Op Art Screen Print Craig Ellwood
View Similar Items
Op Art Screen Print Craig Ellwood
About the Item
- Creator:Craig Ellwood (Artist)
- Dimensions:Height: 51 in (129.54 cm)Width: 51 in (129.54 cm)Depth: 1.5 in (3.81 cm)
- Style:Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:1979
- Condition:Wear consistent with age and use. The frame shows ware. The print is in excellent condition...
- Seller Location:Los Angeles, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU133422558222
Craig Ellwood
Rarely have rectangular boxes looked as elegant as in the mid-century modern homes designed by Craig Ellwood Associates of Los Angeles.
Unabashedly influenced by the work of Bauhaus visionary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ellwood’s houses were long, low and strong boned, made of steel beams and expanses of glass. Dramatically sited on oceanfront properties or in eucalyptus groves, they gave the borrowed architectural formalism of European modernism a distinctly California flavor.
A local legend in his time, Ellwood is not as well known today as Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Albert Frey or any number of postwar architects working in Southern California, although his office designed more than 100 buildings from the late 1940s through the mid-1970s. Several were Case Study Houses, part of an experimental building program sponsored by Arts + Architecture magazine that was intended to encourage the use of industrial materials and techniques for residential construction — a commonplace now but revolutionary then.
Born in Texas, Johnnie Burke (Ellwood’s given name) was a World War II army vet, a student of engineering at UCLA and a male model when he took a night class in construction cost estimating.
“The next thing he knows, he’s working on the Eames Case Study House and John Entenza’s house next door,” says Michael Boyd, referring to the editor and publisher of the influential Arts & Architecture magazine, who became a champion of Ellwood’s work. “That’s where he learned the grammar of form.”
Boyd, a designer and preeminent modernism-preservation specialist, edited Making L.A. Modern: Craig Ellwood (Rizzoli, 2018), which aimed to give Ellwood’s impressive body of work its due.
Burke soon reinvented himself as Craig Ellwood. Accolades rolled in for the designer even as he never earned a license to practice architecture. The fact that a self-taught practitioner was responsible for so many important postwar buildings didn’t sit well with the architectural establishment.
By the late 1960s, things had changed for Ellwood. Unable to get commissions and tossed out of his own firm by disgruntled partners who felt cheated of proper credit, he retired to a farmhouse in Tuscany, and, for the next two decades, turned out abstract geometric paintings in a vivid Op Art mode.
Find vintage Craig Ellwood furniture on 1stDibs.
More From This Seller
View AllMid-20th Century American Modern Decorative Art
Fabric
Late 20th Century Unknown Modern Decorative Art
Paint, Paper
Mid-20th Century American Mid-Century Modern Screens and Room Dividers
Walnut
Mid-20th Century Unknown Mid-Century Modern Decorative Dishes and Vide-P...
Ceramic
21st Century and Contemporary American Modern Paintings
Canvas, Paint
21st Century and Contemporary American Modern Paintings
Canvas, Paint
You May Also Like
Vintage 1970s Italian Mid-Century Modern Paintings
Canvas, Acrylic
Mid-20th Century American Modern Prints
Metal
Late 20th Century Italian Prints
Acrylic, Paper
Vintage 1960s Prints
Paper
20th Century German Prints
Wood, Paper
Vintage 1970s American Paintings
Masonite, Plywood
