Ray and Charles Eames examining sling locations for fabric on prototype for the Aluminum Group Lounge Chair, 1957. Copyright 2011, Eames Office LLC.
The chair: you’ve seen it. In airports, churches, waiting rooms, civic centers, bus stations and hospitals. Some people call them “potato-chip chairs.” Design hounds call them “Eames chairs.” By either name, it’s the iconic chair of the modern world. As an observer notes in Eames: The Architect and the Painter, the word “Eamesian,” denotes 20th century style, just as the 19th century meant “Victorian.”
Which is why it’s so shocking, at the beginning of this documentary, to hear narrator James Franco describing Charles Eames’ struggle to build the chair’s prototype with designer Eero Saarinen (yes, he of the Arch) as an entry for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Organic Design in Home Furnishings,” competition in 1940. The men, who were both teaching at Detroit’s Cranbrook School of Art, could not prevent the molded plywood from splitting down the back. It was a relatively new material, and no one really knew how to work with it; they upholstered it to cover the split, won the competition, but couldn’t figure out how to mass-produce it.
The answer did not come quickly. And it would be a design problem not to be solved by Eames and Saarinen, but Eames and Eames. One of the members of the chair design team was a Cranbrook student named Ray Kaiser, who’d studied with Modernist master Hans Hoffman in New York. Charles fell in love with her, left his wife, and married her. (At one point, Ray left Cranbrook in hopes of not destroying Charles’ marriage, but she loved him, too.) Over the next 40 years, their partnership would have a huge impact on American culture—and it extended far beyond how we sit and wait for doctors or trains.
One of the greatest pleasures of The Architect and the Painter is the voyeuristic look we get into the world of Charles and Ray Eames, which, as the alums of the Eames Office attest in the film, was pretty inscrutable even to those close to them. The Eameses strove to build a seamless world for themselves, where play, work, art and life all melded together. When they first moved to L.A., they built a “Kazam! machine,” from heating coils and a bike pump to experiment with molded plywood—and kept it in their two-bedroom apartment. The Eames Office at 901 Washington Boulevard looked like a ’90s Internet startup office: a totally open floor plan, with film equipment, baubles, art, materials and art projects everywhere. The home the Eameses built facing the Pacific Ocean, originally called the Bridge House but now known as Case Study House No. 8, was as much a Modernist statement as it was a place to live (though “Modernism,” Eames-style, was anything but minimalist—Ray Eames scattered all kinds of interesting bric-a-brac around the house, and even attached a tumbleweed, and two Hoffman paintings, to the ceiling beams). The film does an amazing job of plunging the viewer into their world with a combination of archival footage, interviews and outtakes from the Eameses' own films.
The other great virtue of this documentary is its recogniztion of Ray Eames' value as an artist. It’s true that she gets second billing in the title—she’s the painter—but as the film points out, she herself always positioned herself ten paces behind Charles. He, on the other hand, was always trying to push her more to the forefront. In black and white archival footage from The Arlene Francis Show, we see Francis sputtering in confusion when Charles explains that Ray is his full design partner; the camera even cuts Ray out of the frame for most of the sequence. Francis talks to Ray Eames as if she were a child, asking her doesn’t she think she should let her husband explain all of this design stuff? Though she always put up a stoic façade, Ray was wounded by people who thought she was Charles' brother, or, if they knew she was a woman, just assumed she made the coffee or typed up Charles’ letters. The Architect and the Painter makes a strong case—one Charles Eames would agree with—that the Eames Office would not have been possible without Charles and Ray. He had wild, huge ideas; she had a genius for composition and color. They shared an insatiable curiosity, a sense of play, a love of process. They were also fearlessly interdisciplinary, refusing to skate on the success of their furniture (which has remained so popular, their original designs are still manufactured by Herman Miller).
In fact, they were also quite influential as filmmakers: “Powers of Ten,” is almost as well-known as their chairs. In 1968, it was revolutionary—not just for its special effects, but for its concepts and the speed at which it conveyed information. Glimpses of the U.S.A., a seven-screen film produced for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, employed a cross-country team of photographers to capture 2,200 images, including sunrises and sunsets, busy freeway entrances and exits, and airplanes landing and taking off. When Charles scratched his head about what imagery to end on, Ray suggested forget-me-nots—a flower that universally symbolizes friendship and brotherhood. That is indeed what was used, and the story goes that it made Nikita Khrushchev cry.
Though readers of DWELL and Apartment Therapy will no doubt be snatching this up when it’s released on DVD, ultimately it this is not a film about design. (St. Louis people should also know that though Eames is a native, the story picks up at Cranbrook, so there's nary a mention of his hometown.) It’s a story about an era, and there’s a lot of fascinating material here that makes it starkly apparent how much the world has changed in 50 years. It is also the story of a marriage. Just as the Eamses’ version of Modernism had nothing to do with white boxes or minimalism—it was warm, and very human—their marriage was as much about art as it was about love. In interviews with their children, their colleagues and their friends, the filmmakers draw an endearing and holistic portrait of the Eamses as artists and as people. Though there are light moments—there’s one particularly funny story, told by a family friend, about a dinner party where he was quite disappointed to be served flowers as a “visual dessert”—the film is unflinching it its depiction of the Eameses' professional failures and marital faultlines. Juxaposed against the larger-than-life image they projected to the world, that portrait is incredibly poignant—even more poignant that watching Nikita Khrushchev cry.
Eames: The Architect and the Painter screens at Washington University's Steinberg Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 17. Tickets are $12, $10 for Cinema St. Louis Members. For advance tickets, call 314-725-6555, ext. 0, or visit cinemastlouis.org.
