Alexander Girard: Deep Modernist. A Conversation with Ruth Keffer

One of Ruth Keffer's hand-drawn patterns

A few years ago, my friend the architect and NorCalMod author Pierluigi Serraino took me to see a house designed by Don Knorr with interiors by Alexander Girard. It was almost perfectly intact despite being 40 years old. Girard’s exuberance fit perfectly into a timber Miesian dwelling. We suggested that it might make a great story for Interior Design. A few months later, Eric Laignel photographed the project, and Edie Cohen authored the article. You can see it here at http://www.interiordesign.net/article/484672-Welcome_to_1969_pix.php?intref=sr.

(For the online version of the issue, Pierluigi and I had our own conversation, which you can see here: http://www.interiordesign.net/article/483940-Conversations_with_Pierluigi_Serraino.php?intref=sr)

Front doors designed by Alexander Girard
Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

More than 20 years ago, I visited the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe and was dazzled by Girard’s collection and display. When I lived in Los Angeles, my friend Elaine Jones gave me a few samples from the years she worked with Girard, George Nelson, and Charles Eames at Herman Miller. These little pieces of fabric are among my favorite mementos.

But somehow I missed the exhibit at SFMOMA in 2006–2007. Recently I was having lunch with Ruth Keffer and found out that she was involved in the show. Looking for any excuse to talk about Girard, I asked her some questions. Her answers give us some further insight into the legendary designer.

Girard exhibit entry
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Entry sign on freight elevator
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Q: What was your role in the Girard exhibit?

I was the curator. That role fell to me because Joe Rosa [SFMOMA’s curator of architecture and design] had decided to move to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, so his exit timing became my opportunity. Most of the pieces in the show were accessioned by Joe, except for the Three Passenger Sofa and the La Fonda Chair, which the museum had acquired during the Paolo Polledri era. The pieces that Joe accessioned all came from one donor, a local collector named Carl James, who had been the manager of the Herman Miller showroom in San Francisco back in the day. Carl had lots of textiles, obviously, and many pieces from the La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York, and a cache of ephemera that mostly wasn’t in the show but resides in SFMOMA’s library archive.

The exhibition was intended as a showcase of that accession, with a few other pieces thrown in. It was small, but there was enough for me to create what I felt was a meaningful survey of the high points of Girard’s career: Herman Miller and the textiles, the work for Braniff Airlines, La Fonda, and a smattering of graphic design.

Girard patterns Photo: Ruth Keffer

Girard exhibit title wall
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Girard exhibit gallery
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Gallery exhibit detail
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Q: Did you know about Girard before you started working on the exhibit?

More or less. Mostly less. I think I lumped him in with the other biggies of midcentury design. I knew more about Herman Miller in general than I did him. When the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum did their show in 2000, I remember being very excited to see the images from that exhibition (although I never got to see the show itself), because I’m a huge textile fanatic. But I was still not processing who he was in relation to the company or to Eames and Nelson, or his real stature as a designer. And it’s funny, because I think my confusion had something to do with the way we think of textile designers as a step or two below furniture designers, who are a step or two below proper interior designers, who are a step below architects.

Photo: Ruth Keffer

Photo: Ruth Keffer

Fabrics with three passenger sofa
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Three passenger sofa with pillow
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Q: Had you been to Santa Fe to see the Museum of International Folk Art?

I had not and have not seen the MoIFA. But I have studied Girard’s work there—the layout of the collection, the contents of the collection, his philosophy of taxonomizing things, etc. And that is where I run into trouble with my easy analysis of Girard, for as much as one can rhapsodize about the extraordinary innovation of his textile designs, when it came to his relationship to folk art itself, to the objects that inspired him as a collector and an artist, he was rather formalist. Or should I say, strictly formalist. He had no interest in cultural anthropology. No interest in folk art as a domain of academic inquiry, and likely no awareness of questions about appropriation or imperialism or any such thing. Up until I started looking at the MoIFA work, I had been thinking of him rather breezily as the father of postmodern design, the first to embrace non-Western influences and celebrate outsider art. But now I’m inclined to think he really didn’t have that kind of vision. What I do think is that as an artist he had a keen attraction to and a sensibility for other artists’ work, for their craft, their color sense, for their own joy present in the objects they created. And I think that’s what made him such an obsessive collector. (Truly obsessive!) And it’s no wonder that toys were his principal passion as a collector.

