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

Looking for Billy Baldwin

I always wanted to have an apartment like Billy Baldwin’s. Finally I got to live in a high-rise and have a little desk in my living room. Still don’t have the slipper chairs. I search the Internet for articles about him and for tips on where to purchase his best designs. (Shortcut: Ventry Limited, Bielecky Brothers.) His best work was his most contemporary. What I would have done for Si Newhouse’s white art-filled living room! As soon as Rizzoli published Billy Baldwin: The Great American Decorator, I ordered it. Many of the images are also in Baldwin’s earlier books, which took me to back to my late teens and early twenties, when I poured over those volumes fantasizing about living a bigger life in Manhattan.

Billy Baldwin's apartment with the famous slipper chair

Billy Baldwin's apartment

Kenneth Hair Salon
New York

In my first blog, I mentioned an early childhood memory of seeing Mrs. Gilbert Miller’s Mallorca house in the pages of House & Garden. The indoor/outdoor terrace confused my young mind, but I never forgot it. Several years later, as a teenager, I opened the heavy brass and glass door on Grant Avenue and walked down a few steps into Tiffany’s perfumed tranquility, designed by Billy Baldwin (with Tiffany’s design director, Van Day Truex.) I wanted to live there. Who would have thought that Tiffany’s San Francisco outpost occupied a windowless ground floor of a parking garage (that was once a great department store)? It was hushed and elegant, but not intimidating. The slip-covered sofas were small, complemented by black lacquer Parsons tables and Bielecky Brothers cane side chairs and just a little shiny brass. Even if all I could afford was a modest vase or drinking glass, I felt truly swell for those few minutes. I understood what Holly Golightly was up to.

Mr. and Mrs. Harding Lawrence Residence

Dallas, Texas

Cole Porter's apartment.  Rendering by Mark Hampton

Mr. and Mrs. William Paley's Apartment
St. Regis Hotel, New York

By high school, I knew all about Billy Baldwin and his slipper chair. His simple one-room apartment seemed like the epitome of an elegant New York life out of reach. One of the first design books I bought was Billy Baldwin Decorates, essentially reprints of articles he wrote for House & Garden. He wrote another book, Billy Baldwin Remembers. And then his heir, Michael Gardine, prepared an autobiography that was a bit more gossipy.…

Arango Apartment
Madrid Spain

Now there is Billy Baldwin: America’s Greatest Decorator, by Adam Lewis, who has written biographies of designers Van Day Truex and Albert Hadley. The good news is twofold. There are a few images that have not been seen in any of the previously published books. And the lectures Baldwin gave at the Cooper Hewitt in 1974 are published for the first time. The bad news is also twofold. Lewis’s text contains little new information, and the writing is as stilted as in his other two books. Perhaps worse, at least for a design book, is the uneven quality of the images. Some of the photographs are reproduced beautifully, as you expect from a Rizzoli book, while other images, many of them by the famous photographer Horst, appear to be scans from magazines. Jane Thompson’s recent book about Design Research (published by Chronicle) faced a similar challenge of uneven visuals, but the clever design by Pentagram fixed that. Not so here. The design does not mitigate the uneven reproduction quality. Some of the fuzzy pictures are full pages! When confronted with relatively few visuals, the designers of Lewis’s earlier volume on Van Day Truex resorted to a smaller format. That might have been a good choice here, although the subtitle wouldn’t have made sense. And small books don’t sell as well. I am not sure that Baldwin would want something that was not as tailored as his upholstered furniture.

Mrs. Clive Runnells Residence
Hobe Sound, Florida

Lewis interviewed several people, but many of the key folks are dead, including Michael Gardine and Way Bandy, who provided Baldwin with his final home on Nantucket. Baldwin retired in 1973 and died in 1983, apparently broke. The narrative isn’t compelling and doesn’t capture Baldwin in his time. Lewis writes about Baltimore’s upper middle class, which Baldwin grew up in, and then about the superwealthy that Baldwin catered to in New York and elsewhere. But Lewis provides little insight or analysis. And he adds little color or texture to the tale. (Odd, given Baldwin’s love for both.) Although Lewis says Baldwin lived as an out gay man, he rarely mentions Baldwin’s homosexuality, treating it as if it shouldn’t be discussed. While that might have been a hallmark of the time, I am not sure it was Baldwin’s way. Curiously, the author doesn’t connect Baldwin’s father’s disapproval to his initial false starts and his later ambition and incredible success. Unfortunately, Lewis doesn’t really place Baldwin in any larger context than the upper reaches of the Upper East Side.

