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Black Mountain College
Black Mountain, North Carolina
Arts & Architecture magazine /
Case Study House Program

Los Angeles
Pond Farm
Guerneville, California
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis
Museum of Modern Art
New York
Institute of Design
Chicago
US–born
Gregory Ain
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Gregory Ain

b. 1908, Pittsburgh; d. 1988, Los Angeles

Gregory Ain moved from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles and attended architecture school during the late 1920s, eventually working with both Rudolph M. Schindler and Richard Neutra. Seeking to promote the adoption of modern architecture by the working and middle classes, Ain partnered with architects Joseph Johnson and Alfred Day during the late 1940s. Large housing tracts by their firm included Park Planned Homes, Avenel Cooperative Housing Complex, and Mar Vista Housing in the Los Angeles area. These projects came to the attention of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curator Philip Johnson, and, as a result, Ain was commissioned to design the 1950 demonstration house in the museum’s sculpture garden.

Cosponsored by Woman’s Home Companion magazine, Ain’s demonstration house was built as a single residence but designed to be combined with other units to create a multifamily development. Sliding interior walls and panels made the house spatially flexible; the living room, dining area, parents’ bedroom, and kitchen could be separated for privacy or opened up to create a single large living space. The furnishings included chairs by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames and a clock by the firm of George Nelson.

Saul Bass
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Saul Bass

b. 1920, New York; d. 1996, Los Angeles

Saul Bass was a graphic designer renowned for his innovative film title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos. Bass moved to Hollywood during the 1940s to design print advertisements for films. He designed his first film title sequence in 1954 for director Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones. Bass’s film titles were groundbreaking because they elevated the title sequence to a place of importance, imbuing them with key themes and motifs and using them to establish the film’s tone and atmosphere. Bass continued to work on other Preminger films such as The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and he also designed for other top filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock. Bass sometimes collaborated with his wife Elaine.

Bass became known for his ability to distill imagery into simple modernist forms without resorting to sensationalism. For The Man with the Golden Arm, Bass created the graphic of a disconnected arm as the central feature of the advertising campaign. The metonymic arm both represents the film title and hints at its plot, which follows the protagonist's struggle with heroin addition.

Elaine Lustig Cohen
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Elaine Lustig Cohen

b. 1927, Jersey City, New Jersey; lives and works in New York

Elaine Lustig Cohen trained as a painter, but she shifted her focus to graphic design during the 1940s while working with designer Alvin Lustig, whom she married in 1948. Following his death in 1955, she took control of their studio, and between 1955 and 1961 she produced a distinctive series of book covers for publishers Meridian Books and New Directions. For these designs, Lustig Cohen gave special attention to typography and employed a blend of graphic styles, producing covers that broke from the tradition of pictorial representation. Cohen’s cover for José Ortega y Gasset’s On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme (1957), for example, combines lines of text with three floating images of the same angel sculpture, one rendered in orange, another in purple, and another in black and white, while the covers of Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1958) and The Writings of Martin Buber (1956) rely exclusively on color and form for their strong visual effects. Lustig Cohen also applied her aesthetic to bags, catalogs, invitations, and other materials for the Jewish Museum, New York, in the 1960s. In 2011, she was awarded the AIGA Medal by the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Muriel Coleman
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Muriel Coleman

b. 1917, New York; d. 2003, Oakland, California

Muriel Coleman was an artist and entrepreneur who worked with the Office of Strategic Services (now the CIA) during World War II to help decipher aerial images of the French coastline. She moved to California in 1948, becoming a part of the Bay Area’s vibrant art community. During the 1950s, she designed a line of furniture for California Contemporary Inc., a family business, that made use of materials such as redwood and iron reinforcing bars. Coleman’s furniture designs were featured in Arts & Architecture magazine. Another family business made farm equipment. A characteristic Coleman design for a desk and chair from 1951 demonstrates her flair for visual juxtapositions in the combination of wood drawers, a glass top, and a plush upholstered seat set within an angular black metal structure.