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Q: Even if Girard didn’t have an interest in the larger philosophical or political aspects of collecting, don’t you think he saw cultural threads?

Definitely he saw cultural threads. I think he was always looking for, and firmly believed in, the idea of cultural commonalities, of the Family of Man. One of those commonalities is the idea that physical objects are vessels for memory and feeling. Girard thought this was a crucial idea to remember and incorporate when designing a space, but he thought that modernism, as a design agenda, had left this notion behind, to its detriment. Ironically, modernism was looking for a way to be global and cross-cultural, but by being abstract. So it’s effacing all those elements that have culture-specific, or what could be defined as narrative, references. But for Girard, storytelling was the whole point, since it is the core activity of every culture. Design is storytelling, and design elements—whether objects or motifs—are dramatic players in the “theater” that one creates when designing.

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

I got very excited by this idea when studying Girard, because it’s the same rhetoric that Kandinsky used when describing his compositions and his relationship to the elements in his work. It is formalism, but it’s not superficial or lacking in political relevance, as the academics would argue. It’s a search for, and a celebration of, something deeper and more immediately human. In the case of Girard’s geometric patterns, the forms are not really abstract but abstract-ed—each adapted from their original context to serve a specific two- or three-dimensional design context, such as the folds of a curtain or the contours of a chair. So the feathers on the surface of an Incan ceremonial cloak become the repeating pattern of the 1957 “Feathers” textile, and in each case the feathers are both a formal and a narrative element, wielded deliberately by the artist for evocative purposes.

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Q: Do you think that George Nelson ends up raising Girard and thus other textile designers to a much higher level of appreciation?

It’s really hard to say when this happened or if it really happened at that time. It’s true that Eames and Nelson and other designers who worked with Girard spoke openly about their reverence for him—he was considered the true genius with instincts they envied. He was prolific and aggressive and very confident. (At one point he was also called a “design automaton.”) And he embodied the Bauhaus principle of the Gesamtkunstwerk, creating the total design environment as an architect, interior designer, and textile designer.

Photo: Ruth Keffer

Photo: Ruth Keffer

Q: Do you feel that you got to show that sense of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the exhibit at SFMOMA?

I certainly tried to, though it was a challenge given the limited number of pieces we had to show. But I thought I touched on his holistic approach in each of the various projects: the way the Herman Miller textiles work with the furniture; the idea of a totally branded environment for Braniff; and for La Fonda del Sol, a complete design package: graphics, tableware, fixtures, the space and light of the interior.

Photo: Ruth Keffer

Checkerboard cloth
Photo: Ruth Keffer

La Fonda del Sol tableware
Photo: Ruth Keffer

Q: Girard has been getting a fair amount of attention these last few years. But his works were not always popular?

In the 1950s and through the Kennedy era, his patterns did not sell well. He could not convince Herman Miller customers to surround themselves with cheerful, playful patterns at the same time they were purchasing minimalist furniture. The Textiles and Objects store—where Herman Miller sold folk art objects alongside the textiles—was a failure.

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine
Front door detail

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

By the time he left Herman Miller in 1973, though, the situation had shifted. The hippie culture embraced non-Western influences, and Pop artists had been doing their thing, and Girard started to look prescient. Designers who followed Girard’s lead in borrowing motifs from other cultures were selling, and they were getting attention as designers. But I think Girard recognized that this new trend, and the growing celebrity of designers in the mainstream culture, had everything to do with marketing and the search for novelty and little to do with his heartfelt quest to plumb the mysteries of the human condition. He remarked, in an interview in 1974 with the curators of a Herman Miller show at the Walker Art Center, that he had recently gone into a Miller showroom in New York and been dismayed by what he saw, or didn’t see, there. He said, “There’s no more religion.”

Girard chair in front of Girard fabric
Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Photo by Eric Laignel
courtesy Interior Design magazine

Which I think reveals the way in which Girard truly was a modernist himself — he believed that design should serve the greater good.



