{"id":1735,"date":"2011-05-29T11:00:55","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=1735"},"modified":"2019-11-07T16:43:40","modified_gmt":"2019-11-07T16:43:40","slug":"charles-and-ray-eames-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=1735","title":{"rendered":"Charles and Ray Eames in India"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Eames House interior, Los Angeles, 1944 (photograph by Timothy Street-Porter, \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A photograph of the living room of the Eames house in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles has proven rather puzzling to historians of design. It depicts the famous Case Study House as full of exotic collectibles. Hopi kachina dolls, seashells, craft objects, silk textiles from Nepal and Thailand, and elaborately patterned rugs from Mexico and India all crowd and assault their modernist frame. Beatriz Colomina has commented on this \u201ckaleidoscopic excess of objects\u201d in the Eames house, and attributed it to Ray in particular, described elsewhere as a \u201csublime pack rat\u201d who saved and collected everything.1<\/a><\/sup> In the 1990s, the director of the Vitra Design Museum made a similar observation upon visiting the Eames office: \u201cIt seemed that I was being whisked into a world full of images from India, and at times into a circus.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> Others have expressed their unease with this excess and the difficulty of assimilating this side of the Eameses into their identities as masters of mid-century modernism.3<\/a><\/sup> How, then, should we understand this picture? Is it yet another scene of modernism\u2019s insatiable consumption of the non-West, a photograph that belongs to the same family of images as the picture of tribal artifacts in Picasso\u2019s studio? Or is it an expression of their postwar liberalism, an image consistent with the Eameses as advocates of a cosmopolitan and more \u201chumane modernism?\u201d4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In an essay concerned with the Eameses\u2019 relationship to the discourses of craft, Pat Kirkham, author of an important book-length study of the Eameses, has argued for the latter; she has also gone far to reject the longstanding record of gender bias that has tended to hold Ray responsible for the clutter. Instead, she links the couple\u2019s unorthodox collecting practices to the substantial influence on Charles of the American Arts and Crafts movement. According to Kirkham, the Eameses viewed the carefully composed arrangements of objects in their living room as \u201cfunctioning decoration,\u201d a concept which deliberately sought to overcome the banishment of decoration by modernism\u2019s prevailing minimalist sensibilities, and which contributed to their unique aesthetic of \u201caddition, juxtaposition, and extra-cultural surprise.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> Kirkham thus calls for a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between crafts and industrial design in the postwar era and points, at least implicitly, to the way in which the Eameses\u2019 fascination with the non-West remained inseparable from the hierarchies and binaries of art-craft, high-low, and male-female.<\/p>\n

