25 May 2008
 
Take a Load Off

A Museum Fan-fold on Eames Chairs- Mom has two of the one on the far right
 
This was fun on a couple of levels- Mom is trying to inventory the stuff in her house, not for value, but just to identify where it all came from, based on an existing list compiled by the Great Aunt who had it all- the last living link to the whole tree of the family in south central Pennsylvania.
 
There was a ton of stuff, heavy dark square pieces with intricate carving, the first manufactured furniture of the early Victorian Age. We hauled some of it, but it was heavy even if the gas then was cheap. We finally had to sit down and take a load off.
 
In the course of cataloging the old pieces, she came to realize that the pieces she had scrimped to purchase as a newlywed was worth some serious coin! That spawned a feeble attempt to place the furniture in its context, and somewhere between the Northwest Ordnance of 1783 and the disintegration of a great American City I found the context of her furniture to be located at the Cranbrook Institute of Art, just down the road from her house at the corner of Then and Now streets.
 
Considering that Eames collaborator Eero Saarinen was responsible for the soaring arches of Dulles International Airport, I was completely bemused to see that Eames himself had contributed the gang-seat arrangement to handle the waiting passengers.

A row of Eames seats heading for installation at Dulles
 
In response to my diatribe, my pal the Admiral wrote me about some furniture he had. I went back to my notes about a conversation we had over margaritas a couple months ago.
 
We had come to the Mexican bar across from The Madison so I could interview him on the conflicts in the Department of the Navy that attended the major reorganization of national defense in 1948. We didn’t make it. Instead, we moved backwards from 1941 to the time when the banks were closed by FDR, and people on the farms did without cash in the barter system.
 
“My great-grandfather built his "mansion" on his thousand-acre farm in Iowa City, Iowa, in the 1860s and equipped his living room (parlor) with Eastlake furniture, then manufactured in Pennsylvania.”
 
“As his descendants, my brother, sisters, and I have pieces of this furniture.  Except for re-upholstery, they are original and in good condition.  I once sought to have them valued as antiques, and I was told that the value of antique furniture had little to do with the style or condition of the piece, but only with the importance of the family in whose home the furniture was used. George Washington or Abraham Lincoln had never been in my great-grandfather's home, so no particular value could be given to my pieces.”
 
“Admiral, that is dead wrong,” I said, warming to the topic. “And I am speaking as an occasional watcher of the Antiques Road Show on PBS. The provenance does not have to be connected to the famous- just the maker is enough these days! Reupholstering does not necessarily hurt, although refinishing can.”
 
I agreed that he probably did not have a piece that will enable you sell and retire again in even grander style; on the Road Show, most people are bemused that the value of a precious heirloom is found to be much less than they had been led to expect, although there is always a great story.

“At least once in a show,” I said, taking a sip of margarita, “the appraiser gets to tell someone that the neat article is actually worth a couple hundred grand. Everyone feels good.”

I checked a for a couple examples of Eastlake and Morris furniture on internet antiques sites and saw that they have respectable value. I wrote the Admiral back to tell him:
“This chair below is on the market for $695; the sink-cum-writing table below that, even with some damage to the marble, is worth $1400.”

He was quite right about the period and thrust of the furniture. The Eastlake-Morris philosophy was straight out of Ruskin, in the post-Luddite phase of English thought, and in chronologic order was the immediate predecessor to the Arts and Crafts movement that produced Frank Lloyd Wright, and in the next generation, the Saarenins and Eames’.

Charles Locke Eastlake was the English architect and writer who popularized William Morris' notions of decorative arts in reaction to the first wave of manufactured household furniture that began to flood the market. A lot of it came out of Western Michigan, since the manufacture of bedroom and parlor sets was the stock in trade of the hardy Dutch who settled there and built Grand Rapids into a regional industrial powerhouse.

Detroit built things of iron and steel. West Michigan built of wood. They were both on the railway, and the steel road took their goods west.

Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and other Details of 1868 inspired Morris' simple, straight lines and designs executed in honest oak and fruitwoods.

In 1872, Eastlake published his book in the United States, where it served to seed the land for the American Arts & Crafts movement. The use of rugged woods like oak and the elimination of applied decorations were characteristic of Eastlake furniture, and the mass-production of sentimental junk was discouraged.

Naturally, the manufacturers immediately attempted to machine replicate real handiwork with glued-on moldings and machine-reproduced architectural detail, just as they do today overseas. Eastlake disliked these imitations and publicly disavowed any association with their manufacture. Also known under the name Cottage Furniture, the mass-produced pieces were much more affordable than the fanciful revival pieces.
 
Eastlake hated it, but what can you do? Eastlake inspired or genuine Morris Style furniture is still frequently seen in antique shops, especially in the east and Midwest as the Admiral’s was.
 
The concept of simple, affordable, attractive cottage furniture survived to become the high fashion of full blown Arts and Crafts, which in turn, bequeathed its idea of simplicity and function to the molded hardwood shapes of the Eames.

 
I guess what I think is a little ironic is that the airy designs are now mass produced out of simple industrial materials, notably plastic and steel, by the hardy Dutchmen of the Herman Miller concern in Zeeland.
 
I think Eastlake would be appalled. Still, Herman Miller does business in 45 countries around the world now. Everyone has to take a load off once in a while.
 
The Admiral wrote me back the next day, to tell me this: “I don’t want to beat a dead horse on this, but we also had a Morris chair.  Ours was made by my father in a shop class he took in school. It's solid oak, no "curved" shapes like your photo, but it was a recliner. That was made possible by an iron rod that could be moved from slot to slot behind the back to provide the desired recline. I don't know where it is now.”
 
Wherever it is, I know what it was, and the Admiral knows, too. It was the best possible refection of an architectural movement whose time may have come around again. If you want to rest easy, you might do that best in something you have built yourself out of honest materials not based on putrefied dinosaurs and hauled all the way from China.

You could even do it in shop class, I imagine, if we taught anything useful there anymore.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com