Photographer Eric Laignel and Interior Design editor in chief Cindy Allen graciously loaned the photos from the story that ran in Interior Design.

For more info:

www.ruthkefferdesign.com
www.ericlaignel.com
www.maximodesign.com/
girard.houseind.com/
www.internationalfolkart.org/about/girard.html
www.interiordesign.net

One of Keffer's digital patterns

Handmade Portraits in the Modern Age

A Conversation with Leslie Williamson

Handcrafted Modern by Leslie Williamson

Every now and then, a book arrives which is not just a handsome presentation of information but also a completely satisfying aesthetic object. This was the case with Handcrafted Modern by Leslie Williamson, which was released a few weeks ago. Her photographs of modernist homes capture something of the inhabitant and his or her pattern of living. But they also reveal something more. Something of the life of the creator of the space.

The linen cover and the layout of the book complement the beautiful photos. Leslie’s informal and personal text adds another layer of witness. Leslie and I met at my office recently to talk about her work.

Q: How did you decide to become a photographer?

A: I grew up in San Jose, and I always did art. From the age of about 8, I wanted to be a fashion designer, but I hated to draw and hated to sew. This was a problem. Of course, this was before the entire world wanted to be a fashion designer. It was rather unusual then.

Out of high school, I was studying fashion illustration, a foundation year at art school, and I just decided to stop. I thought I would change my major to photography because taking pictures was faster than drawing. That was completely wrong, of course, but something about me and photography worked. It stuck.

Sink at Wharton Esherick Home

Q: When and where did you study photography?

A: I took my first photo class was when I was 21 at Foothill Junior College in Los Altos, California. After a year, I applied to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and got my undergrad degree from there. I thought I was going to end up shooting fashion, but I quickly realized that I didn’t want to shoot fashion every day. I liked photographing real people.

Q: Did you intend to shoot architecture and interiors?

A: I have always been into design, but I never shot interiors in any serious way. Most of my work has been shooting people, portraits for magazines and advertising . The closest I got to shooting interiors was doing work for Travel + Leisure. I would shoot a story for them, and it always required a restaurant shot or an interior in a hotel, but that was completely different to my approach to shooting interiors for my book. I don’t consider myself an architectural photographer.

Q: How did the idea for the book come about?

A: I needed a break from photography, so I took a job at William Stout Architectural Books. I was in charge of interiors, photography, and furniture design books—all of my loves.

Q: You mean downstairs?

A: Yeah, downstairs was my domain. I still get emails from clients who ask me about photo books. I would still take interesting photo assignments when they came, but most of this time, I was at the bookstore full time.

I think the idea was already in my head before I worked there, but I visited Palm Springs and got a little obsessed with Albert Frey’s home. This was April 2005. I started asking around and found out that you could gain access to his house for architectural study and research. Frey had left his home to the Palm Springs Museum so that one of his buildings would be kept intact architecturally. I got the idea then, but I figured we would have a book like that at Stout.

Albert Frey's Home

So when I got back, I looked around at the bookstore thinking that this kind of book would exist. But it didn’t. There were a few books on architects’ homes. I like looking at those archival images, but I wanted something more. How do designers live with their own work? What sits on the bedside table? What books do they own? The images in my book are all portraits of people through their home. I shot the book that I wanted to buy.

Early on, and through much of the process, I just called it the Book Project. I never sat down and made a plan. I am not sure I knew what “doing a book” really meant. If I had thought it out, I might have never finished it. But I just couldn’t stop shooting this once I started. It was a rather organic process. When I got a big job, I would shoot a house or two. I only had a publisher for the last year or so.

Q: After Frey’s, what was the second house you shot?

A: Gropius’s was next. That was when I realized that everything had to be in the house, as intact as possible. It is about the house and the stuff. Gropius’s daughter arranged the house just as it was on a day in the 60s. It is sublime in its detail.

Walter Gropius's desk

Q: How did you connect with Rizzoli?

A: I met Dung Ngo, one of the senior editors, at the bookstore. I told him I was working on a book, and he was very kind. He had just started at Rizzoli, I believe. Whenever he came back to San Francisco, he came into the store. I sent him contact sheets throughout the project, and he would encourage me to keep going.