This essay will not be concerned with assessing whether the Eameses\u2019 aesthetic of \u201cextra-cultural surprise\u201d was either humanistic or imperialistic in its posture or effects. Nor will it claim to provide an account of high modernism\u2019s relationship to the discourses of craft, which fueled the postwar interest in the emergent category of \u201cnon-Western art\u201d in a number of different ways. Instead, I will turn to the little-known circumstances of the Eameses\u2019 relationship to India, in part to begin to dislodge the loaded terms of these equations, and in part to investigate some larger problems of historical understanding that emerge from these entanglements between East and West. The Eameses\u2019 projects in India provide a dislocated setting through which to view their design ideas, and reveal how certain modern aesthetic principles were translated and interpolated into other idioms and contexts of the modern. By asking not merely how India fit into the work of the Eameses, but also how the Eameses fit into the ideologies and practices of the newly independent nation-state, my concern is to map a set of global arrangements that have been largely excluded from the prevailing narratives of mid-century modernism and postwar design. As I will show, the Eameses traveled extensively in the Indian subcontinent during the 1950s and 1960s, and participated in a range of projects in film, architecture, and exhibition design\u2014at times successfully with enduring results, at other times less so, with contradictory results that point up the limits of their cross-cultural desires. By tracing the range of seemingly incommensurable interactions between the modernist canon embodied by the Eameses and the very different formations of the modern produced through a society such as India, I argue instead for a more global historiography of modernism itself, undertaken through a contextual and comparative relation to the archive and a disruption of its universalizing claims. The account of postwar modernism I seek to construct, in other words, is one that includes the modernizing agendas of the postcolonial nation-state, for the aspirations, visions, tensions, and contradictions that emerge in the latter, I will argue, are crucial to understanding the distinctly global culture of design that we find ourselves inhabiting today.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"
Charles and Ray Eames with the scholar of Asian art and aesthetics Pritwish Neogy, in an outdoor photography stall, Delhi, January 6, 1958 (photograph \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scholars have only recently begun to examine systematically the implications of the ethical and epistemological questions raised by non-Western contexts for the modernist canon in art and architectural history.7<\/a><\/sup> In the case of Le Corbusier, for example, architectural historians have generally regarded the Swiss architect\u2019s unexecuted projects for Algiers, developed between 1931 and 1942, after he received French citizenship, as masterpieces of modernism, discussing them at length in formal terms with little or no attention to their sociopolitical context. As Zeynep Celik has argued, however, it is not simply the legacy of nineteenth-century French discourses on the Orient or the Parisian avant-garde\u2019s preoccupation with the non-West in the 1920s and 1930s that requires assimilation into the discipline\u2019s canonical understanding of this episode.8<\/a><\/sup> Le Corbusier\u2019s plan for the Arab quarter, with its spatial separation between the indigenous and European inhabitants of the city, was an especially unsettling example of modernism\u2019s urban image at this moment. Le Corbusier\u2019s Algiers, had it been built, would be characterized by separation, hierarchy, and visual supervision, with appended space for \u201ccontact and collaboration\u201d between the races. If his later plan for Chandigarh, the city born \u201cwithout umbilical cord, in the harsh plains of Punjab,\u201d according to one of India\u2019s preeminent modern architects, produced fundamental and competing divergences between Le Corbusier and his client, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, then the plan for Algiers was undoubtedly much worse: it fulfilled all of the most damaging premises of colonial urban planning, which Frantz Fanon would later connect so unequivocally to violence, trauma, and psychic damage to the self, in his powerful anticolonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Critical interventions in architectural history have thus helped to deconstruct the heroism of a figure like Le Corbusier in places like Algiers, Chandigarh, Istanbul, and elsewhere. They have also confronted, more substantially, the tremendous historical complexities of modernism on the world stage at the middle of the previous century, for it is a historical moment which belongs simultaneously to nationalism and decolonization, modernism\u2019s varied responses to colonialism, and the residues of orientalism of the nineteenth-century sort. It is useful to recall that Edward Said had cautioned against extending the arguments of Orientalism,<\/em> rooted in the historical logic of the nineteenth century, to the complexities of the twentieth century precisely because he felt that his 1978 book could not account for the great political and cultural movements of decolonization within which modernism\u2019s canon was produced. A \u201chuge and remarkable adjustment in perspective and understanding\u201d was required, he stated, to account for twentieth-century modernism\u2019s postures and sensibilities, which led to the end of the era of colonial subjugation and a new self-awareness for many of those involved.10<\/a><\/sup> Said was interested in a writer like Joseph Conrad precisely because he sat on the cusp of this threshold; it was the ambiguity and essential lack of clarity of Heart of Darkness<\/em> that generated Said\u2019s brilliant reading of the \u201ctwo visions\u201d made possible by the \u201ccomplicated and rich narrative form of Conrad\u2019s great novella.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> Although the paradigms of Orientalism <\/em>were quickly assimilated into the field of art history, and the study of nineteenth-century painting, in particular, Said-ian approaches to the twentieth century have received far less attention in the visual arts. For Said, Conrad\u2019s method of spectral illumination and misty meaning-making, \u201cas a glow brings out a haze,\u201d marked not only the difficulty, confusion, and gloom brought on by the increasing inevitability of colonialism\u2019s demise, it also represented modernism\u2019s response to the erosion of an earlier epistemological ground (i.e., orientalism). Through such readings, and in much of his later work, Said sought an account of twentieth-century culture by placing modernism\u2019s aesthetic forms, or at least its literary forms, the novel in particular, within <\/em>the world-historical unfolding of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism in the twentieth century. How can we meaningfully extend these insights to the modernist canons of the visual arts? And what would it mean to rethink our account of \u201cmid-century modernism\u201d through the discrepant narratives of a postcolonial one?<\/p>\n

The Eameses are perhaps, on first glance, an unlikely point of entry into some of these concerns and trajectories relating to postcolonial modernity because in many ways they serve to epitomize a story that is thoroughly American. Both Charles and Ray were born before World War I (he in St. Louis, and she in Sacramento) and were shaped by the political economy of the Depression and the New Deal. Charles\u2019s design ideas were imprinted by his experiences in engineering and manufacturing, and by blue-collar jobs he held in the heartland, while Ray was influenced by early Abstract Expressionism during her time in New York in the late 1930s.12<\/a><\/sup> They married and moved to Los Angeles six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, where they joined an group of acclaimed Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9s from Europe to establish a robust aesthetic and intellectual culture in that city. Yet they also signaled a major departure from their peers in these Old World circles: the Eameses did not maintain a \u201chigh-cultural\u201d distance from the forms of mass culture so unappealing to a contemporary neighbor like Theodor Adorno. Instead, the couple served to embody Southern California as a site for the \u201cAmerican Dream,\u201d defined as the seductive mix of postwar prosperity, consumerism, television, freeways, and good weather.<\/p>\n

