Ray Eames
Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser Eames was an American artist and designer who worked in a variety of media.
In creative partnership with her husband, Charles Eames, she was responsible for groundbreaking contributions in the fields of architecture, graphic design, textile design, film, and furniture. The Eames Office is most famous for its furniture, which is still being produced. Together as a couple, the Eameses are considered one of the most influential creative forces of the 20th century.
During her lifetime, Ray Kaiser Eames received less credit than she has been given posthumously in art and design literature, museum shows, and documentary films.
Biography
Early life
Ray Eames was born in Sacramento, California, to Alexander and Edna Burr Kaiser and had an older brother named Maurice. Edna was Episcopalian and Alexander had been raised Jewish, but did not practice. Eames and Maurice were brought up as Episcopalians. Bernice was known to her family as Ray Ray. Her mother was a housewife, and her father managed the vaudeville Empress Theater, in Sacramento, until 1920. He then became an insurance salesman, later owning a downtown office to better support his family.The family lived in an apartment for much of Eames' early childhood and then moved to a bungalow outside of town. Her parents taught her to value both the natural world and objects that induce joy, which later inspired her inventions in furniture design and toys.
Eames came from a loving but overprotective home. Her elder sister died a few months after she was born, and her parents lived in fear that they would lose her, too. The overprotectiveness was further fueled by Eames' mother's anxiety that her "short, squat child might be deformed." Despite and because of this, Ray was very close to her mother, living with her in California and New York until Edna's death in 1940. Eames was also close to her older brother, Maurice.
Work and education
Education
Ray graduated from Sacramento High School in February 1931. She was a member of the Art Association, the Big Sister Club, and the decorating committee for the senior dance.After graduating in 1931, she spent a term at Sacramento Junior College before moving with her widowed mother to New York to be nearer her brother, then a West Point cadet.
In 1933, Ray graduated from the May Friend Bennett Women's College, in Millbrook, New York, and moved to New York City to study Abstract Expressionist painting with Duble's mentor, Hans Hofmann.
New York Work
During the 1930s, Kaiser’s artistic career centered around her painting. In 1937, she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group and exhibited paintings in its first show at Squibb Gallery April 3–17, 1937, New York City. The AAA group promoted abstract art at a time when major galleries refused to show it. She became a key figure in the New York art scene and developed friendships with painters Lee Krasner and Mercedes Matter, both important figures in Abstract Expressionism. While the Whitney Museum of American Art holds in its permanent collection a painting by Kaiser, little else remains of her art from this period.Kaiser lived alone in New York City until she left the Hoffman Studio to return home to care for her ailing mother. Edna died in 1940.
Cranbrook Academy
By September 1940, Kaiser was entertaining the idea of moving back to California and building a house there. Her architect friend, Ben Baldwin, suggested she might first enjoy studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She took his advice and, once at Cranbrook, learned a variety of arts, moving beyond painting as her sole focus.Life and work with Charles Eames
Also at Cranbrook, Kaiser met her husband-to-be, Charles Eames, who headed the school's industrial design department. Charles was a married man with one child, but he soon divorced his first wife. In 1941, he married Ray, who changed her name from Kaiser to Eames.Settling in Los Angeles, the couple began a highly successful and lauded partnership in design and architecture.
The Eames House
In California, the couple was invited to participate in the Case Study House Program, a housing initiative, sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, with a mission of building and showcasing a series of economical, yet inventive, modern homes that used wartime and industrial materials. John Entenza, the owner and editor of Arts & Architecture, recognized the importance of the Eameses' thinking and design practices—he also became a close friend of the couple. Originally, Charles and his Cranbrook colleague Eero Saarinen were hired, in 1945, to design Case Study House Number 8, envisioned as Charles and Ray's future residence. The plan was for the home to share with other Case Study houses a five-acre parcel in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, north of Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Because of post-war rationing, materials for that first scheme had to be back-ordered. In the meantime, Charles and Ray spent many days and nights on site in the meadow, picnicking, shooting arrows, and socializing with family, friends, and coworkers. They soon discovered their love of the existing eucalyptus grove, the expanse of land, and the unobstructed ocean views. Eventually, they decided not to build the Bridge House, but instead reconfigured the materials to create two separate, glassy, block-like structures, nestled into the property’s hillside. Saarinen played no role in this second version of the house—instead, it became a collaboration between Charles and Ray. Once the materials arrived, in 1949, the buildings were erected in the period from February through December. The couple moved in on Christmas Eve, and the house became their sole residence for the rest of their lives. It remains a milestone of modern architecture.The Eames Office designed a few other architectural works, many of which remained unrealized. But, in 1950, they succeeded in building the Herman Miller Showroom on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles and, in 1954, the De Pree House in Zeeland, Michigan, for Herman Miller founder’s son, Max De Pree, and his growing family. The unbuilt works include the Billy Wilder House, the prefabricated kit home known as the Kwikset House, and a national aquarium.
The Eames Office
The designs of Ray and Charles were highly collaborative.Graphic design
The Eames Office's graphic and commercial artwork, however, are largely attributable to Ray. Independent of her husband and the Eames Office, she designed 27 covers for Arts & Architecture, from 1942 to 1948. She also contributed to the 1948 Eames furniture advertisements for Herman Miller.Ray's sense of form and color was the primary driver behind the Eames "look." Her sensibility made the difference between "good, very good—and Eames." While she did not make drawings, she was committed to documenting and tracking all the Office's projects, and in this capacity she embraced the responsibility of organizing and protecting the enormous collection of photographs that the office produced over the years.
Textile design
In 1947, the Eames Office created several textile designs, two of which—"Crosspatch" and "Sea Things"—were fabricated by Schiffer Prints, a company that also produced textiles by Salvador Dalí and Frank Lloyd Wright. Two of her patterns received awards in a textile competition organized by MoMA. She worked on graphics for advertising, magazine covers, posters, timelines, game boards, invitations, and business cards. Original examples of Ray Eames textiles can be found in many art museum collections, and some of her designs have been reissued by the Maharam company as part of its “Textiles of the Twentieth Century” collection.Plywood design
Between 1943 and 1978, the Eames Office produced numerous furniture designs that were commercially manufactured, many with plywood. The first of the plywood pieces was a leg splint, made for the US Navy. The idea arose when one of the Eameses' medical friends described the problems caused by standard metal splints, which had been mass produced using simple designs molded in one plane, rather the a more ergonomic compound curved design that better fit the human body. Ray's early background in fashion design proved useful here, as the splint resembled a clothing pattern with a system of darts to contour the plywood to the shape of a leg. The Navy commissioned the Eameses to mass produce 150,000 splints. Their company became the Molded Plywood Products Division of Evans Plywood. The splint profits enabled these emerging designers to expand their production and experiment with plywood furniture creations.The splint's use of bent plywood was a significant breakthrough for the couple's trademark design. They would later use similar bent plywood in their seminal Lounge Chair Wood and the Eames Lounge Chair.
Popular furniture
Ray and Charles worked together to create their most popular furniture:Lounge Chair Wood (LCW)
Collaborating with Eero Saarinen, the Eameses applied their knowledge of plywood, gained from their Navy splints, to chair design. The resulting Lounge Chair Wood won the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Designs in Home Furnishings contest and, in 1946, went into production by Herman Miller.Time magazine called the LCW the century’s best design in its December 31, 1999 issue, writing that the designers had taken "technology to meet a wartime need and used it to make elegant, light, and comfortable. Much copied but never bettered.”