Louis Danziger
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Louis Danziger

b. 1923, New York; lives and works in Arcadia, California

Louis Danziger is a graphic designer who is also known for his teaching contributions. He moved to Southern California to establish his studio in 1949, working with a roster of clients that included Atlantic Richfield Company and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Danziger’s design approach always begins with identifying the problem that the design should solve, and his work is admired for its economy and authenticity. In his imagery for the cover of Will Herberg’s Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (1959), for example, Danziger alludes to the book’s title and all it suggests by cleverly overlaying an image of the Star of David (Judaism) over that of a computer card (modern) dotted with black punch–hole rectangles that suggest a face (man). Danziger retired from professional design work during the 1970s, but he has continued to teach at schools, including the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Henry Dreyfuss
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Henry Dreyfuss

b. 1904, New York; d. 1972, South Pasadena, California

Henry Dreyfuss opened his own industrial design office in New York in 1928; it quickly became one of America’s most celebrated firms and is still in operation. Dreyfuss’s creations, the Big Ben Alarm Clock (1939), the Honeywell “T86 Round” thermostat (c. 1953), and the Princess Phone (c. 1959), were the result of his pragmatic, user–friendly approach to design. The large numbers on the clock are easy to see; the round thermostat is easy to hold and cannot be installed crooked; and the phone, intended for the bedroom, has a light–up dial that also serves as a night light. Dreyfuss’s designs were ubiquitous in middle–class homes during the midcentury. His interest in ergonomics made him uninterested in jobs involving the design of the form but not the function. He illustrated his concepts of the human usability of his designs by conceiving an idealized man and woman, Joe and Josephine, and cataloging the permutations of their movements, annotating them with careful measurements. In 1944, Dreyfuss was one of fifteen prominent designers who founded the Society of Industrial Designers.

Alvin Lustig
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Alvin Lustig

b. 1915, Denver; d. 1955, New York

Alvin Lustig was primarily a graphic designer, but he also worked in interior design, furniture and textile design, and advertising. He began his career in Los Angeles in 1937 designing book covers, and he was the force behind the modern, graphic look of that city’s influential Arts & Architecture magazine. During the early 1940s, Lustig moved to New York, where he worked for Look and Fortune magazines. At about that time he began designing book covers for the publishing company New Directions. Until his death in 1955, he produced more than seventy covers for the publisher’s New Classics literary series. Lustig’s covers often feature biomorphic forms as favored by the Surrealists. In his 1945 cover for Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, for example, three surrealistic female forms (two white, one black) seem to float on a blue sea.

Lustig was invited by Josef Albers to teach design at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1945, and in 1946 he moved back to Los Angeles, where for five years he had an office. There, while still working on publications, he also designed interiors, furniture, and fabrics. One of his chairs, composed of a sculptural seat and back panel held aloft by a tubular metal frame, was featured in the 1950 Good Design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1951, Lustig went on to teach at Yale University’s department of graphic arts in New Haven, Connecticut. During this time, he became interested in immigrating to Israel, believing that good design might help shape and organize that new nation’s society for the better; he died before he was able to launch his experiment..

George Nelson
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George Nelson

b. 1908, Hartford, Connecticut; d. 1986, New York

George Nelson was an influential architect, designer, author, and editor. He attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and later taught at the Yale School of Art. In 1945, Nelson was appointed director of design for the Herman Miller furniture company in Zeeland, Michigan, where he and his colleagues designed everything from the company’s logo to the furniture it sold. In his own studio, founded in 1947, Nelson and others, most notably Irving Harper, designed some of the most iconic midcentury–modern furniture. This work ranged from simple, minimalist pieces such as the Platform Bench (1945), which blends into its surroundings, to more exuberant and sculptural furnishings, including the Coconut Chair (1955), and Marshmallow Sofa (1956). Nelson was also an avid writer and helped establish Industrial Design magazine.

Later in his career, Nelson developed exhibitions and multimedia presentations on the importance of design, including slideshows, films, live readings, and audio records. He also was lead designer for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, the location of the Kitchen Debate between United States Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Paul Rand
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Paul Rand

b. 1914, New York; d. 1996, Norwalk, Connecticut

Paul Rand, born Peretz Rosenbaum, was a graphic designer known for his advertisements, book covers, and visual communications systems for corporations such as IBM, UPS, and ABC. He was also an influential teacher, illustrator of children’s books, and author of books about design. Taking night classes at New York’s Pratt Institute and attending the Arts Students League, Rand began his career in 1934, creating stock images for a syndicate that sold them to newspapers and magazines. He opened his own studio the following year.

