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Journal of Design History 1998 11(1):15-29; doi:10.1093/jdh/11.1.15
© 1998 by Design History Society
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Humanizing Modernism: The Crafts, ‘Functioning Decoration’ and the Eameses

PAT KIRKHAM

Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts New York


  Abstract

This article outlines some of the problems encountered in evaluating the work of Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife design partnership flourishing in the USA from 1941 to 1978, including issues related to gender, crafts and Modernism. It focuses on two items of furniture and argues that both gender and pro-Modernist‘anti-crafts biases are at work in the attitudes of design critics towards them. It goes on to examine the Eameses’ attitudes towards the crafts, before and after they met in 1940, and considers the role played by ‘functioning decoration’ (their decorative arrangements of objects which encouraged an interplay between craft and machine work) in the humanizing of Modernist design in the post-war years in the USA

Key Words: crafts • Charles and Ray Eames • furniture • interior design • Modernism • USA


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