Q: Did you know you were a writer as well as a photographer? I really enjoyed the text.

A: I knew I was an OK writer, but I had not done it since college. My writing the book was a matter of necessity. It turned out that the money for the writer would come out of my advance. I needed all of the advance for the photography expenses. I shot everything on film. Plus there was travel, shipping, and of course all the film processing. Most of the time I was working at Stout’s. I couldn’t afford to stop.

So I said I could write it and sent Dung a writing sample. I wrote four chapters in the third person and threw them all away. Luckily, I figured out I had to write in the first person for it to be any good.

Q: But the text doesn’t seem overly personal or self-centered.

A: That’s because I am a fan. I just love these people. I get choked up. And meeting them makes you love them more. Just being able to spend time in the houses and look at their life through their possessions and how they lived.

Even though I am not an expert or a historian, I realized that I had to be the one writing because no one else had my experience being in these homes for two days. Whatever I know is because I look and observe and wonder what the story is. If something piques my interest, I am like a dog with a bone.

Q: What were your criteria for including a house?

A: At the most basic level, I had to really love the house—how it looked, I mean—and the work of the designer who lived there. But other criteria formed as the project went on. Nothing crazy and rigorous…

Q: What kind of camera do you shoot with?

A: A medium format. Mamiya RZ67.

Q: Why do you still use film?

A: I think it’s richer. It’s more beautiful. But also, I started the book on film, so I was adamant that I had to finish that way.

Q: How did you get into all these incredible houses?

A: For the first few, I wrote formal letters. That would be Frey, Gropius, Esherick, Nakashima, and Russel Wright. Honestly, it wasn’t that difficult. And once I had those five, it got easier.

 George Nakashima's Home

Q: Some of the houses are relatively well known, like Eames’s or Gropius’s, but others are not.

A: After I had shot about seven houses, it started to get a bit harder. I had big names, but I wanted unknown gems that no one knew about. So I researched. Irving Harper I knew about, and he had not been seen that much. He has a computer, but he doesn’t use it. So I called him.

Once you start shooting, people start telling you about other houses. I would get a name and research them online, and of course I was spoiled at the bookstore. My friend Cathy Bailey at Heath recommended a couple of places.

 Irving Harper's Studio

Q: Were there some you didn’t get?

A: There are a lot I didn’t get. I wanted to do Oscar Niemeyer but couldn’t. I even got the OK to photograph Finn Juhl’s house. I was all set to go to Copenhagen, but the house got broken into. Then they were handing it over to the Danish Government and asked me to come on really short notice. So it didn’t happen. But it became clear that because of budgetary reasons, this book would focus on just North America.

Russel Wright's Home and Studio

Q: What links all of these houses and designers?

A: I guess the main thread is that I was in love with the house and the work. The interior told a story about the person. But also, there is a thread running through all of these designers—whether furniture or product design or architecture—in that most are from the same general era, except for Wharton Esherick.

Vladimir Kagan's Apartment

John Kapel's Home

Q: Where did the title come from?

A: I didn’t have a title for a long time. Of course the houses are not all handcrafted. The Eames house is basically prefab. The title is not about the structure of the house in every case, but about what you make of the interior of the house over time and how it evolves. There was talk of calling it Handmade Modern, but that didn’t feel right to me. These homes were more handcrafted over time. That title stuck. Handcrafted Modern.

The Eameses Living Room

Q: What about the outtakes, about what we don’t see?

A: I shot 250 to 300 images per house. That’s a lot of pictures! In doing the book, we edited it down to what gave the best idea of what it feels like to be in the house. I ordered it so it was a walk through the house, but there is only so much space in a chapter. I am putting some of the outtakes on my blog.

J.B. Blunk Home at Sunrise

Q: Did you work closely with the graphic designer?

A: Dung knew I had to work with somebody here because I was going to be so hands on. I worked with Adam Brodsley and Eric Heiman of Volume Inc. They totally got the idea. They found this gorgeous typeface and came up with the concept that you are looking through a keyhole, which can be seen on the title page of each chapter. I thought it was perfect.

Q: Over the course of working on the book, what changed in you?

