costs of homophobia” as well as “the historical ‘impossibility’ of same-sex desire.”9 But in Eyre de Lanux’s archive, the trauma of loss and this feeling backward do not manifest as shame, despair, self-hatred, bitterness, or ressentiment associated with the “painful negotiation of the coming of modern homosexuality.”10 In her diaries

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w e fin d an a r c hi v e of emotion that d o c u ments moments of intima c y, se x u alit y, an d lo v e st r et c hing f r om the 1 9 2 0 s to the 1 9 7 0 s

We might say that befo r e 1 9 2 8 , the r e was no lesbian i d entit y — no se r ies of a c ts , d esi r es , o r d is c o u r ses ha d y et c ohe r e d into a r e c ognizable s u b j e c t o r t y p e of p e r son k no w n as lesbian .

and letters, sketched portraits of women, and over thirty years of letters from Wyld, the pain and suffering of early twentieth-century articulations of same-sex desire are strikingly absent. We find instead the softer sadness of regret and nostalgia tied to the emergence of visibility and the obsolescence of interiority that followed.

We might say that before 1928, there was no lesbian identity— no series of acts, desires, or discourses had yet cohered into a recognizable subject or type of person known as lesbian. And women like Eyre de Lanux and Wyld seem to have been happy this way, identifying instead as modern artists or designers. But what studies in sapphic modernity show is that a central, inseparable, constitutive element of this modern artist-designer identity was “the rejection of received ideas about what it meant to be a woman,” which included a refusal to be governed by the norms of heterosexuality.11 And as this sapphic modernist (or female modern, nonheterosexual artist) identity was on the brink of being lost, reduced to a simply sexual identity (lesbian), women like Eyre de Lanux and Wyld responded.

They insisted, instead, on the irreducibility, complexity, or queerness of interiority—a sense of inside (human and physical) that could not be so simply communicated by the emerging modern lesbian identity nor by the increasingly standardized interiors coming to be identified as official modern architecture and design.

While there were of course various, and at times contradictory, culturally and locally specific versions of modern architecture and design circulating at the start of the twentieth century, by the end of the 1920s these variations were being carefully eliminated by an international network of architects, designers, and historians invested in the production of one unified, clearly recognizable, and easily communicated modern architectural identity. The success of these efforts can be attributed to three main events: the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition in 1927; the creation of the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) in 1928; and the naming, by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, for their show of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1932, of an International Style in architecture.12 These efforts were motivated by what Weissenhofsiedlung organizers and CIAM founding members like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Siegfried Giedion articulated as the need to “cleanse” and “purify” architecture and design into modernity.13 This discourse of hygiene and purification ostensibly articulated modern architecture’s rejection of decoration and ornament, but by the 1920s these aesthetic concepts had come to be associated (not only in architectural discourse) with a complex mix of feminized and racialized perversities. When Le Corbusier wrote that decoration “is suited to simple races, peasants and savages” he was recycling Adolf Loos’ extremely influential essay that linked ornament with criminals, ladies, an indistinguishable list of racially marked pre-moderns (Papuans, Negros, Kafirs, Persians, Slovaks),

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and sexual degenerates.14 These architects, and the purified architectural modernity that they inspired, were, of course, reiterating the scientific racism sustained at the time in criminology, sexology, sociology, and comparative anatomy, wherein “markers of race, class and sexuality overlap” as “lesbianism and male homosexuality, blackness, disease, criminality, working-class status, taint, pollution, and prostitution coexist as multiple features of the trope of degeneracy.”15 The modern architectural identity which solidified around 1927 and 1928 was not only the product of a shared commitment to aesthetic or stylistic reform. As architectural historian Mark Peach explains, “It is by now a commonplace to point out that . . . [modern architects] sought above all to reform the occupants of their architecture.”16 Galvanized to make purified modern buildings, modern architects also sought to make modern bodies cleansed of any trace of racialized, sexualized, and classed degeneration.