Rand was able to amass a large portfolio early in his career, and his work was heavily influenced by modern European graphic styles emphasizing abstraction, asymmetry, and dynamic compositions of type and image. To this aesthetic Rand added his own sensibility, creating advertisements, posters, and other forms of visual communication with a lively sense of wit and often inspired by American vernacular traditions. So successful was Rand in fashioning this distinctive style that he won praise from László Moholy–Nagy, one of Europe’s most celebrated modernist designers, who had recently immigrated to Chicago. “Among these young Americans,” Moholy–Nagy wrote, “it seems to be that Paul Rand is one of the best and most capable. He is an idealist and a realist, using the language of the poet and business man.”

In his poster for the 1950 film No Way Out, Rand reproduces the movie title inside a jagged black and red arrow, suggesting dynamism and forward movement. This feeling is undercut, however, by a pair of black–and–white images collaged in above and below — a tight close–up of a pair of eyes and a bedstead with handcuffs — that denote confinement.

Ben Seibel
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Ben Seibel

b. 1918, Newark, New Jersey; d. 1985, New York

Ben Seibel grew up in Manhattan and studied at both Columbia University and Pratt Institute, where he was attracted to industrial design. He served in the United States Air Force during World War II, and, in 1947, established a successful industrial design firm that produced dinnerware, glassware, stainless–steel flatware, tabletop accessories, furniture, and lamps. Seibel’s aesthetic was equally wide–ranging, from dinnerware in brightly colored, geometric patterns as well as the soft–edged Raymor Modern Stoneware line of the early 1950s in warm, earth tones. A large, oven–to–table line of some 60 pieces, Raymor Modern Stoneware offered consumers a visually coordinated cornucopia of products for formal and informal dining: plates, platters, casseroles, bean pots, teapots, ashtrays and more.

Julius Shulman
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Julius Shulman

b. 1910, New York; d. 2009, Los Angeles

Julius Shulman was one of the most influential architectural photographers of the twentieth century. Shulman was born in Brooklyn, New York, but his family moved to Los Angeles while he was a boy. He began taking pictures while still in high school; because he never threw away negatives, Shulman was still selling those photographs seventy years later. His close friendships with Los Angeles modernists Raphael Soriano and Richard Neutra inspired his interest in architecture and his move into architectural photography.

Shulman worked as a staff photographer for Arts & Architecture magazine, which launched the Case Study House Program in 1945. His photographs capture the architectural essence of a building; his images of Neutra’s Kaufmann House (1946) in Palm Springs, California, for example, get to the core of the residence’s synthesis of the natural (the surrounding mountains, stone walls, and artfully placed boulders) and the man–made (the house’s glass walls and metal cantilevers). Taken as a whole, his work compellingly represents the California way of life at midcentury.

Alex Steinweiss
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Alex Steinweiss

b. 1917, New York; d. 2011, Sarasota, Florida

Alex Steinweiss received a scholarship to attend the Parsons School of Design in New York. In 1939 he designed what is recognized as the first example of album cover art and soon became the art director of Columbia Records. During the late 1940s, he was asked to develop a packaging solution to protect a new product: the long–playing 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record. Steinweiss designed a paper jacket that quickly became the industry standard. He oversaw cover art for Columbia up until the 1970s, designing thousands of album covers.

Steinweiss’s covers combine witty cartoon figures, abstract shapes, bright colors, and his signature curly, hand–drawn lettering. In his playful record cover for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, for example, tiny figures stand under an enormous, modern nutcracker. Similarly, a spotlight in cool light blue highlights a pair of dancers on the fanciful cover of Stravinsky’s Scènes de ballet.

émigré
Anni Albers
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Anni Albers

b. 1899, Berlin; d. 1994, Orange, Connecticut

Anni Albers was born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin. In 1922, she was admitted to the Bauhaus in Weimar and joined the department of weaving, one of the few open to women. Albers plunged into the construction challenges of textiles, interested in their capacity to embody the abstract compositions more common to modernist painting. In 1933, she and her husband, Josef Albers, were invited at the suggestion of Philip Johnson, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to teach at the experimental arts school Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The couple remained there until 1949.

