George Nelson – MAA Swaged Leg Lounge Chair

George Nelson (Designer) MAA Swaged Leg Lounge Chair, designed circa 1958, in production 1958-1964, made 1958-1963 Born 1908. Hartford. Connecticut: died 1986. New York, New York Design Office: George Nelson and Company . . Manufacturer: Herman Miller. Inc .. Zeeland. M1ch1gan Tubular steel. molded plastic shell and rubber 29 5/8 x 27 3/ 4 x 27 inches Gift of Herman Miller. Inc. zo 1989.3 Architect, writer and designer George Nelson was one of the pioneers of postwar design in America. Made Herman Miller's first Director of Design in 1946, Nelson felt strongly that innovative design was needed to replace the impractical revival furnishings that appeared in most postwar homes. He continued the work of Gilbert Rohde, the first designer at Herman Miller to create modern objects, and enabled the company to become a forerunner in the creation and dissemination of modern industrial design. Under his leadership, Herman Miller employed forward-thinking designers whose experiments with material and form shaped what was, and still is, contemporary design. This molded plastic chair formed part of a collection of tables ...

Eero Saarinen – Model for Dulles International Airport Terminal Building

Eero Saarinen (Designer) Model for Dulles International Airport Terminal Building, circa 1960 Born 1910. Kirkkonummi. Finland. Cranbrook Academy of Art. Instructor. 1939-1941 : died 1961. Bloomfield Hills. Michigan Maker: Eero Saannen and Associates. Bloomfield Hills. Michigan. with Jim Smith Wood. masonite. plastic. gesso and paint 18 1/2x144 3/4 x 46 1 /2 inches Gift of Rice University. School of Architecture CAM 1983.15 When Eero Saarinen designed the passenger terminal for the gateway to the nation's capital, he envisioned a building that expressed movement and the excitement of travel. Dulles International was the first commercial airport to be designed specifically for jet air travel. After completing extensive research into jet travel, Saarinen and his team developed a building that was meant to be practical, elegant and monumental. Two years after this model was constructed, the terminal opened for operation. Angular concrete columns spaced forty feet apart on each side of the main concourse carry suspension cables that in turn support curved concrete roof panels. The columns are tapered and tipped outward to emphasize the dynamic structural system. The ...

Eero Saarinen – Pedestal or Tulip Side Chair

Eero Saarinen (Designer) Pedestal or Tulip Side Chair/ designed 1955-1957,· made 1971 or earlier Born 1910. Kirkkonummi. Finland: Cranbrook Academy of Art. Instructor. 1939-1941: died 1961. Bloomfield Hills. Michigan Design Office: Eero Saarinen and Associates. Bloomfield Hills. Michigan Manufacturer: Knoll Associates. Inc .. East Greenville. Pennsylvania Fiberglas-reinforced plastic. aluminum. upholstery 32 x 191 /2x21 inches Gift of Knoll International zo 1977.7 Eero Saarinen once considered pursuing a career as a sculptor. Some critics have suggested that he never strayed far from that path. Some of his most impressive buildings, such as the Ingalls Hockey Rink at Yale, the TWA Terminal in New York, Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C., and the St. Louis Arch, possess a decidedly sculptural form, with a free-flowing, curvilinear quality central to their design. In these and other buildings, Saarinen also showed a sculptor's concern for surface textures and treatments, selecting exterior materials that would best support the rhythm of the design and the function of the architecture. Saarinen brought these same sensibilities to bear on his furniture designs, which he began ...

Maija Grotell – Vase – 1940-42

Maija Grotell Vase, 1940-1942 Born 1899, Helsinki. Finland: Cranbrook Academy of Art. Head. Department of Ceramics. 1938-1966: died 1973. Pontiac. Michigan Stoneware: Albany slip over unglazed clay 21 1 / 2 x 8 1/4 (diameter) inches Collection of Cranbrook Art Museum CAM 1970.2 Born in Finland, Maija Grotell studied in Helsinki at the Central School of Arts and Crafts with Belgian-English ceramist Alfred William Finch. After immigrating to the United States in 1927, she taught at the Henry Street Settlement, Rutgers University, and several other institutions in the New York City area until 1938, when she was invited to join the faculty at Cranbrook Academy of Art. The strong, simple silhouette of this vessel is characteristic of Grotell's production throughout her career. To decorate the cylinder, she used slip---a form of clay thinned to a creamy consistency and painted on before firing; the blackness of the Albany slip contrasts with the lighter clay body. Grotell applied it in a geometric pattern, allowing the opposition of positive and negative spaces to establish a contrapuntal rhythm across the ...

Mary and Edwin Scheier – Bowl

Mary and Edwin Scheier Bowl, 1951 Mary: Born Mary Goldsmith, 1909. Salem. Virginia Edwin: Born 1910, New York. New York Earthenware 7 x 13 1/2 (diameter) inches Museum Purchase with funds from The Cranbrook Foundation CAM 1951.9 Mary and Edwin Scheier's life-long collaboration began in the 1930s when both worked for the federal Works Progress Administration. After spending a year as traveling puppeteers, they were given the opportunity to experiment with ceramics at the Tennessee Valley Authority Ceramic Laboratory and turned to pottery. Although they were largely self-taught, they were soon winning awards in national competitions. From 1940 to 1960, they taught at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. Mary threw their small and medium sized vessels, such as this one, which came into the Art Museum's collection from the "Third Biennial Exhibition of Ceramics and Textiles" in 1951. Its flaring shape and thin walls show her mastery of the wheel and her admiration for Japanese and Chinese ceramics traditions. Edwin was responsible for the glazing and decoration. The abstracted linear patterns he used here relate to late ...