It was within this historical and cultural context that Eyre de Lanux and Wyld designed interiors with what Bridget Elliott describes as a hybrid of “primitive” and “modern” aesthetics, crafting very different living spaces for what seem to be very different bodies.

Their first exhibition at the 1928 Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, for instance, included Eyre de Lanux’s sleek glass-pillared table atop a

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Interior by Evelyn Wyld and Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, Salon des Artistes Décorateurs, 1928.

Terrasse du Midi by Evelyn Wyld and Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, Salon d’Automne, 1929.

rug by Wyld that was inspired by Native American design, imagined in a studio apartment on the forty-ninth floor of a skyscraper, set before an ultra-modern floor-to-ceiling bay window wall overlooking New York City.17 In projects like their design of Mrs. Forsythe Sherfesee’s Paris apartment, Eyre de Lanux and Wyld achieved what Madge Garland described, in the language of modern architecture, as “simplicity” and “austerity” with minimal furnishings.18 This particular living space contained a characteristic mix: long, low, squared lounge chairs and divan in beige cowhide, combined with the sort of earthy, decidedly nonindustrial design elements that much modern architecture sought to purge— walls in matte terracotta red, a carefully arranged table display of Mexican terracotta pottery, and Wyld’s richly textured wool rugs, hand-knotted and dyed in the style she learned from textile research in Algeria, patterned in what were read as Africaninspired aesthetics. We also see this sort of “primitive”–modern style at work in the women’s Salon d’Automne (1929) and Union des Artistes Modernes (1930) exhibitions: with the African-inspired designs of Wyld’s rug on the wall (1930) and carved in the lacquered bench (1929) and divan (1930), the wicker and cowhide chairs and bamboo screen (1929), and what seems to be a miniature totem pole (1930), all set within the modern “simplicity” of muted tones (beige and black) and “austerity” of furnishings that Garland admired.

Elliott has suggested that we might consider Eyre de Lanux and Wyld’s work within a range of “‘primitive’ enthusiasms that were differently inflected according to gender” and sexuality at the time.19 Indeed, the exoticization and cultural appropriation involved in modernist primitivism is complicated by the fact that, as female and nonheterosexual, Eyre de Lanux and Wyld were already conceptually connected (within modern architectural and scientific discourse) to the premodern, perverse, and degenerate connotations of the primitive. Instead, I think we might read Eyre de Lanux and Wyld as having cultivated this connection in resistance to both modern architecture’s drive towards a purified identity and the contemporaneous emergence of a purely sexual lesbian identity. By mixing the aesthetic signifiers of degeneration and modernism in their interior designs, then, they created spaces that signaled the possibility of accommodating those mixed, unclean, hybridized bodies that were being carefully purged from architectural modernity at the time.

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The sixty-three letters from Wyld at the Archives of American Art span from 1938 to 1970 and record a remarkable story of queer life, love, commitment. The letters include consistent assertions of Wyld’s unwavering love and affection; advice on Eyre de Lanux’s dealings with her husband, his lovers, her daughter, her daughter’s male and female lovers; as well as encouragement on Eyre de Lanux’s relationships with lovers such as Consuelo Urisarri, Alice de Lamar, and Paolo Casagrande. Judging by these letters, Wyld and Eyre de Lanux seamlessly cultivated a queerness that readers today would recognize as a challenge to fixed sexual identities, homonormative monogamy, and temporality.

But however Wyld and Eyre de Lanux did identify, in their letters there is no mention of the word “lesbian,” or any of its variants, and no clear acknowledgement of the “corporeal and psychic costs of homophobia.”20 The closest thing in the correspondence to a discussion of the possible social and cultural obstacles to samesex love came in 1963 when Eyre de Lanux’s daughter, Anne, left her husband for a woman. Wyld writes, “Your impression of the woman seems to be fairly good—of course you can’t expect her to use your language—but it’s something that she should include you

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The installation by Evelyn Wyld and Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux for the Exposition de L’Union des Artistes Modernes, 1930.

in the party—takes it for granted that you are on her side.”21 It is unclear to what party she is included, but it seems that Anne and her female lover assumed a sense of camaraderie or community from Eyre de Lanux based on a sexuality that, by 1963, is articulated in a language she does not share—and which she describes to Wyld as “shockingly frank.”22 This is the only instance in their letters where same-sex desire figures as a sort of identity, a socially intelligible mode of being that Eyre de Lanux is slightly uncomfortable being read into, and one that constituted a “side.”