Anni Albers’s work was widely exhibited throughout the United States, including at the Museum of Modern Art — her 1949 show there was the museum’s first solo exhibition of textiles, helping to establish her as one of the best–known weavers in postwar America. Albers’s work was influential because of her insistence on creating textiles meant to be displayed rather than used. She is also known for pioneering the use of nontraditional materials in weaving, including metallic and plastic fibers.

Lili Blumenau
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Lili Blumenau

b. 1912, Berlin; d. 1976, New York

Lili Blumenau was a textile designer, author, and educator. Blumenau studied fine and applied arts in Berlin and Paris during the 1930s before immigrating to the United States, where in 1950 she attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina. That same year, she founded her own weaving workshop and design studio in New York. Stude.nts took weaving classes in the workshop, while design industry professionals came to the studio for consultations on home furnishings such as upholstery, draperies, and rugs, as well on fabric for women’s clothes, purses, and shoes.

In 1944, Blumenau became the keeper for textiles at the Cooper Union Museum in New York (now the Smithsonian Institution Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum). She published a number of books, including The Art and Craft of Hand Weaving: Including Fabric Design (1955) and Creative Design in Wall Hangings: Weaving Patterns Based on Primitive and Medieval Art (1967), which offer historical background on weaving techniques as well as practical instruction for textile making.

Marcel Breuer
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Marcel Breuer

b. 1902, Pécs, Hungary; d. 1981, New York

Marcel Breuer was an architect, furniture designer, and educator known for his use of simple, bold forms. Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus during the 1920s, serving as the head of the carpentry workshop. While there, he created innovative tubular metal chairs that became signature Bauhaus designs: his Wassily (1925) and Cesca (1928) chairs are still in production. Immigrating to London in 1935, he moved to the United States in 1937, teaching at Harvard University’s School of Architecture, where his pupils included Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph.

Breuer was commissioned to design a suite of furniture for the dormitory rooms at Bryn Mawr College’s Rhoads Hall in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The set included a desk, chair, shelving unit, mirror, and dresser. Made of softly curving forms in wood and plywood — the latter favored by modernists because it expressed industrial manufacturing processes without sacrificing the warmth of traditional wood — the Bryn Mawr commission brought to America a furniture aesthetic Breuer had developed in England for the trendsetting firm Isokon.

Breuer’s influential architectural projects in America include his 1949 temporary demonstration house for the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and his 1966 building for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Breuer considered Saint John’s Abbey Church, built between 1958 and 1961 in Collegeville, Minnesota, his best work. In 1968, he was honored with the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.

Eugene Deutch
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Eugene Deutch

b. 1904, Budapest; d. 1959, Chicago

Eugene Deutch made ceramics that are admired for the way they combine a modern functionalism with a handcrafted sensibility and respect for tradition. Living in Paris during the early 1920s, Deutch worked as a carpenter and was part of a social circle that included sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Through Brancusi, Deutch became interested in modernist concerns such as folk traditions and factory production in the decorative arts. In 1927, Deutch moved to Chicago to join his brother, who ran a successful handicraft business. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and by 1934 had established his own ceramics studio, where he produced bowls, pots, lamps, and other household objects. Deutch also taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design with László Moholy–Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The shapes of Deutch’s coffee set (1944), finished in his characteristically subtle, mottled glazes, are sculptural and functional; the pieces’ indentations both give them form and serve as their handles.

Marli Ehrman
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Marli Ehrman

b. 1904, Berlin; d. 1982, Santa Monica, California

Marli Ehrman was a Bauhaus weaver who fled Nazi Germany for the United States. She became the director of the weaving workshop at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design in Chicago, which was established with the purpose of bringing Bauhaus ideas to the United States. Ehrman designed textiles for mass production and collaborated with such architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Charles Eames. Erhman’s supple, solid–colored upholstery covered the award–winning molded–plywood chairs designed by Eames and architect Eero Saarinen for the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition, which were exhibited at the museum in 1941.

