EAMES: THE ARCHITECT AND THE PAINTER opens @ Laemmle's Music Hall Friday, 11.18

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.

The “Eames Era” began in the optimistic flush of American victory during World War II, and the global impact of the Eames aesthetic continues to grow unabated today. With Eames: The Architect and the Painter, Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey have made a definitive and unprecedented cinematic foray into the private world of the Renaissance-style studio that Charles and Ray Eames conceived in a cavernous warehouse on a gritty street in Venice Beach, CA. Eames: The Architect and the Painter, is the first film to be made about Charles and Ray since their deaths — and the only one that peers deeply inside the link between their artistic collaboration and sometimes tortured love for one another.

Despite their unrivaled impact on American design, the persona's of the steadfastly private Charles and Ray Eames have remained oblique beyond the giddy publicity photos they doled out to inquiring journalists while they were alive. Eames: The Architect and the Painter draws extensively from a virgin cache of archival material, visually stunning films, love letters, photographs and artifacts produced in mind-boggling volume by Charles and Ray with their talented staff during the hyper-creative forty-year epoch of the Eames Office.

Interviews with family members, including Charles’ insightful grandson Eames Demetrios, and design historians guide the viewer on an intimate tour of the Eames era, while junior designers who were swept into the 24-7 world of “The Eamery,” as they called it, flesh out a fascinatingly complex blueprint of this husband-and-wife powerhouse. Featuring interviews with Charles Eames’ daughter, Lucia, filmmaker Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, noted architect Kevin Roche and a cast of former Eames Office designers, including Jeannine Oppewall, Deborah Sussman and Gordon Ashby, Eames: The Architect and the Painter provides a candid view of the emotional inner lives of two great American artists as they applied their genius to practical problems and innovation, not out of a sense of ego, but out of sheer creative necessity.


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Bonus Video - Ice Cube Celebrates The Eames

@ LACMA - California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way.” Opens 10.5.11

LACMA presents California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way.” The exhibition—the first major study of modern California design—examines the state’s key role in shaping the material culture of the country at mid-century. California Design features more than 350 objects in wideranging media, including furniture, textiles, fashion, graphic and industrial design, ceramics, jewelry, metalwork, architectural drawings, and film, as well as two period re-creations—most notably the living room from the home of renowned designers Charles and Ray Eames. The exhibition is organized by Wendy Kaplan, Curator and Department Head, and Bobbye Tigerman, Assistant Curator, of LACMA’s Decorative Arts and Design Department.

“Given that California became a world center for design innovation after 1945, it’s surprising that this exhibition is the first comprehensive study of the subject. While figures such as the Eameses, Richard Neutra and Rudi Gernreich are well known, we present new context for their work,” stated Wendy Kaplan. Bobbye Tigerman elaborated, “At the same time, we also introduce audiences to previously unheralded designers who played an integral role in the development of California design.”

California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way” is one of five exhibitions LACMA is presenting in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented collaboration initiated by the Getty, bringing together more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene (beginning October 2011).

Exhibition Overview
“California is America, only more so,” the author Wallace Stegner famously declared in 1959. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the state symbolized the good life in America. After 1945 a burgeoning, newly prosperous population—intoxicated by the power to purchase after the deprivation years of the Great Depression and the wartime rationing of goods—turned the state into America’s most important center for progressive architecture and furnishings. This exhibition explores how the California of our collective imagination—a democratic utopia where a benign climate permitted life to be led informally and largely outdoors— was translated into a material culture that defined an era.

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FILM - The Visual Language of Herbert Matter will be screening for FREE @ LACMA on 1.8.11

Herbert Matter was a man who seemingly fit many lives into one by excelling in the creative disciplines of design, photography and film. The documentary The Visual Language of Herbert Matter profiles his extraordinary life and seminal work.

With the help of historical footage, vintage photographs, never-before-seen film excerpts (some shot by Matter himself) and a broad overview of his extensive body of work, the feature length documentary helps in bringing the picture of an almost forgotten creative genius back into focus.

Interwoven with interviews from a who's who list of legendary artists, designer and photographers, the film sheds light on a remarkable career and its impact on the evolving language of design during the short 20th century both in the USA and Europe.

For the first time in an encompassing and comprehensive way, the film touches on the innovative expressions of his free experimental work, his fashion and advertising photography and his portraiture. His amazing talent of combining bold combination's of words, images and space is shown in his iconic Swiss travel posters, pavilion designs for the New York World's Fair 1939, photographs for Condé Nast publications; corporate image programs for Knoll furniture, the New Haven Railroad, exhibition- and numerous catalog designs for the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum; Matter's photography was instrumental in disseminating the designs of Charles and Ray Eames, covers for the legendary Arts & Architecture magazine and his lesser known work in film, the prime example being a film on the works of Alexander Calder.

The documentary is produced by independent Swiss production company PiXiU films, directed by award-winning filmmaker Reto Caduff (who will be on hand to discuss the film) and presented with a unique approach of visual storytelling: beginning with Matter’s childhood in the Swiss alps, to his training in Paris with legends such as A.M. Cassandre, Fernand Léger, and Le Corbusier, leading back to Zurich and the groundbreaking photomontage in his legendary Swiss travel posters - followed by his subsequent move to the United States.

FREE - Bing Theater | No Reservations
Saturday, Jan 8, 2p

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Matter Teaser from Herbert Matter on Vimeo.