Besides this encounter with the next generation’s understanding of sexual identity, in these letters, same-sex desire is linked much less to social intelligibility than to interiority and artistic production.

A letter from December 1962, captures the tone of so many. After three pages of sharing the mundane intricacies of daily life and friends, Wyld signs off explaining, I live chiefly on that period of my life— Paris—with you—but always with a vital anguish that we didn’t play our cards well—it should have been an everlasting companionship—and we didn’t manage to make it that—Now my E, I’ll make you a little dinner—beginning with soupe au pistou—I’m very homesick for you often—always—we had so few years together. . . . My arms very much around you (and yet you are never in them) E.23 Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux in a coat designed by Sonia Delaunay, 1920s.

Opposite: An ink sketch (front and back) in the Eyre de Lanux papers.

The loss Wyld felt as “a vital anguish,” and which is affectively inscribed in the Eyre de Lanux archive, is the loss of a period in history when reconfiguring interior design was also a means of reconfiguring bodies, sexualities, and possibilities for being—that is, when interventions into the design of modern spaces were also interventions about who could count as modern and be accommodated within modernity. Eyre de Lanux and Wyld capitalized on this historically powerful moment of intersection between architecture, design, and sexuality to create very queer modern spaces for very queer modern subjects. Their mix of queer interior design aesthetics (both identifiably modern and anti-modern, racially and sexually degenerate) can be read as part of a losing battle to accommodate those hybrids who rejected received ideas about what it meant to be a woman, but also what it meant to be a sexually, racially specific modern identity.

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from objects of everyday use. . . .[O]rnament is no longer a natural product of our culture, but a symptom of backwardness and degeneracy.”

Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1908), in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed. A. Opel, trans. M. Mitchell (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1998), 167, 169, italics in original.

15 Robin Hackett, Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 8, 36.

For more on the inseparability of scientific racism and homosexuality at the turn of the previous century, see Siobhan Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2 (October 1994); and Dana Seitler, “Queer Physiognomies; or How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality?”

Criticism 46, no. 1 (Winter 2004).

1 Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux papers, box 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter cited as the Eyre de Lanux papers).

2 One major exception is the recently published article by Bridget Elliott on the sapphically inflected collaborative design work of Eyre de Lanux and Wyld, “Art Deco Hybridity, Interior Design and Sexuality Between the Wars: Two Double Acts: Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Archer/Eyre de Lanux and Evelyn Wyld,” in Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, ed., Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 109–132.

Another important essay on the work of Wyld and Eyre de Lanux is Isabelle Anscombe’s “Expatriates in Paris: Eileen Gray, Evelyn Wyld, and Eyre de Lanux,” Apollo 115 (February 1982), 117–118. For more on the life and work of Eyre de Lanux, see Betsy Fahlman, “Eyre de Lanux,” Woman’s Art Journal 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1982–Winter 1983), 44–48.

3 See, for example, Berenice Abbott’s photographs of women, including Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Solita Solano, Sylvia Beach, Tylia Perlmutter, Princess Eugène Murat, Margaret Anderson, Anna Wickham and Eileen Gray; or Romaine Brooks’ painted portraits of such women as Una Troubridge, Ida Rubenstein, Natalie Barney, Elsie de Wolfe, Renata Borgatti, Gluck, Elisabeth de Gramont (Duchesse de ClermontTonnerre), herself, and Eyre de Lanux (as The Huntress, 1920). For more on the role of portraiture and photography in early twentieth-century lesbian culture, see Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

4 Ann Cvetkovich, “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 1 (2002), 106–47.

5 See Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

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6 See Heather Love, “Impossible Objects: Waiting for the Revolution in S. T. Warner’s Summer Will Show,” in Sapphic Modernities, 133–134.