By 1947, the Institute of Design weaving workshop had closed, and in 1956, Ehrman opened a design studio in Oak Park, Illinois, called the Elm Shop, featuring her own hand–woven textiles. She paid close attention to the artistry of her works, no matter their intended use. For example, in a placemat from c. 1960, Ehrman elevated a quotidian household object into a modernist canvas of asymmetrically arranged stripes of varied colors and widths.

Paul T. Frankl
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Paul T. Frankl

b. 1886, Vienna; d. 1958, Los Angeles

Paul T. Frankl was a furniture and interior designer, architect, and writer. He trained as an architect in Europe before moving permanently to the United States in 1921. He soon opened an interior design firm in New York, later moving to Los Angeles in 1934. Frankl’s writings and designs popularized American modernism, from his Skyscraper furniture of the 1920s to his chic Hollywood décor from the 1930s on.

Frankl’s Skyscraper furniture was his signature work. The setback skyscraper, especially those being built in Manhattan in the 1920s, represented the potential of the era. It symbolized a better future made possible by modern engineering and materials. Frankl’s Skyscraper desks, dressers, clocks, and bookshelves miniaturized this modern icon for inclusion in the American home. The Skyscraper bookcase, for example, is made up of modules of different heights and widths that, when combined, suggest a jagged–edged urban skyline.

Trude Guermonprez
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Trude Guermonprez

b. 1910, Danzig, Germany; d. 1976, San Francisco

Trude Guermonprez was born Gertrude Jalowetz. She was a commercial textile and rug designer as well as a design teacher. She attended schools in Cologne, Halle an der Saale, and Berlin in Germany before taking her first position at the Het Paapje weaving studio in the Netherlands. Guermonprez’s parents came to the United States in the 1930s and taught at the experimental arts school Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina. After her father’s death in 1947, Guermonprez began teaching at Black Mountain, invited by fellow instructors Anni and Josef Albers. Two years later, Marguerite Wildenhain, her former teacher from the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Halle an der Saale, invited her to teach at the Pond Farm artists’ colony in Northern California. Guermonprez later moved to San Francisco to join her second husband and became a faculty member of California College of Arts and Crafts, now California College of the Arts; she was chair of the crafts department from 1960 to 1971 and chair of the weaving department from 1960 to 1976.

Like Anni Albers, Guermonprez was a seminal figure in the emergence of weaving as an art form. Examples of what she called “textile graphics” include decorative wall hangings such as Op Banner and Untitled Space Hanging (both undated works) that, with their complex patterns and vivid colors, were intended to be displayed and appreciated as sculptures.

Leo Lionni
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Leo Lionni

b. 1910, Amsterdam; d. 1999, Rome

Leo Lionni was an art director, designer, and creator of children’s books, born to a successful Sephardic family in Amsterdam. By age twenty–one, he identified as a Futurist and connected with the artist F. T. Marinetti, who brought him into the Italian scene, leading Lionni to study at the University of Genoa. With the rise of Fascism, Lionni immigrated to the United States and began working for the advertising firm N. W. Ayer, where he was the director of significant accounts, including Ford Motors. He returned to graphic design work in the 1950s, with clients including Fortune magazine.

Many of Lionni’s best works use type and the alphabet as design elements, such as his February 1960 cover for Fortune, with its grid of colorful letters spelling “NEW YORK” against a black background. The magazine’s editors remarked that the image recalled “one of New York’s greatest spectacles, thousands of lighted office windows shining through the early darkness of a winter afternoon.” Lionni also worked for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, designing catalogs for such popular exhibitions as The Family of Man and also authored and illustrated children’s books exploring the natural world.

Gertrud & Otto Natzler
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Gertrud & Otto Natzler

b. 1908, Vienna; d. 1971, Los Angeles /
b. 1908, Vienna; d. 2007, Los Angeles

Gertrud Natzler and Otto Natzler were a husband–and–wife team who created ceramics from 1933 until Gertrud’s death in 1971, after which Otto completed the glazing and firing of her work and subsequently created his own solo ceramic constructions until 1992. While they were living in Vienna, Gertrud took a ceramics class, which Otto joined. When he realized he could not match Gertrud’s throwing expertise, Otto concentrated on experimenting with glazes. The Natzlers operated their own ceramics workshop in Austria from 1935 until the Nazi invasion in 1938, when they immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, bringing their family shortly thereafter.