Bradley Walker Tomlin – Music Rack

Bradley Walker Tomlin Music Rack, 1944 Born 1899, Syracuse, New York; died 1953. New York. New York Oil on canvas 42 1/8 x 24 15/16 inches Gift of George Gough Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth through The Cranbrook Foundation CAM 1945.25 Bradley Walker Tomlin gained notoriety in 1951 as part of an alliance of painters who protested The Metropolitan Museum of Art's conservative exhibition program. Dubbed by Life Magazine as "The Irascible 18," the New York group included rising luminaries such as Willem de Koening, Robert Motherwell and Tomlin's close friend, Jackson Pollock. The Irascibles represented a radical break with the European modernist tradition and solidified the American postwar movement of Abstract Expressionism. Tomlin's career was brief com pared to most of his illustrious colleagues. Plagued by poor health, which prohibited him from active duty in the armed forces, he died of a heart attack in 1953. Music Rack illustrates the strong influence of Cubism on Tomlin's formative work. In this visual evocation of music, a still-life disintegrates into an array of random fragments. A songbird ...

Peter Voulkos – Storage Jar

Peter Voulkos Storage Jar, 1952 Born 1924. Bozeman. Montana: died 2002. Bowling Green. Ohio Stoneware 181/2 x 12 1/2 (diameter) inches Museum Purchase CAM 1953.6 Following a period of teaching at the vanguard Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1953, ceramist Peter Voulkos traveled to New York City where he came in contact with the leading Abstract Expressionist painters of the period. His work changed dramatically, and he is credited with revolutionizing the concept of ceramics as an art form and with encouraging the use of ceramics as a means of deep personal expression. This jar was completed early in the artist's career when Voulkos had just finished the graduate program at California College of Arts and Crafts, where he wrote his master's thesis on lidded jars. It demonstrates his skill at expertly thrown functional objects with innovative design work, using native Montana clays, earth slips and glazes. The body of the jar is decorated with wax-inlaid line drawings, an adaptation of the wax-resist technique used in batik. His whimsical figures foreshadow the gestural expressiveness of ...

Lucienne Day – Calyx (Drapery Fabric)

Lucienne Day (Designer) Calyx (Drapery Fabric), 1951 Born 1917. Coulson. Surrey, England Manufacturer: Heal Fabrics. Ltd., London. England Distributor: Greeff Fabrics. Inc .. New York. New York Screen-printed linen 43 1/2 x 90 inches Gift of Greeff Fabrics. Inc. CAM 1953.1 British-born Lucienne Day graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1940 before working as an art teacher, freelance designer and design partner with husband Robin Day. Together the Days pioneered new production techniques and design methods in postwar Britain. Although well known for her apparel and furnishing fabrics as well as her wall paper, carpet and porcelain designs, Day's work also includes unique wall hangings. Designed to accompany Robin's products for the "Home" section of the Festival of Britain in 1951, Calyx was an immediate success. It received the prestigious gold medal at the IX Milan Triennale in 1951 and was rated the best textile on the American market by the American Institute of Decorators in 1952. The printed textile, with abstracted botanical forms, embodies designers' tendencies in the 1950s to move away from the ...

Wharton Esherick – Spiral Three-Step Ladder

Wharton Esherick Spiral Three-Step Ladder, 1966 Born 1887. Philadelphia. Pennsylvania: died 1970. Paoli. Pennsylvania Cherry with hickory legs 48 x 16 1 /2 x 17 112 inches Gift of S. C. Johnson and Son. Inc. CAM 1977.7 As a young painter Wharton Esherick lived and taught in the utopian community of Fairhope, Alabama, prior to settling in 1926 in Paoli, Pennsylvania, outside his native city of Philadelphia . Inspired by Thoreau's Walden, Esherick and his wife embraced a life there in harmony with nature, absent the modern conveniences that were shaping the typical twentieth-century home. His attention turned from painting to woodcarving as he crafted a unique house and studio complete with furnishings and architectural details of his own design. Although this woodland dwelling was the focus of his creative energy for decades, the reclusive artist also crafted sculpture and furniture for select clients. Like his house, Esherick's furniture reflects the organic forms and materials of the natural environment. In functional artworks such as his graceful Spiral Three-Step Ladder, Esherick combines a devotion to craftsmanship inherited from the ...

Gertrud and Otto Natzler – Tall Double-Curved Bottle with Lip

Gertrud and Otto Natzler Tall Double-Curved Bottle with Lip, 1963 Gertrud: Born Gertrud Amon. 1908. Vienna. Austria: died 1971. Los Angeles. California Otto: Born 1908. Vienna. Austria Ceramic: blue-green and sang reduction glaze with crystals and melt fissures (molybdenum crystalline glaze) 20 1/2 x 71/4 (diameter) inches Gift of Peggy deSalle in memory of Albert deSalle CAM 1980.22 The work of Gertrud and Otto Natzler has become synonymous with complete harmony between form and glaze. After meeting in Vienna, the couple became interested in ceramics and studied together at the workshop of Franz Iskra. They established their own workshop in Vienna in 1935 and were awarded a Silver Medal at the Wor Id Exposition in Paris in 1937. Gertrud and Otto married in 1938 and moved to California, where they taught and collaborated until Gertrud's death in 1971. With Gertrud throwing the pots and Otto formulating the glazes, their ceramic work found a complete unity of expression. This vase, with its molybdenum crystalline glaze, is a fine example of Otto's experiments with reduction firing (the extraction ...