For a glimpse into Baldwin’s actual life, I would suggest an interview Baldwin gave to Francesco Scavullo in the 1970s for the book Scavullo Men. (There are also a lot of great interviews with leading cultural figures of the time, like Leo Castelli, Henry Geldzahler, Leo Lerman, and Sam Wagstaff.) This interview is not listed in Lewis’s bibliography, and I think that is a serious omission. When asked if he was spoiled, Baldwin refers to his mentor Ruby Ross Wood: “I really pity most rich people, and I don’t want to see very many of them. I think they’re boring. My old boss, Ruby Wood, said to me ‘Now, Billy Baldwin, you’re coming here from that nice town and you’re going to have a hard time because New York is very tough. But don’t forget one thing: you’re going to see an awful lot of rich people. You get as much of their money as you can. That’s all they’re worth—money—and we’re lucky because we’re going to get some of it.’” Baldwin is quite open about being “1000 percent homosexual” and about how he looks on serving the superrich and what it meant to be gay. When asked, “As a man, what were your feelings about becoming a decorator?” he replies, “Since the day I was born I’ve never had the slightest idea of being gay. It just seemed perfectly normal.”

With both of Baldwin’s volumes out of print, Lewis’s book provides a survey, if not a critical look, at the great decorator, who by the way loved being called a decorator. In the Scavullo interview, Baldwin responds to the question about the difference between a designer and decorator by saying, “Michael Greer, if you please, was the first person to call himself a designer so people wouldn’t think that he was gay. Designer is supposed to make a man of you. It’s perfect crap.” Despite its shortcomings, the volume is important for the library of future decorators—and designers too.

All images (unless otherwise noted) courtesy Rizzoli USA.

Related Links
www.ventryltd.com
bieleckybrothers.com
www.rizzoliusa.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2vuOxz6YU

Design District Ramble

The new Restoration Hardware showroom on Henry Adams

Walked down the street the other day to check in on the new Restoration Hardware Showroom that replaced Ed Hardy’s antique emporium in at the San Francisco Design Center. The garden draws you in, but the store makes you want to turn around and run. It felt like an oversized dark nightclub with lots of puffy linen furniture or a nightmarish exaggeration of an undertaker’s office. Not a spec of color, just grey, grey, grey. Ed Hardy’s space worked because he found ways to bring in the light and make each nook enchanting, if somewhat unaffordable. The gardens were pure delight – now you may not reach the rear courtyard.


The courtyard is the best part of the new Restoration Hardware Showroom


The nice entry garden


Set for a funeral party


Inside the undertaker's chamber


Light at the end of the tunnel

The line between wholesale and retail has gotten increasingly fuzzy down there in the design district. Some showrooms won’t let you in without a decorator, others will. In the long run this may be good for transparency, if not profit. But when a retailer makes such a huge investment with such little impact you wonder what the future of design driven retail might be. If you want neutral, Room & Board is just a few blocks away and a far more pleasant environment than Restoration Hardware. Less Faux France though. In these budget times you can often see a decorator walking the floor with a client. While I like Room & Board I think of it as a source of big background pieces, not a place for new design. Design Within Reach during Rob Forbes’ tenure nearly became a real design shop like our long lost Design Research. I still like most of the furniture at DWR, but some of the joy is missing. I am not sure it is possible to have a high quality national design chain. The pressure of quarterly returns ruins the good news. It takes the hand of the individual, Ben Thompson at Design Research, or Maynard and Lu Lyndon at Placewares, (http://www.placewares.com) to create enduring beauty in a retail setting. (More on the talented folks up at Sea Ranch later this year.)

It’s also fun to stop in at Inja, 215 Fifteenth Street and see what they have in stock in Asian design goodies. I found a tiny Buddha head for just $25.00. But the real treat in the neighborhood is next door, a talent to watch, designer Siobhan Brennan.


Buddha head from Inja


Living room by Siobhan Brennan
Photograph by David Wakely

Siobahn will have an official opening party for her showroom from 1 to 4 pm on Saturday October 16th with special guest John Wheatman signing his beautiful books. She worked with John for over twenty five years and decided to open her own business after he closed his shop last year (http://designfaith.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html). She continues his tailored Asian influenced aesthetic, with her own stamp, mainly bolder color and a broader variety of artists. The photographer for John’s books, David Wakely, has kindly loaned us a few images of Siobhan’s work. I am sure there will be more beautiful rooms coming.


Napping space by Siobhan Brennan
Photo by David Wakely