Few of their earliest breakthrough artistic experiments would merge art and technology so perfectly as their iconic 1943 Plywood Sculpture, which embodies the pioneering spirit of Charles and Ray’s personal relationship, multidisciplinary working partnership, and wholly original thinking.
Characterized by delicate changes in thickness and graceful three-dimensional curves, the groundbreaking, innovative molding techniques worked out through the Plywood Sculpture would give rise to some of the most important furniture designs of the 20th century. Only two sculptures were made in 1943. After a rigorous year-long research and production process the Plywood Sculpture is now available as a limited edition of twelve – celebrating eighty years of Eames Office.
“Charles and Ray’s sculpture represents a pivotal moment in their work, in their lives, and in design history and continues to inspire all that encounter its beauty today. For Charles and Ray, art was the best way to test the technology and technology was the best way to make the art.”Eames Demetrios, Director of Eames Office
In a sense, the Eames Office takes shape with Charles and Ray’s courtship letters and begins with a wedding held at a friend’s Chicago apartment on June 20, 1941. This was the moment when Charles and Ray Eames became partners in life and partners in design, joined together by their love of creation, and passion for solving problems that needed to be solved. Immediately after the wedding, the couple moved west and lived in a Hollywood hotel as they got to know Los Angeles and make new friends, one of whom was John Entenza, publisher of Arts and Architecture magazine, who introduced Charles and Ray to Richard Neutra. The architect had recently completed his Strathmore Apartments, which is where the Eameses came to live. It would be two years before the Eames Office moved to 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, so the Neutra apartment initially served as a working laboratory, and home to a tool that helped shape (literally) the future of modern design: The Kazam! machine.
A curved plaster mold threaded with powerful electric coils wired directly – in a death defying move by Charles – to a transformer on a nearby power pole, the Kazam! machine was a homemade device for molding plywood. The process required extremely thin sheets of wood veneer to be sandwiched with glue, clamped tightly in the hot mold, and then held in place for four to six hours by a rubber balloon inflated by a bicycle pump. Charles and Ray would repeat these steps – in their small apartment, where they had to sneak in the materials at night by climbing sixty-five stairs in the dark – as many as a dozen times to create one piece of curved plywood.
The Kazam! machine was the couple’s first significant hands-on experience with molded ply. With this machine they’d successfully designed and figured out how to mass-produce a U-shaped leg splint for the U.S. Navy in 1942 but mastering how to make molded forms with compound curves was still uncharted territory, for the Eameses and all designers worldwide. Even large-scale furniture companies hadn’t succeeded, a fact Charles and Ray were aware of after watching two manufacturers attempt and ultimately fail to mass-produce the Organic Chair, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen’s winning entry in MoMA’s 1940 Organic Furniture competition.
After the MoMA competition, for which Ray, then Ray Kaiser, worked on the drawings for its final presentation, Saarinen moved on to other projects. The Eameses, however, were determined to solve what they didn’t see simply as a manufacturing problem, but rather a design problem. They knew that if they were going to create an organically shaped, single-piece molded chair that could be mass-produced and whose design would optimize the manufacturing technique rather than fight it, then they’d have to figure out that technique themselves.
Anyone familiar with the thirty-seven-year brilliant career of Charles and Ray Eames knows how this story ends, but what you may not know is that everything they created – furniture, films, World’s Fair exhibitions, architecture and more – and how beauty and functionality are never in conflict in any of their work, all began with a sculpture – sketched on a small scrap of paper that would fit in the palm of your hand. Sketched in pencil, the drawing on this paper, circa 1943, is by Charles and Ray Eames. In the center is an organically shaped form, which we now know to be a sculpture, and all around it are notes and measurements written in two styles of handwriting – the quick, loopy cursive of Charles, and the neat, artistically drawn script of Ray.
“Charles and Ray always said that their early hands-on experience with molded plywood was essential to their development because it required them to design a lot of tools. They realized that when you design a tool you need to have a really good idea of what that tool is going to do. They took that idea with them in everything they did – and it started with their early experiments with molded ply.”, says Eames Demetrios.
To understand the constraints of plywood, Charles and Ray designed experimental shapes to be the best possible test for pushing the envelope on curves. In 1942, they made a first small sculpture, most likely using the Kazam! Machine in their apartment. This sculpture, which has since disappeared, had one same wall-thickness throughout. Building on knowledge gained in production of their molded plywood legsplints, the couple began experimenting with even more complex organic shapes, thinner sections and varying numbers of layered veneers. They realized that the molding process was not sophisticated enough for any of these challenges so they started using stronger presses and metal sheets on the molds. This process of iteration and ability to surrender to the journey is a thread in everything Charles and Ray designed.
With its abstract organic shape, the 1943 Plywood Sculpture was not only a beautiful work of art but also a technological breakthrough in the amount of control they were able to achieve. Being able to make the curves three-dimensional and precisely guided represents a pivot point in the Eameses’ understanding of plywood, and a pivot point in midcentury modern design. The objects we live with – how they’re made and what they look like – were forever changed by this hands-on, problem-solving approach of Charles and Ray Eames.
“In a sense, their chairs are tools for living and the sculpture is a tool for beauty. One of the main threads in Charles and Ray’s work is that art and technology are united.”Eames Demetrios
Before enrolling to Cranbrook and ultimately founding the Eames Office in California, Ray Eames was a promising young artist in New York City. From 1933 to 1939 she studied with abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. Her paintings and collages were shown in several publications and exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists group of which she was a founding member. Feeling discontent with the limiting nature of painting and looking to learn more about architecture and the three-dimensional space, Ray went to Cranbrook in 1940. As Ray later said: “I never gave up painting, I just changed my palette.”
