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Elliptical Table, Rod Base (ETR)

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Elliptical Table, Rod Base (ETR)

1951
plywood, metal
10 in. x 89 in. x 29 in. (25.4 cm x 226.06 cm x 73.66 cm)
Gift of Marie and Victor Metoyer, 2001.2

Charles Eames
American
1907–1978

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames is synonymous with mid-twentieth-century modern furniture. Born in Sacramento, California, in 1912, Ray Kaiser planned on a career in art, studying at the Art Students League of New York, the Hans Hofmann School and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. At Cranbrook, she met Charles Eames, a St. Louis architect and designer who had taken a position as instructor at the school in 1939. Two years later, Ray and Charles married and moved to Los Angeles, where they began a creative collaboration that lasted throughout the remainder of their careers.

During the 1940s the Eameses began working in plywood, a material that became a signature component of their modern furniture. Both artists continued to work on individual projects, including graphic design, fabric design, and architectural commissions, but by the latter part of the decade they had combined forces and had begun to produce the pioneering furniture designs for which they are today best known. Influenced by varied sources including Southern California vernacular, Japanese traditional, and the work of their close friend, architect and designer Eero Saarinen, the Eameses created airy, free-flowing furniture whose appearance reflected postwar notions of informal living and high technology. The Los Angeles firm of Herman Miller began to mass-produce many of their designs, making the Eames name well known among progressive consumers of the 1950s and 1960s. As styles changed during the mid-1960s, the Eameses focused more on film and special exhibitions, producing a number of short features and multiscreen slide compositions. They created few new furniture designs after 1965, and following the death of Charles in 1978, Ray gradually retired from the scene. She died in 1988.

The Currier's Elliptical Table, Rod Base (ETR) is among the most widely recognized of the Eameses' furniture designs. As manufactured by the Herman Miller Furniture Company, the table consists of an elongated oval top made of black plastic laminate over Baltic birch plywood, resting on bent metal rods arranged in two boxlike configurations. Although the table is rather long at eighty-nine inches, it stands only ten inches off the floor. The broad expanse of the top contrasts with the weblike appearance of the legs, giving the table a lightweight, sprightly air that is well suited to the casual lifestyle for which it was created.

When the Eameses' design first appeared in 1951, the familiar furniture form known as the "coffee table" was virtually unknown. However, as open-plan architecture and new inventions such as the television broke down the barriers between formal spaces in the home, it suddenly became permissible to eat and drink in places other than the dining room or at the parlor tea table. Casting off memories of wartime privation and reveling in the renewed prosperity of America during the 1950s, consumers embraced an ideal of domestic ease and relaxation. The parlor became the "family room" or the "living room," and stiff-backed Chippendale-revival chairs gave way to comfortable modern sofas. Through forward-looking intermediaries such as the Eameses, the old tea table became the new coffee table, scaled to the sofa and large enough to accommodate everything from hot dogs, bottles of soda, and a portable phonograph to platters of hors d'oeuvres, ashtrays, and martini glasses.

To arrive at their archetypal coffee table, the Eameses looked to traditional Japanese furniture, made for homes where occupants typically sat on the floor, rather than in chairs. The lightweight quality of the table is also evocative of Japanese design, with its emphasis on paper, bamboo, and other insubstantial materials. On the other hand, the long, ovoid shape of the tabletop has been likened by a number of critics to a surfboard, an object that the Eameses were undoubtedly familiar with as residents of coastal Southern California. Itself a quintessential embodiment of recreation and freedom, the surfboard serves as a singularly appropriate (albeit humorous) reference in the Eameses' iconology of casual living.

The Elliptical Table, Rod Base (ETR) was presented to the Currier Museum of Art in 2001 by Victor and Marie Metoyer.

VSD

REFERENCE

Pat Kirkham. Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996.

Ray Eames
American
1912–1988

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames is synonymous with mid-twentieth-century modern furniture. Born in Sacramento, California, in 1912, Ray Kaiser planned on a career in art, studying at the Art Students League of New York, the Hans Hofmann School and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. At Cranbrook, she met Charles Eames, a St. Louis architect and designer who had taken a position as instructor at the school in 1939. Two years later, Ray and Charles married and moved to Los Angeles, where they began a creative collaboration that lasted throughout the remainder of their careers.

During the 1940s the Eameses began working in plywood, a material that became a signature component of their modern furniture. Both artists continued to work on individual projects, including graphic design, fabric design, and architectural commissions, but by the latter part of the decade they had combined forces and had begun to produce the pioneering furniture designs for which they are today best known. Influenced by varied sources including Southern California vernacular, Japanese traditional, and the work of their close friend, architect and designer Eero Saarinen, the Eameses created airy, free-flowing furniture whose appearance reflected postwar notions of informal living and high technology. The Los Angeles firm of Herman Miller began to mass-produce many of their designs, making the Eames name well known among progressive consumers of the 1950s and 1960s. As styles changed during the mid-1960s, the Eameses focused more on film and special exhibitions, producing a number of short features and multiscreen slide compositions. They created few new furniture designs after 1965, and following the death of Charles in 1978, Ray gradually retired from the scene. She died in 1988.

The Currier's Elliptical Table, Rod Base (ETR) is among the most widely recognized of the Eameses' furniture designs. As manufactured by the Herman Miller Furniture Company, the table consists of an elongated oval top made of black plastic laminate over Baltic birch plywood, resting on bent metal rods arranged in two boxlike configurations. Although the table is rather long at eighty-nine inches, it stands only ten inches off the floor. The broad expanse of the top contrasts with the weblike appearance of the legs, giving the table a lightweight, sprightly air that is well suited to the casual lifestyle for which it was created.

When the Eameses' design first appeared in 1951, the familiar furniture form known as the "coffee table" was virtually unknown. However, as open-plan architecture and new inventions such as the television broke down the barriers between formal spaces in the home, it suddenly became permissible to eat and drink in places other than the dining room or at the parlor tea table. Casting off memories of wartime privation and reveling in the renewed prosperity of America during the 1950s, consumers embraced an ideal of domestic ease and relaxation. The parlor became the "family room" or the "living room," and stiff-backed Chippendale-revival chairs gave way to comfortable modern sofas. Through forward-looking intermediaries such as the Eameses, the old tea table became the new coffee table, scaled to the sofa and large enough to accommodate everything from hot dogs, bottles of soda, and a portable phonograph to platters of hors d'oeuvres, ashtrays, and martini glasses.

To arrive at their archetypal coffee table, the Eameses looked to traditional Japanese furniture, made for homes where occupants typically sat on the floor, rather than in chairs. The lightweight quality of the table is also evocative of Japanese design, with its emphasis on paper, bamboo, and other insubstantial materials. On the other hand, the long, ovoid shape of the tabletop has been likened by a number of critics to a surfboard, an object that the Eameses were undoubtedly familiar with as residents of coastal Southern California. Itself a quintessential embodiment of recreation and freedom, the surfboard serves as a singularly appropriate (albeit humorous) reference in the Eameses' iconology of casual living.

The Elliptical Table, Rod Base (ETR) was presented to the Currier Museum of Art in 2001 by Victor and Marie Metoyer.

VSD

REFERENCE

Pat Kirkham. Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996.



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