This Americanness was stamped into all their contributions, from the Case Study House of 1949, heralded by Peter Smithson as \u201cwholly original and wholly American,\u201d yet somehow \u201cthrough Mies,\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> to their famous furniture experiments with molded plywood and plastic, which \u201cchanged the way the twentieth century sat down,\u201d according to the Washington Post<\/em>.14<\/a><\/sup> Their patriotism was perhaps most explicit in their exhibition work for the federal government, such as their show for the bicentennial of the American Revolution, The World of Franklin and Jefferson,<\/em> which was panned as overly ideological by some critics (\u201cWhat is this stuff doing at the Met?\u201d demanded Hilton Kramer in the New York Times<\/em>), or their multiscreen film for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, titled Glimpses of the USA.<\/em>15<\/a><\/sup> The latter, which projected over two thousand still and moving images onto seven huge screens <\/em>hanging inside a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, was intended to convey \u201ca day in the life of the United States.\u201d It was viewed by some three million Russian visitors to the exhibition, which became famous as the site of another media spectacle, namely, the impromptu \u201cKitchen Debate\u201d between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon, when the two leaders discussed their political differences against a backdrop of domestic appliances and the escalations of the cold war.16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"
Textile and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition, 1955, installation view, showing at left the contested colonial-era sculpture called Tipu\u2019s Tiger, Museum of Modern Art, New York. MoMA Archives (photograph by Alexander Georges, digital image \u00a9 The Museum of Modern Art\/Licensed by SCALA\/Art Resource, NY)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Eameses\u2019 first Indian project\u2014a contribution to a 1955 exhibition titled Textile and Ornamental Arts of India<\/em> at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art\u2014was also shaped by this cold-war picture. Placing still images of objects in the show against the dramatic sounds of an Indian raga<\/em>, the Eameses produced a short film for the installation,<\/em> which was designed by their friend, the architect Alexander Girard, and organized by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., the director of industrial design at MoMA during the time of its \u201cGood Design\u201d exhibitions.17<\/a><\/sup> Girard and Kaufman had traveled to India together in the fall of 1954 to survey and collect objects for the exhibition. \u201cI had six weeks,\u201d Kaufman explained apologetically,<\/p>\n

in which to pick up a smattering idea of India and its crafts. Monroe Wheeler\u2019s library and the Library and Museum at Cooper Union were mainstays; experts at the Metropolitan Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts joined the Cooper Union staff in helping me cram. None of this could suffice to prepare me for the exceptional diversification of Indian textiles which I found, nor for their wide dispersion in the country, nor for the elephantine leisure with which India moves, when and if it moves. . . . Timing was one block. Another was the newness and stiffness of the Central Government. . . . India is facing a gigantic, controlled conversion to industrialization.18<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kaufman was particularly excited by loans he had secured from the major museums in Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta, along with numerous private lenders, because they represented items that were \u201ctruly Indian in design\u201d in contrast to the \u201cexport\u201d wares, which he felt had \u201cdominated Western collections up to now.\u201d19<\/a><\/sup> But Kaufman resigned before the opening of the show, passing the design directorship on to Monroe Wheeler. The preparations had coincided with the opening of his infamous MoMA exhibition The Family of Man, <\/em>which presented \u201cthe essential oneness of mankind throughout the world\u201d through the photographic selections of curator-photographer Edward Steichen.20<\/a><\/sup> If the latter exhibition offered up postwar America as part of an integrated global unity through a portraiture that valorized difference and erased inequality, then the former was similarly mired in the ideological agendas of the time: the intention of the India show, according to Kaufman, was to improve India-US relations, especially given \u201cthe urgency with which India today, independent and industrially bourgeoning, was being courted by both parties in the cold war contest.\u201d21<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The exhibition thus revealed America\u2019s fears about India\u2019s alliances in the cold-war struggle, fears that would only escalate that year because of an event taking place in another part of the world. The event was the Bandung Conference, the emotionally charged meeting held in Bandung, Indonesia, that brought together twenty-nine newly liberated countries of Asia and Africa, the self-declared \u201cunderdogs of the human race,\u201d in response to the bipolar politics of the cold war.22<\/a><\/sup> The goal of the meeting, in the words of its host, the Indonesian president Sukarno, was to \u201cinject the voice of reason into world affairs,\u201d through a new alliance of \u201cthird\u201d or \u201cnon-aligned\u201d nations united by their commitment to peace, and their shared histories of colonial and anticolonial struggle.23<\/a><\/sup> The meeting represented, in other words, the spirited beginnings of the \u201cThird World\u201d ideological project and its foreign-policy counterpart, the Non-Aligned Movement, which was formalized by Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Josip Tito of Yugoslavia in 1961, and viewed as a provocation by the cold-war powers.<\/p>\n

