Ray Eames

Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser Eames (née Kaiser; December 15, 1912 – August 21, 1988) 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. Her mother was a housewife, and her father managed the vaudeville Empress Theater (now the Crest Theatre), 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 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, (where her art teacher was Lu Duble) 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 (AAA) 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. 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. 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 Eames' 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 Eames' 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 (LCW) 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 (LCW) 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 [developed] to meet a wartime need (for splints) and used it to make [a chair that was] elegant, light, and comfortable. Much copied but never bettered.” thumb Lounge Chair In 1956, the Eameses introduced their luxurious Lounge Chair, which combined molded plywood with leather-upholstered cushioning. Charles likened the comfortable way the leather wears to a "well-used first-baseman’s mitt.” It remains in production and has become something of a status symbol.

Shell Chair Originally created in 1948 for the Museum of Modern Art’s “International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design,” the Eames Fiberglass Shell Chair was first sold in 1950. It was a novel creation for its time, with the entire seat made of plastic, ultimately in a range of colors, some of them vibrant.

The first shell chairs were released in three colors: Parchment, Greige, and Elephant Grey Hide. Less than a year later three more colors were added, Seafoam Green, Lemon Yellow, and Red Orange. These six colors comprised the "first generation" of Eames shell chairs, made from 1950 to 1954.

Films Charles and Ray also created these films for the Eames Office:

Traveling Boy (1950) Parade or Here They Come Down Our Street (1952) Bread (1953) Atlas (1979)

The Eames Office's Legacy While the Eames Office is most widely known for its furniture, the design philosophy of Ray and Charles was far more holistic, and not limited to furnishings. Inventively, the scope of the work included film making, information design, and design theory. The New York Times wrote in 2015 that “by the mid-1950s, the Eameses had become as indispensable to the American computer company IBM as they were to Herman Miller,” which has continued to produce their furniture. For the armrests of Eames Lounge Chair alone, they experimented with 13 different versions before arriving at the final design.

Later years IBM and The 1964 World's Fair With their interest in communicating ideas visually, the Eameses also turned their attention to exhibition design, beginning in 1950, for the Chicago Merchandise Mart and the New York Museum of Modern Art, and continuing into the mid-1970s, for IBM.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the Eameses designed a series of exhibitions for IBM, centered on scientific and mathematical themes, as well as famous individuals within those fields. If Ray was less passionate about computers than her husband, she shared his belief in their importance and used her talents to make them understandable and acceptable to ordinary people. thumb

Death Ray died in Cedars Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles, California, on August 21, 1988, 10 years to the day after Charles. They are buried beside each other in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. The Office closed after her death.

On February 23, 2013, a 3,300-square-foot exhibition entitled “Ray Eames: A Century of Modern Design,” opened in the Sacramento, California Museum. The show ran for one year and featured work she produced before meeting Charles, in 1941, in addition to the work of the Eames Office.

Ray, along with Charles, had also produced the India Report, creating a basis for the government of India's National Institute of Design, in Ahmedabad.

Recognition Ray's contributions to the work of the Eames Office were overlooked during her lifetime, The show's host, Arlene Francis, added that “when there is a very successful man, there is an interesting and able woman behind him.”

In recent decades, however, Ray's work has received more attention. In 1990, the journal Furniture History published a thorough interview between design historian Pat Kirkham and Ray. As Kirkham put it in the introduction to the interview transcript, "the interchange of ideas between these two enormously talented individuals is particularly difficult to chart because their personal and design relationship was so close."

Ray has also received posthumous recognition for her personal fashion sense, which the New York Times described as "too maidenly to be echt-bohemian, too saucy to be quaint."

Awards 100th Anniversary Gold Medal (craftsmanship and excellence in furniture design and execution): American Institute of Architects (AIA), with Charles Eames, 1957 Emmy Award (Graphics), "The Fabulous Fifties", with Charles Eames, 1960 Kaufmann International Design Award, with Charles Eames, 1961 Women of the Year 1977: California Museum of Science & Industry Muses, Los Angeles, 1977 25 Year Award: American Institute of Architects (AIA), with Charles Eames, 1978 Gold Medal: Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), with Charles Eames, London, 1979 U.S. Postal Service Stamps, Charles and Ray Eames, 2008

Philosophy