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Collecting Eames: The JF Chen Collection
By Erika Heet
Of all the mid-century modern designers represented in Joel Chen’s multilevel, 40,000-square-foot loft in Los Angeles, Charles and Ray Eames were the respected dealer’s clear choice as the sole focus of his part in the citywide Pacific Standard Time exhibition, a months-long Getty Research Institute initiative celebrating LA art from 1945 to 1980. “Eames pieces are the epitome of good design,” explains Chen, who has built one of the most important collections of their designs. “They have a very strong influence on all modern furniture.”
Sponsored by 1stdibs, Herman Miller and Nike, “Collecting Eames: The JF Chen Collection,” which runs October 3 through January 14, will serve as a complete Eames design timeline, spanning 1939 to 1998. It includes the largest group of Eames models and originals ever shown outside of a museum, beginning with a chair designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen in 1939 for the Kleinhans music hall in Buffalo, New York, conceived by Saarinen and his father, Eliel. The chair’s wood frame and sinuous lines, clear influences of the era, make it an anomaly among Eames chairs.
The true highlight, says Chen, is a high-back molded-plywood armchair, Charles and Ray’s first collaboration, designed with Saarinen for the Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Design Competition in 1941 (they won in the furniture category). Covered in its original fabric, now torn and stained, by Bauhaus weaver Marli Ehrman, the chair is one of probably only three made and bears a strong pencil cut-line likely drawn by Charles or Saarinen along the top. After he acquired it a few years ago, Chen found the chair so special that he sequestered it near his desk in his private office before finally bringing it downstairs for inclusion in the show.
During World War II the Eames’ business shifted focus, which explains Chen’s group of sleek circa-1943 wood splints, modeled from Charles’s own leg, of which the US Navy ordered 150,000. In 1945, the couple designed the first of their now iconic wide-hipped, low-slung LCW chairs. (Typical of the couple’s no-nonsense naming conventions, the initials stand for Lounge Chair Wood.) Chen will display almost every imaginable LCW example: Variations on a theme, the chairs are different in ways that are both barely perceptible (the type of rubber shock mounts on the back) and strikingly evident (the color of paint; the Chen show features a rare rust-red pair made shortly after Herman Miller began distributing Eames furniture in 1946).
More than a year in the making, the exhibition has been overwhelming, even for Chen’s family — including wife Margaret and daughters Bianca and Fiona — all of whom have contributed months of work toward the show. “It’s a huge endeavor,” admits Joel Chen, who called in Eames collector and scholar Dan Ostroff to curate the exhibition, and recruited veteran LA artists and collectors Bob Breen and Clare Graham to help design it. “Had the Chens not done what they did here, I wouldn’t know what I know,” says Ostroff, author of Modern Classic: The Eames Plastic ChairITALICS. “This was an unparalleled opportunity to study these things.” (Ostroff previously sold Chen hundreds of important pieces from his own collection, many of which are in the show.)
In addition to Eames oddities — skateboard decks depicting an LCW chair; Eiffel Tower–base chairs; an extremely rare onyx-topped La Fonda table from the private collection of Max Lawrence, the owner of the historic LA ceramics firm Architectural Pottery — visitors will be able to view prime examples of better-known Eames designs from five decades. These range from the colorful Eames Storage Unit (1950) to the Lounge Chair and Ottoman (1956), as well as the Eames design du jour — the milky-white La Chaise, designed in 1949 and finally put into production by Vitra in 1996. Chen’s example, which used to belong to the filmmaker Tim Burton, was made in 1998 and is the newest piece in the show.
“Nothing of this scale has been put together — ever,” says Joel Chen, who will be commemorating the exhibition with a book: Collecting Eames(ITALICS), compiled by Bianca and Fiona with graphic designer Victoria Lam and available in October. In addition, Chen will show many Eames films, including ECS(ITALICS), a short the Eameses wrote and directed in 1961, in which they reveal their oft-repeated design mantra: “The details are not the details, they make the design.”
Other Eames events are running concurrently with Chen’s for Pacific Standard Time: Of particular note is the exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where the entire living room of the Eames Case Study House #8 in Pacific Palisades has been meticulously reassembled while the Eames Foundation restores the original building. In the spirit of this unprecedented series of museum and gallery collaborations, Chen contributed pieces from his collection to the museum show. “We want to prove that art and history are strong in Southern California, and Eames designs are a big part of that,” says Chen. “People are coming from all over the world, and we will be proud to show them.”
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