7 For the comprehensive analysis of Hall’s trials, and the shift from modern chic to degenerate lesbian, see especially Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism.

8 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

9 Ibid., 4.

10 Ibid.

11 Whitney Chadwick and Tirza Latimer, eds., The Modern Women Revisited: Paris between the Wars (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), xx.

12 Philip Johnson and HenryRussell Hitchcock organised “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. It featured work by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van de Rohe and was accompanied by a monograph, The International Style (New York: Norton, 1932).

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13 See Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 10–11, in which he quotes Mies van der Rohe’s and Gropius’ intention that the Weissenhofsiedlung work “purify” architecture of “divergent” tendencies; and Sigfried Giedion’s hope, which he shared with cofounder Le Corbusier, that the CIAM would perform a “secret cleansing” of modern architecture. On the role of the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung in laboriously creating the impression of a spontaneous international modern style, see especially Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 303.

14 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans.

Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), 143.

In 1908, Adolf Loos published what would become his most famous condemnation of decoration in the essay “Ornament and Crime,” where he explains that “[a] person of our times who gives way to the urge to daub the walls with erotic symbols [that is, ornament] is a criminal or a degenerate. . . . [T]he evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation

16 Mark Peach “‘Der Architekt Denkt, Die Hausfrau Lenkt’: German Modern Architecture and the Modern Woman,” German Studies Review 18, no. 3 (October 1995), 441.

17 They entitled this design “Baie d’un studio au 49e étage.”

18 Madge Garland, “Interiors

by Eyre de Lanux,” Creative Art (April 1930), 263–265.

19 Elliott, “Art Deco Hybridity,” 121.

20 Love, Feeling Backward, 4.

21 Wyld to Eyre de Lanux, 27 June 1963, box 6, Eyre de Lanux papers .

22 Eyre de Lanux to Wyld, 29 July 1963, box 6, Eyre de Lanux papers.

23 Wyld to Eyre de Lanux, 16 December 1962, box 6, Eyre de Lanux papers.

To look through someone’s journals is to gain an unprecedented view of what life was like through the work produced along the way. In the case of Millicent Nesbit, an Oklahoma transplant who arrived in New York City in 1918, that life included collaborations with many of the designers whose work would come to ultimately shape communication in the twentieth century.Though she herself remained anonymous, she left behind a prolific body of work that suggests a spirited presence and a robust involvement in the world she inhabited. In both word and deed, through portfolio and journal alike, Nesbit’s observations reveal the spectacular insight and vision that made her such a valuable contributor to the era in which she lived.

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Selections from the portfolio and the journals of Millicent Nesbit, graphic designer, 1920 –1955.

Finding Miss Nesbit An Imagined Biography Jessica Helfand

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Nesbit worked on a series of billboards in the 1940s, and later assisted the American artist Rockwell Kent on an early broadcast interview. Early photographs reveal Nesbit as a hard-workng student, whose focus later paid off when she was awarded a coveted internship with Leo Lionni. For years she prayed for a chance to work with Paul Rand, but the closest she got to him was in a photograph at a party. Rand, seated near to Isamu Noguchi and his wife, barely gave her a glance.

Saving things. Drawing things. Looking at books and at pictures and at everything in her midst—which, back in Oklahoma, didn't amount to very much.The only child of hard-working hoteliers (her family owned the legendary Hotel Severs in Muskogee, Oklahoma), she'd spend hours sitting in the hotel rooms, copying the letterforms from the engraved hotel stationery until the chambermaids shooed her away, anxious to get on with their business and wondering who she was, this curious child who drew pictures all day long. z The day she turned eighteen, Millicent Nesbit bought a train ticket and off she went, heading East, hoping to find her way to art school. The year was 1918, and the war was only just over, but for Millicent, the battles continued unabated— battles with her family, who simply couldn't understand her unwavering devotion to this thing called Commercial Art. But Millicent was over the moon, surrounded by pastepots filled with rubber cement, single-edged razor blades that obliterated a manicure, and something called a Lucy — an immense black box you could stand in, hand-cranking it up and down to visualize things up and down in size. And that was just the beginning. z For the next thirty years, Millicent Nesbit was in the middle of it all, working first as an apprentice and later as an art director, in studios and agencies all over the country. There were parties and exhibitions, openings, and no shortage of varied visual experiments, all of them preserved in multiple portfolios, where they lay, undiscovered, until late last year.