In their practice together, Gertrud created the earthenware forms, while Otto developed new glaze formulas and firing methods. Gertrud was known for making paper–thin ceramics, while Otto invented over 2,500 glaze formulas and originated unusual reduction firing techniques. His bold glazes, each applied with a brush, responded to Gertrud’s delicate forms. The couple achieved national and international recognition for their ceramics, which were showcased in Arts & Architecture, House Beautiful, and many other publications. Major retrospectives of their work have been organized by museums in the United States as well as in Europe and Israel, most recently at the Jewish Museum Vienna in 1994.

Richard Neutra
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Richard Neutra

b. 1892, Vienna; d. 1970, Wuppertal, Germany

Richard Neutra immigrated from Vienna to Los Angeles in 1923, where he designed airy and coolly elegant houses for an elite group of clients, including film director Josef von Sternberg, health columnist Philip Lovell and his wife, Leah, and artist and collector Galka Scheyer. Neutra’s post–World War II masterpiece, the Kaufmann House (1946), was commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann, Sr., the Jewish owner of the trendsetting Pittsburgh department store that bore his name. Kaufmann had previously hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design Fallingwater (1939) outside the city. His son, Edgar, was a leading promoter of modernism at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he organized its Good Design exhibition program.

Located in Palm Springs, California, the Kaufmann House integrates architecture and landscape in remarkable ways. The mountains that surround the house are, in effect, domesticated by Neutra in the house’s crisp–edged stone walls and the chimney, which anchors the sprawling metal–and–glass residence to its site. With a sculptural boulder prominent in the foreground, Julius Shulman’s famous photograph of the house captures its synthesis of the natural and man–made.

Victor S. Ries
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Victor S. Ries

b. 1907, Berlin; d. 2013, Danville, California

Victor S. Ries was a metalsmith, sculptor, and jewelry designer whose early work was influenced by Bauhaus design principles. In 1933, Ries immigrated to Palestine, where he collaborated with architect Eric Mendelsohn on decorative works for his architectural commissions and taught metalsmithing at the Bezalel School of Arts and Design. During the 1940s, he moved to Northern California, where he was a founding member of the Pond Farm artists’ colony. Ries designed jewelry, decorative objects, and Judaica such as a mezuzah in a curvaceous sculptural form. He also created window screens depicting Jewish holidays at Temple Beth Abraham in Oakland, California, and a gate for the Judah L. Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley, California.

Rudolph M. Schindler
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Rudolph M. Schindler

b. 1887, Vienna; d. 1953, Los Angeles

Rudolph Schindler was an architect who helped lead the development of California modernism, designing residences that take advantage of the Southern California climate and landscape as well as incorporate low–cost materials. He received his architecture degree from the Polytechnic Institute in Vienna and also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, where his professors included Otto Wagner and he became acquainted with Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs. Seeking to work with Wright, Schindler moved to Chicago in 1914, eventually relocating to Los Angeles in 1920 to oversee the construction of Wright’s Hollyhock House (1921). By 1922, Schindler was working on his own Los Angeles commissions, so he left Wright to set up private practice.

Schindler is known for buildings that feature complex plans of interlocking spaces and solid concrete walls punctuated by open expanses of wood and glass; his own home in West Hollywood, completed in the early 1920s, exemplifies his style. Schindler also designed furniture that is both multifunctional and highly sculptural, such as a chair–cum–end table in wood and plush upholstery he designed for the Elizabeth Van Patten residence in Los Angeles.

Ruth Adler Schnee
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Ruth Adler Schnee

b. 1923, Frankfurt; lives and works in Southfield, Michigan

Ruth Adler Schnee received early art training from the painter Paul Klee, a family friend. After her home was destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938, Schnee fled Germany with her family and settled in Detroit. During the 1940s, she trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and then worked for industrial designer Raymond Loewy in New York before returning to the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit. Schnee produced her own line of textiles, characterized by dense and complex patterns in bright colors. She also ran an eponymous store, itself a masterful essay in contemporary interior design, devoted to bringing modernist design to Michigan. Schnee was recently commissioned by Knoll Textiles to transform her printed textiles into woven ones for use in health–care facilities. Her textiles are still available through the manufacturer Anzea.

