Paul Evans Hanukkah Menorah, "The Simon", For Raymor, 1955

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Paul Evans Hanukkah Menorah, "The Simon", For Raymor, 1955

About the Item

Paul Evans Hanukkah Menorah, "The Simon", For Raymor, 1955. (NY85930-cpn) The menorah is made from walnut with brass candleholders. Paul Evan's menorahs were never marked. Reference: Illustrated in Paul Evans: Designer and Sculptor, Jeffery Head, Page 19. The entry in the Raymor catalogue reads, "Hanukah Menorahs have been created in the noble spirit of the Glorious Maccabees. Paul Evans, their designer, who is an accomplished creator of contemporary ideas, has used black walnut and brass in each to maintain the traditional concept in modern dress. Our hope is that they will decorate Jewish homes throughout the year. Each had been named for one of the Glorious Brothers." Dimensions: 20.25 inches x 2.5 inches x 1 inches Paul Evans (1931-1987) was a leading figure in the mid-century American studio and brutalist furniture movement. Evans consistently pushed boundaries with his innovative approaches to metalsmithing and furniture-making. His transcendent works, which defied what everyday objects looked like and how they were made, continue to reveal the fascinating crosscurrents between sculpture and design. Evans began working with metal in the early 1950s— first at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Craftsmen (SAC) in Rochester, New York, where he studied under the influential American silversmiths and designers John (Jack) Prip and Lawrence Copeland, and later at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Evans then moved to Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, where he worked as a full-time craftsman, demonstrating various silversmithing techniques at Old Sturbridge Village, a living museum that re-creates life in rural New England during the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. In 1955, seeking a change of scenery, Evans moved to Lambertville, New Jersey, a well-known haven for artists and craftsmen, and opened a workshop in a former chicken coop. He soon befriended the self-taught furniture designer, Phillip Lloyd Powell, who encouraged Evans to take his metallurgy skills and apply them to furniture. For the next ten years, the duo shared a showroom in nearby New Hope, Pennsylvania, and collaborated on pieces that melded Powell’s wood prowess and Evans’ metalworking skills. The late 1950s and 1960s were an incredibly important period for Evans as his workshop operation continued to grow and he began producing some of his most celebrated forms. In 1964, Evans became a featured designer for the furniture manufacturer Directional Furniture, an association that significantly impacted the nature and scope of his production. Evans introduced several lines, including the Sculpted Bronze series (mid-1960s), which involved applying epoxy resin over a plywood base or steel frame, shaping it by hand, and coating it with atomized bronze; the Argente series (late 1960s to early 1970s), which featured aluminum and pigment-infused metal surfaces welded together (a process that was deemed highly toxic and quickly abandoned) to create abstract forms; and the popular Cityscape series (1970s), which was inspired by the Manhattan skyline. Boasting sleek, elegant surfaces made of brass and chrome, the Cityscape series differed greatly from Evans’ sculpted steel works of the 1960s, which were painted and highly-textured. The Cityscape series garnered significant recognition for Paul Evans furniture and established Directional Furniture as one of the most notable mid century design companies of the twentieth century. In 1966, Evans relocated to Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania, where he opened a larger workshop. Independent of his work for Directional, Evans continued to create prototypes, produce commissions, and craft his celebrated sculpture-front screens, sideboards, collages, chairs, and tables, which featured high-relief, hand-forged decorative elements. In 1979, Evans opened a second showroom in New York City. Evans died of a heart attack in 1987, shortly after retiring to Massachusetts.

Creator:
Paul Evans (Designer)
Dimensions:
Height: 2.5 in (6.35 cm)Width: 20.25 in (51.44 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
Style:
Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Walnut,Wood
Place of Origin:
North America
Period:
1950-1959
Date of Manufacture:
1955
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use.
Seller Location:
Downingtown, PA
Reference Number:
Seller: NY85930-cpn1stDibs: LU861022837752

Shop All Paul Evans

Paul Evans

A designer and sculptor, Paul Evans was a wild card of late 20th century modernism. A leading light of the American Studio Furniture movement, Evans’s sideboards, credenzas, coffee tables and other work manifests a singular aesthetic sense, as well as a seemingly contradictory appreciation for both folk art forms and for new materials and technologies.

Evans’s primary material was metal, not wood, which was favored by his fellow studio designers, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, neighbors George Nakashima and Phillip Lloyd Powell. He trained in metallurgy and studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the famed crucible of modern design and art in suburban Detroit. For a time early in his career, Evans also worked at Sturbridge Village, a historical “living museum” in Massachusetts, where he gave demonstrations as a costumed silversmith.

Evans’s earliest work unites these influences. The pieces that made his reputation are known as “sculpted-front” cabinets: wood cases faced with box-like high-relief patinated steel mounts laid out in a grid pattern. Each mount contains a metal emblem, or glyph, and the effect is that of a brawny quilt.

Evans’s later work falls into three distinct style groups. His sculpted-bronze pieces, begun in the mid-1960s, show Evans at his most expressive. He employed a technique in which resin is hand-shaped, and later sprayed with a metal coating, allowing for artistic nuance in the making of chairs, tables and case pieces. Later in the decade and into the 1970s, Evans produced his Argente series for celebrated manufacturer Directional (a brand known to vintage mid-century modern furniture collectors everywhere): consoles and other furniture forms that feature aluminum and pigment-infused metal surfaces welded into abstract organic forms and patterns.

Last, Evans's Cityscape design series — a milestone in the history of brutalist design — meshed perfectly with the sleek, “high tech” sensibility of the later ’70s. Evans constructed boxy forms and faced them with irregular mosaic patterns that mixed rectangular plaques of chromed steel, bronze or burlwood veneer. These, like all of Paul Evans’s designs, are both useful and eye-catching. But their appeal has another, more visceral quality: these pieces have clearly been touched by an artist’s hand.

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