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She was always making things.

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Millicent Nesbit’s parents continued to write to her throughout her years in New York, hoping that a mere glimpse of their hotel’s letterhead would remind their daughter of her Oklahoma home, but to no avail. By all indications, Nesbit’s off-hours were as exciting as her time in the studio, if not more so: she attended parties and dinners, and she was rarely, if ever, in need of male companionship. A dinner party at the New York Art Students League in the 1930s reveals the painters Louis Bouché, Edwin Dickinson, Julian Levi, and Walter Pach. Some years later, Nesbit waltzed with an unidentified suitor. Stealing a glance on the dance floor nearby is Eero Saarinen, with his wife, Aileen.

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Indeed, dancing loomed large in young Millicent's carefree life: coincidentally, her personal work started to take on a kind of choreographic undertone also. Among multiple design projects were book jackets and broadsides that relied upon cut paper and careful investigations of shape and composition. Her own collages, too, reflected this spirited appeal to pure, dynamic energy. Even the covers of her journals reflected a restlessness, a need to turn and torque the boundaries of color and shape in space, on the page, and in the air.

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Some of Nesbit's observations took place between photography and collage. Here, an early collaboration with Alvin Lustig reveals a playful tension between a series of floating triangles and typographic marks that appear lazily suspended, like strings from flyaway kites. In her journal, opposite, lies a photograph of a Times Square billboard taken at night. By positioning it on its side, Nesbit amplified the dynamic geometry that led her to the abstract composition she and Lustig created.

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At the time of her death in the early 1960s, Millicent Nesbit left over100 sketchbooks filled with notes, photographs, sketches, and lists of unrealized projects. Calendar pages reveal her peripatetic schedule, marked by studio visits and dinners to attend, client meetings, and supplies to purchase. Snapshots run from found typography to formal portraits of her design heroes, including the legendary American designer Alvin Lustig; Nesbit named her only child after him.

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EditorIAL

Darcy Tell, Editor Jenifer Dismukes Managing Editor Design

Winterhouse Subscriptions & single issues

Individual rate with Membership Student rate Institutional rate Single back issues

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All inquiries regarding subscriptions, back issues, and manuscript submissions should be sent to: Editor Archives of American Art Journal P.O. Box 37012 MRC 937 Washington, DC 20013 T. 202.633.7971 Manuscripts submitted for publication should be based in part on materials in the Archives.

Full text of volumes 2–43 (1962–2003) available online through JSTOR. Articles published in the Journal are abstracted and indexed in the Art Index and in Historical Abstracts America: History and Life.

Opinions expressed in the Archives of American Art Journal are those of the authors and not necessarily of the editors or the Archives of American Art. ©2009 Smithsonian Institution.

Color wheel, Rudolf Schaeffer papers.

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Archives of american art

THE ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART , founded in 1954 and a unit of the Smithsonian Institution since 1970, provides researchers with access to the largest collection of documents on the history of the visual arts in the United States. The collection, which now totals more than sixteen million items of original source material, consists of the papers of art-world figures and the records of art dealers, museums, and other art-related businesses, institutions, and organizations. Original material can be consulted, by appointment, in Washington, DC; the most actively used holdings are available on microfilm through Interlibrary Loan or at Archives offices in Washington and New York, and at affiliated research centers in Boston, Fort Worth, San Francisco, and San Marino, California.

The Archives is part of one of the world’s great research centers for the arts and sciences. In addition to its federal funding, the Archives raises a portion of its annual budget from private sources, including its membership program and contributions from individuals and organizations.