Ernest Sohn
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Ernest Sohn

b. 1913, near Antwerp; d. 2006, New York

Ernest Sohn fled Germany in 1936, settling in New York. From then until the late 1970s, Sohn designed novel and imaginative objects for the American gift and housewares industries, from chafing dishes to “lazy Susan” relish trays, candlesticks, and fruit bowls. He established his own design firm, Ernest Sohn Creations, in 1951, and his output appealed to postwar America’s taste for colorful and exuberant products, some of which were featured in the Good Design exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. To reach the broadest possible market, Sohn sometimes tempered his modern forms with traditional materials such as wood, copper, or brass, or with decorative treatments drawn from history. Sohn’s 1963 Esquire stoneware dining service, for example, combines matte–black exteriors, decorated with delicately incised lines, with shiny white interiors and lids. The coffee urn, creamer, and sugar bowl of his Doric line (1959) are fluted to mimic ancient Greek columns.

Saul Steinberg
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Saul Steinberg

b.1914, Bucharest; d. 1999, New York

Saul Steinberg worked as a cartoonist and illustrator in Italy during the 1930s, immigrating to the United States during the early 1940s because of rising anti–Semitism. He was known primarily for his work in The New Yorker, for which he created hundreds of illustrations and covers over the course of his career, including the famous 1976 cover depicting a myopic Manhattanite’s view of the world by compressing everything west of the Hudson River into virtual nothingness. He also produced textiles and wallpapers such as Aviary, which, in its rendering of birds of different shapes and sizes, has the same fluid and fanciful style as his drawings. Aviary was featured in the 1951 Good Design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Steinberg's drawings, photographs, and sculptures were internationally exhibited during his lifetime, such as his panoramic mural for the United States Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.

George Tscherny
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George Tscherny

b. 1924, Budapest; lives and works in New York

George Tscherny was raised in Berlin, where he was exposed to dynamic, modern street posters that would influence his graphic designs. Tscherny moved to the United States in 1941, working with George Nelson early in Nelson’s career and designing graphics for the Herman Miller furniture company. Among his most striking advertisements for the company was a 1953 photogram of an open, loose–weave fabric, dramatically cropped and enlarged to resemble a sea of turbulent waves. For a 1955 announcement marking the opening of the company’s new Dallas showroom, Tscherny photographed a chair with a cowboy hat to imply, as he claimed, “the human element…so that anybody can finish it by placing themselves into the picture.”

In 1955, Tscherny opened his own graphic design studio in New York. His corporate clients have included Pan American World Airways and Ligget & Myers Tobacco Company, for which he designed packaging for Lark cigarettes in decorative, colorful styles to appeal to women. Tscherny’s cultural clients have included the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and he has been affiliated with New York’s School of Visual Arts since 1955, designing the school’s first poster advertisement and teaching its first design course..

Marguerite Wildenhain
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Marguerite Wildenhain

b. 1896, Lyon, France; d. 1985, Guerneville, California

Marguerite Wildenhain, born Marguerite Friedlander, began studies at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Berlin before entering the Weimar Bauhaus in 1919, where she remained for seven years. From 1926 until 1933, Wildenhain taught at the Municipal School for Arts and Crafts in Halle an der Saale, Germany, and worked for the Royal Porcelain Factory. In 1933, as the Nazis gained power, she moved to Holland, eventually immigrating to the United States in 1940, where she taught at the California College of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland. She soon settled in Guerneville, California, designing and producing ceramics in workshops at Pond Farm. Wildenhain kept the forms of her vessels simple, while their decoration ranges from geometric patterns to more figurative imagery drawn from nature, legend, and religion, such as the angels and dragons that decorate a 1952 vase. Pond Farm officially closed in 1952, the year Wildenhain started a brief teaching stint at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, but she eventually returned to Guerneville, retiring shortly before her death.