The Plywood Sculpture is a perfect synthesis of artistic expression and experimental yet rigorous technical expertise. As a Christie’s catalogue puts it “the sculpture unites the parallel narratives of fine art, sculpture and industrial design.” In 1943, Charles and Ray Eames made two sculptures in an experimental mold, one of which was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1944. After being exhibited at MoMA’s “Design for Use” exhibition, the sculpture was purchased by curator Serge Chermayeff, and today it is in the permanent collection of the Vitra Design Museum in Germany.
However, this wasn’t the one that the Eameses kept for themselves. Both sculptures were made in the same production tool but, due to the natural properties of wood and the fact that veneers have a tendency to warp after being removed from a mold, they are not identical. The legs are positioned in a slightly different way, which changes the feeling of the piece and how it activates a space, and one sculpture has a more contrasting veneer pattern.
The sculpture that the Eameses kept for themselves stayed in the hands of the Eames family for decades, and it is now held in a private museum collection. It is this sculpture, the one cherished by Charles and Ray as well as the entire Eames Office, on which the limited edition Plywood Sculpture is modeled.
1943
Plywood
Eight to twelve ply laminated woods, walnut-faced 37½ inches (95.3 cm) high, 27 inches (68.6 cm) wide, 13 inches (33 cm) deep, plywood laminate variable from 7/16 inches (11 mm) to 5/16 inches (8 mm)
A Highly Important and Unique Plywood Sculpture, 1943, by Charles and Ray Eames
Photographs and Catalog text courtesy of Christie’s:
History has confirmed Charles & Ray Eames as amongst the most influential creative partnerships of the twentieth century, their rational yet playfully eloquent designs emblematic of post-war optimism, yet robustly grounded in democratic pragmatism. Crucial to their evolution as designers were the experimental plywood sculptures and objects developed at their Venice, California, workshop in the early 1940s, of which the present sculpture, created in 1943 and exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art the following year, is the definitive representation. Of biomorphic form and choreographed profile, the sculpture unites the parallel narratives of fine art, sculpture and industrial design. Ray Eames, a painter and sculptress, trained under Hans Hofmann, and her husband Charles, who during this period was developing plywood structures and components for the U.S. Navy and the military aviation industry, were here able to synthesise their talents to create a work of outstanding technological and aesthetic importance.
As with any creative partnership, it is difficult to segregate the contributions offered by the individual contributors, however the playfully serpentine outline of the structure is clearly related to the mobiles, sculptures and graphics of Ray, and in particular to the covers that she designed for the magazine ‘Art & Architecture’ that same year, 1943. Recalling the biomorphic massing characteristic of Jean Arp, or the meandering calligraphy of Joan Miró, Ray Eames’ drawings delivered the informal aesthetic that would soon translate into the experimental DCM and DCW chairs of 1945. By 1943 Charles already had over a decade’s experience in architecture and design, including the exposure of furniture created together with Ray and Eero Saarinen at the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Organic Design in Home Furnishings’ exhibition of 1940. Despite their furnishings being successfully received, Charles remained frustrated at the absence of suitable plywood molding technology–a situation that was to alter when, in early 1943, the Eames’ received a commission from the U.S. Navy to produce lightweight plywood leg splints — the first ever fully three-dimensionally molded plywood structure. Embracing the opportunity to experiment with professional industrial molding equipment and high-strength waterproof adhesives, the Eames’ created a series of hand-guided machine-made forms, structures and sculptures, including the present example, that must be regarded not solely as experimental industrial products, but as resolved artistic expressions that were to define the identity of post-war design.
The present sculpture, whilst superficially appearing to have been constructed from a single sheet of plywood that simply was cut and molded, was in fact the consequence of an extensively laborious hand-crafted process. This commenced with the cross-layering of extremely thin plies of wood, glued and heat-sealed utilizing the Eames’ self-built molds to ensure that sufficient and even pressure was maintained throughout the four-to-six hour molding process. Careful examination of the edges of this sculpture reveal that the laminate thickness varies from twelve to eight laminations, corresponding with the regions of the sculpture that were to either remain rigid and robust, such as the legs, or were to be subject to more complex curvature. The careful and specific layering of these laminates would have to have been identified at the start of the design process, confirming that the undulations, curves and planes of the sculpture were predicted and mathematically calculated in advance of construction. Once formed and sealed, the sculpture was delivered from the mold, the edges trimmed with a hand-saw to the desired finished shape, and the surfaces sanded by hand. Included in the seminal exhibition ‘Design for Use’, Museum of Modern Art, 1944, this wholly hand-crafted work endures as the perfected synthesis of aesthetic intuition allied to experimental yet rigorous technical expertise.
PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTION
Literature
S. Chermayeff and R. D’Harnoncourt, ‘Design for Use,’ Art in Progress, 1944, p. 200;
J. Neuhart, M. Neuhart, R. Eames, Eames Design: The Work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, New York, 1989, p. 40;
P. Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, 1996, p. 215 for an illustration of the sculpture in situ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Design for Use, 1944. This black and white photo is reproduced below in Additional Notes and Images.
Exhibited
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Design for Use, 1944.
We congratulate Christie’s on their excellent work in documenting and presenting this work.
Provenance: formerly in the collection of Serge Chermayeff, Former Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
By auction at Christie’s East, New York, Important Design , 27 November 1999, lot 69 to a gentleman in Europe.
