Launched in 1950, the shell chairs designed by Charles and Ray Eames were the first mass-produced piece of furniture in which the seat and back were formed from a single unified piece of plastic. That same year, the creative couple invited their friend, Saul Steinberg, the illustrator best known for his cartoon-style musings in The New Yorker-he describes himself as “a writer who draws” – to visit them. While on the West Coast with his wife, Hedda Sterne, Steinberg made the fateful trip to the Eames’ office in Venice, California.
Together, the three eccentrics overflowed with imagination, creating an array of unique art objects. Take, for example, an official-looking but totally fabricated college diploma that Steinberg drafted for Charles Eames (who left architecture school before graduating) and an actual bathtub on which Steinberg painted the outline. of a woman in the bath. Archival photographs were also discovered around this time showing Steinberg’s whimsical designs projected onto his wife and Ray Eames.
Saul Steinberg’s fake university degree for Charles Eames (circa 1950). Courtesy of the Eames Foundation.
“The interconnection of Steinberg’s ideas and the way it intertwined with my grandparents’ creations is incredible,” said Llisa Demetrios, the Eames’ youngest granddaughter and the Institute’s chief curator. Eames, who looks after the artistic and design heritage of the family. “I think this collaboration is exemplary of how they loved to create – always open to another creative iteration, going beyond what is expected.”
“Steinberg was always attentive to the changing American cultural landscape,” said scholar Francesca Pellicciari, co-curator of “Saul Steinberg: Milan, New York” at the 2021 Milan Triennale.[He] seemed to revel in the growing gap between popular tastes and the vanguard of modernist art and design. Indeed, as early as the 1950s, he made a name for himself as a painter and muralist in the absurd vein, beyond his ironic caricatures for the new yorker. In 1946, he was included in the group exhibition “Fourteen Americans” at MoMA, exhibiting alongside Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi and Robert Motherwell.
Courtesy of Eames Office, LLC.
At some point during his creative festivities with the Eames, Steinberg applied his wit and humor to two of these shell chairs. On one he drew the crude silhouette of a napping cat and on the other a naked woman. The Eameses held these chairs, which they correctly understood to be more than the byproduct of two couples having fun. Today, more than 70 years later, the Eames Institute has had the cat chair scanned and faithfully reproduced by Vitra and the furniture company Herman Miller, right down to the hand-drawn mustaches. The new model, in a limited edition of 500, is available for $2,500.
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