Word: cranbrook
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, is, in fact, our equivalent of the Bauhaus, and it has had an equally profound influence on our contemporary design. The Bauhaus search for a machine-age aesthetic was revolutionary, a radical break with the past. The Cranbrook approach was evolutionary. Its artists and craftsmen created new designs not with dogmas or preconceived notions but by enthusiastic, almost playful experimentation with traditional craftsmanship and styles...
That experimentation is traced in an excellent and comprehensive exhibition, "Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925-1950," which opened two weeks ago at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was organized by R. Craig Miller of the Metropolitan and Davira S. Taragin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, where it opened last December. As is made clear in the scholarly catalogue, Cranbrook is no ordinary art school. There has never been a formal curriculum or method in this graduate school for some 150 students. Instead, each department, such as sculpture, painting, ceramics or weaving...
...Cranbrook's first great achievement was the 350-acre campus itself, which includes four schools, an institute of science and a museum. The complex was founded by Detroit Newspaper Magnate George Gough Booth and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth, both philanthropists and aesthetes under the spell of the arts and crafts movement that was launched in England in the 1880s, inspired by the work of the designer-poet William Morris. They enlisted a kindred spirit-Eliel Saarinen, then Finland's leading architect-to serve as Cranbrook's designer, president and guiding force. Saarinen's stately, romantic...
Nowhere has it been more true than at Cranbrook that "architecture is the mother of the arts," as architects are fond of saying. Among the works created under the academy's aegis: the sculpture of Carl Milles, Tony Rosenthal, Harry Bertoia and others; the rugs and wall hangings of Eliel Saarinen's wife Loja, his daughter Pipsan and Marianne Strengell; and the furniture and furnishings of Charles and Ray Eames, Bertoia and Eero Saarinen. Says Met Curator Miller: "Cranbrook's artists all conceived their work in an architectural context and believed in the totality of design from...
...bronze model for Europa and the Bull (depicting Europa as a perplexed Lolita, although she is grown up in the full-scale sculpture); the bold, glazed vases of Maija Grotell; the assertive, colorful fabric designs of Strengell. Most prominent in the show is the best-known achievement of Cranbrook: the furniture and interior design by the Saarinens, the Eameses, Bertoia, Florence Schust Knoll and others. One exhibit replicates a typical mid-century office. Designed by Florence Knoll, it combines the work of Cranbrook creators into a smart, elegant interior, as representative of our time as the Victorian parlor...