The Magazine Antiques

It was also in Columbus that the modernist who had the most passionate appreciation for folk art of all had one of his signal triumphs. Alexander Girard was born in New York City but raised near Florence, Italy. As a child, he developed a fascination with nativity scenes, and his interest was encouraged by his parents, who thought it a sign of an artistic temperament. All through his life, from his studies at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, to his move in 1951 to the Herman Miller Furniture Company as a designer of textiles and graphics, and until the end of his days, Girard collected folk figurines, miniature animals, houses, buildings, and other toys. He kept careful records and loved to arrange pieces from his collection into elaborate tableaux (see Fig. 8). In all, he amassed more than a hundred thousand artifacts, which he donated in 1978 to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe (on condition that they build a wing to house the collection).

In his monograph on the Girard Collection, the folklore specialist Henry H. Glassie assays a view in which, through his scenic displays, the designer was trying to make a statement about the brotherhood of mankind: “The human universals of happy play and sociable consumption, and most important, the universal encounter with the unknown, underlie the [presentation of the collection,] within which universals are clothed in cultural particularity.”11 The designer and writer Marilyn Neuhart, who worked for Girard beginning in 1956, says he had a simpler motivation. “Sandro had a great concern for the work of artisans, and wanted to preserve traditions that were disappearing,” she says. “But mainly he just collected for love—he loved the craft, he loved the beauty and the innocence.” As a proselytizer for folk art, Girard, Neuhart says, convinced J. Irwin Miller (1909–2004), for whom he and Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) built a landmark modernist house in Columbus in the mid-1950s, to make folk art a chief element in the decor.12 It was also Girard, Neuhart says, who introduced the Eameses to folk art.

Folk art was a difficult area to discuss for the modernists who appreciated it. On the one hand, modernists were supposed to be forward looking. On the other, they were (in theory if not in practice) democratic. In 1951 Arts and Architecture—the influential magazine that launched the famed Case Study House program—published an admiring article about Simon “Sam” Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles (see Figs. 7a, 7b). Discussing the amazing spires, built by hand from curled steel-reinforcement bars that were covered in cement, then festooned with stones, shells, broken bottles, and bits of colored glass and crockery, the editors focused on Rodia’s technical achievement and not his obvious obsessive compulsion.13 (Today Rodia is called an “outsider artist”—a term no one likes, but for which no one has coined a substitute.) The Eameses took the same tack when speaking about their folk art. They “always discussed objects within the framework of the functionalism that then dominated the discourse of design,” Kirkham wrote. “When I admired a Hopi kachina…Ray stated that its design was clearly related to its function of informing Hopi children about their history and their gods.”14 The reader senses a frustration with the Eameses’ inability to say that they liked it because they liked it.

But design is meant to be serious business. Curiously, one of the most popular mid-twentieth-century designers today is Paul Evans, whose works stemmed not only from a unique personal aesthetic but one that was almost without doubt heavily influenced by folk art. Evans grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, an area with a long and proud artistic heritage. Jeffrey Head, a design historian who is at work on an Evans monograph, notes that the designer studied painting and textile design in his youth, took up metalwork in college, and for a time worked as a metalsmith at Old Sturbridge Village, a “living history museum” in Sturbridge, Massachusetts where costumed crafts-people portray life in an early nineteenth-century New England town. The most highly sought after of Evans’s pieces are his earliest, known as “sculpture front” cabinets (Fig. 3). They feature front panels divided into gridded compartments, which are filled with various roughly shaped metal glyphs—stars, spirals, bulls-eyes, and other runic, or totemic, forms. “Evans left the air of handicraft very apparent in these works, and I don’t think it’s a big leap to say this is because of his exposure to folk art,” Head says. “The pieces look like quilts and were made like quilts. I don’t know if it was conscious or not, but I think it’s there.”

Todd Merrill, a New York vintage design dealer who has handled many Evans pieces, has often heard the comparison to quilts, or to North African house doors. “I understand all that,” he says. “But to me, what makes Evans’s work a sort of folk art is that you have this guy, all alone, doing his thing. And there’s nothing else like it.” When Evans began contract work for the Directional Furniture Company, his furniture first became less intricate, then less idiosyncratic. Perhaps Cahill had it right when he suggested that the most vital tool for the folk artist is the human heart.

1 Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995), p. 145. 
2 Holger Cahill, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1932), p. 6.
3 Ibid., pp. 5–6 and 26–27.
4 Ibid., p. 28. 
5  Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Architecture, ed. Stephen Sennott (Fitzroy Darborn, London, 2004), vol. 1, p. 471.
6 Nina Stritzler-Levine, “Three Visions of the Modern Home: Josef Frank, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto,” in  Leon Botstein et al., Josef Frank: Architect and Designer: An Alternative Vision of the Modern Home (Yale University Press, New Haven, for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York, 1996), p. 16.
7 Ibid., p. 22.
8 Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Architecture, vol. 1, p. 471. 
9 Botstein et al., Josef Frank, p. 247. 
10 Marika Hausen et al., Eliel Saarinen: Projects 1896–1923, trans. Desmond O’Rourke and Michael Wynne-Ellis (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990), pp. 42–43.
11 Henry H. Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art: The Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1989), p. 20. 
12 For more on the Irwin Miller House, see Martin Filler, “Indiana modern,” The Magazine Antiques, vol. 175, no. 4 (April 2009), pp. 106–111. 
13 See Jules Langsner, “Sam of Watts,” Arts and Architecture, vol. 68 (July 1951), pp. 23–30.
14  Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames, p. 145.

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