A: I feel like I really found my calling shooting this book. I have no doubt I will continue documenting and shooting homes in this way for the rest of my life as well as shooting these people’s portraits when I can. I think that the way I shoot makes these people more accessible and human. I hope the way I shoot shows these people’s humanity as well. I don’t want to shoot just designers and artisans either, although that is where my heart tends to go. I just like people who are passionate about what they do. Don’t get me wrong, it helps to have great furniture and a cool interior, and these homes I shot for Handcrafted Modern have that in spades. But there are other places I am dying to shoot that have nothing to do with design at all. I have a list started. It is getting pretty long.… I really want to shoot Winston Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms in London. I literally dream about that place.

Self Portrait at Henry Varnum Poor's House

More info can be found at:

www.lesliewilliamson.com
www.lesliewilliamsonphoto.blogspot.com
www.rizzoliusa.com

All photos courtesy Leslie Williamson

Day Time

Celebrating Robin and Lucienne Day

courtesy of Design Onscreen

It’s time for Robin and Lucienne Day to have their moment in the light. Too-long regarded as the Charles and Ray Eames of the UK, their individuality and accomplishments will finally receive due credit with the release of a new film, “Contemporary Days,” followed by the opening of an exhibit next year at the Pallant House Gallery in the UK. Embarking on their prolific careers in furniture and textile design during the turmoil of post-World War II England, the young married couple found themselves in a challenging environment in which to promote design as social vision; the country had been heavily bombed and was without basic materials well into the mid-1950’s. But the Days shared, among other things, a deep optimism for modernism’s potential to help steer the war-torn country in a new direction.


Contemporary Days: The Designs of Lucienne & Robin Day from Design Onscreen on Vimeo.

The film, directed by Murray Grigor, tells the Day’s story in a straight-forward manner through several interviews with people who worked with them. There are more recordings of Lucienne Day, so her voice is more prevalent, but the viewer doesn’t sense that either she or Robin dominated. While the Eames’ collaboration was largely represented through Charles as the spokesperson, the Days pursued their own interests independently and had separate studios right next to each other. Despite this autonomy, Robin’s furniture and Lucienne’s fabrics work well together because of their shared vision rooted in the education (at the Royal College of Art) and wartime experience they shared. Both of them wanted to shape Britain’s modernity after the war.

Not surprisingly, in this post-war context, excess ornament seemed pointless, so Robin’s minimal furniture felt right for the moment. Many of his designs were successfully produced for the low-cost market, in particular his stacking wood, and later, plastic chairs. But when permitted a bit of luxury his work could be almost whimsical, like his some of his pieces for the Festival Hall in 1951. The wood arms feel like wings that might lift the chair into space.

Looking back at Lucienne’s textiles, many designed for Heal’s Department store, we find beautifully drawn and colored patterns. The repeats are subtle and the designs look timeless. Some of them have been reintroduced by Classic Textiles, and Unica Home carries modest, limited edition tea towels.

Calyx textile courtesy of Jill A. Wiltse and H. Kirk Brown III
Collection of British Textiles

The executive producers of the new film, Denver-based collectors H Kirk Brown and Jill A Wiltse, are also loaning their extensive collection for the Pallant Gallery exhibit next year. Their effort and commitment to celebrating the couple’s work have been instrumental in giving the Days this moment.

While the Days were a charismatic and successful couple – with their good looks, beautiful voices, and winning competition entries – they more importantly shared a profound talent and a desire to create change in a challenging time. They had faith in the future. In our own age, perhaps environmental awareness and more efficient technologies may renew the power of design to steer us in a more sustainable direction. The talented young optimists are somewhere among us.

Coda:
Robin Day passed away on November 9th at his home in Chichester, England.

More Information:

The movie:
www.designonscreen.org

The exhibit in 2011:
www.pallant.org.uk/exhibitions/forthcoming/main-galleries/robin-and-lucienne-day/robin-and-lucienne-day

The textiles:
http://www.classictextiles.com/day.html

The tea towels:
http://www.unicahome.com/p40106/limited-edition-tea-towels-designed-by-lucienne-day.html

The interview:
http://www.wallpaper.com/art/the-days-interview/2915

courtesy of Design Onscreen