Mission statement: The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art enlivens the extraordinary human stories behind America’s most significant art and artists. It is the world’s largest and most widely used resource dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America. Constantly growing in range and depth, ever increasing in accessibility to its many audiences, it is a vibrant, unparalleled, and essential resource for the appreciation, enjoyment, and understanding of art in America.

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Archives of Americ an Art Journ al 48: 1–2

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Janice C. Oresman Chair Suzanne D. Jaffe President Arthur Cohen Vice President John R. Robinson Treasurer Lynn Dixon Johnston Secretary Frank Martucci Member at Large Warren Adelson Ann E. Berman Gerald E. Buck Edward O. Cabot Ruth Feder Barbara G. Fleischman Martha J. Fleischman Diane A. Fogg Leslie K. S. Fogg John K. Howat Wendy Jeffers Gilbert H. Kinney Tommy LiPuma Barbara Mathes Marla Prather Wendy Reilly Rona Roob Donna Kemper Rosen

Trustee Council

William Bailey Gilbert S. Edelson Dr. Helen I. Jessup Samuel C. Miller Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims Theodore J. Slavin

Trustees Emeriti

Nancy Brown Negley Chair Dr. Irving F. Burton Dona Kendall Richard A. Manoogian Marilyn Schlain Alan E. Schwartz A. Alfred Taubman

Founding Trustees

Lawrence A. Fleischman Mrs. Edsel B. Ford Edgar P. Richardson

Ex Officio

Dr. G. Wayne Clough Secretary, Smithsonian Institution Dr. Richard Kurin Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Director

John W. Smith

credits

Cover: Alvin Lustig Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Pages 4–9, 11–17: Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 10: Photograph © Chicago Historical Society.

Pages 18–29: Esther McCoy Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 28: Photographs copyright © Marvin Rand; Page 29: Photograph copyright © Harvey Steinberg.

All the photographs in Jessica Helfand’s artist’s project are from the collections of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Specific credit information is listed below, by page number.

Page 66: (left to right) Charles Green Shaw Papers, John Henry Bradley Storrs Papers.

Page 67: (clockwise from top right) Esther G. Rolick Papers, Marcel Breuer Papers, Charles Green Shaw Papers.

Page 68: Oscar Bluemner Papers.

Page 30: Photograph by John Rawlings, © Condé Nast; Pages 30–44: T. H. Robsjohn Gibbings Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Pages 47–48: Photograph by Tom Bernard, courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, Inc.; Pages 49, 51, 55: Ellen Hulda Johnson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Pages 52–54: courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, Inc. Pages 56, 59, 64­–65: Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Pages 58, 61–63: Photographs lent by Isabelle Anscombe.

Page 69: (clockwise from top left) Rockwell Kent Papers; Ben Shahn Papers; Federal Art Project, Photographic Division Collection; Katherine Kuh Papers; Douglas Leigh Papers; Florence Knoll Bassett Papers; background: Charles Green Shaw Papers.

Page 70: all photographs from the Julian E. Levi Papers, (background) Mary Fanton Roberts Papers.

Page 71: (above) Mary Fanton Roberts Papers, (below) Aline and Eero Saarinen Papers.

Page 72: Charles Green Shaw Papers.

Page 73: (background) James Wells Champney Papers, (below, left to right:) John Henry Bradley Storrs Papers, Kootz Gallery Records, John D. Graham Papers.

Page 74: Alvin Lustig Papers.

Page 75: Douglas Leigh Papers.

Page 76: (clockwise from top) Charles Greenshaw Papers; Center for Creative Studies Records; (left) Douglas Leigh Papers.

Page 77: (clockwise from top left) Philip Evergood Papers; Lee Gatch Papers; Mary Fanton Roberts Papers; Paul Suttman Papers; Photograph by Peter A. Juley and Son, Miscellaneous Photograph Collection; Photograph by Charles Eisenman and Grubman, Federal Art Project, Photographic Division Collection; Alvin Lustig Papers.

Page 78: Rudolph Schaeffer Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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