Although art historians have increasingly turned to the impact of cold-war discourses on the visual arts, the global implications of an event like the Bandung Conference have not been part of this revisionist project, which in its account of cold-war culture continues to privilege the art-historical divide between a dominant prewar France and American hegemony after the war.24<\/a><\/sup> Here, Okwui Enwezor\u2019s ambitious attempt to archive and exhibit the modes of cultural self-awareness that found expression in Africa in this postwar period, which reshaped for African nations a \u201cshort century,\u201d is a noteworthy exception. Enwezor\u2019s lesson, for our purposes, is that the radical transformations of the world in the postwar period cannot be understood outside the agency and autonomy of Africa\u2019s liberation struggles and the new conceptions of self and society that found expression in events like the Bandung Conference. These social processes generated, in Enwezor\u2019s terms, a fundamental change in the Western conception of the universal subject, \u201cchallenging and transforming the ontological limits imposed by European hegemony.\u201d As such, they remain a \u201cstrong knot in the tangled web of the modern condition,\u201d and demand a revision of the metanarratives of the twentieth century.25<\/a><\/sup> Two crucial questions, raised by Enwezor and by discussions in postcolonial historiography more generally, thus serve to inform the present investigation: How are modernist practices and forms of representation in the postwar period linked to \u201cother\u201d ideas about history and agency, culture and progress, and sovereignty and nationhood, which were unfolding in dialogue and dissent with the dominant practices of the era? And what is the relevance of this historical matrix for our understanding of modernism, and indeed the world, today?<\/p>\n

\\\"\"
Ray Eames and Deborah Sussman riding an elephant, Udaipur, Rajasthan, 1964. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Work of Charles and Ray Eames, LC-E10-641231-E-31A (photograph \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Three years after the Bandung Conference, in 1958, Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, invited the Eameses to help the developing country incorporate design into his project of national regeneration. Before elaborating, however, I want to attend more closely to the summer of 1955, when the self-assertions of the former colonies at the Bandung Conference converged with the arrival of Indian art and aesthetics into public consciousness in the United States. The Textile and Ornamental Arts of India <\/em>exhibition at MoMA had gathered an unprecedented range of textiles, crafts, and decorative objects from collections and institutions around the world, including several hundred loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, such as the highly symbolic Tipu\u2019s Tiger, seized by the British in 1799 and still displayed at the Victoria and Albert in London.26<\/a><\/sup> Tellingly, American audiences were largely indifferent to this contested symbol of imperial rule; they responded instead to Girard\u2019s installation of brightly colored saris from different regions of the subcontinent, which hung over a fifty-foot pool of water and were reflected for the viewer in a large mirrored wall. Visitors did not appear to object to this or other violations committed by Girard to the sanctity of MoMA\u2019s modernist \u201cwhite cube\u201d space. Indeed, his installation, designed as an imaginary bazaar, received rave reviews in New York\u2019s fashion magazines and, intentionally or not, helped to establish the village scene as the privileged setting for the display of Indian crafts in the postwar period.<\/p>\n

MoMA\u2019s Textile and Ornamental Arts of India<\/em> thus received significant attention by the mainstream media and was featured in Life, <\/em>the New Yorker, <\/em>the New York Times Magazine, Women\u2019s Wear Daily<\/em>, and Harper\u2019s<\/em> Bazaar<\/em>, before traveling for the next three years to more than a dozen locations in the United States, ranging from Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Tennessee, to Texas, California, Florida, and Hawaii. The exhibition also brought the Eameses into contact with a number of distinguished \u201cexperts\u201d on Indian art, including Stella Kramrisch, the Austrian professor and curator of Indian art who had recently arrived to work in Philadelphia, Pupul Jayakar, the writer and cultural activist known for her advocacy of crafts in Indian society, and John Irwin, the Keeper of the Indian Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is more than a simple coincidence that all of these authorities on Indian art would converge on the MoMA show, the first large-scale exhibition of Indian culture in the United States. They were, more accurately, pioneering figures in an international art world that had been ideologically and politically transformed by the realities of cultural sovereignty in the subcontinent, who possessed a spirited sense of mission, simultaneously nationalist and internationalist, in relation to the visual arts. The role of this first generation of postcolonial art practitioners was to consolidate and institutionalize knowledge about Indian art for the first time on this new global stage, which was also defined by a growing American hegemony and New York\u2019s increasingly unrivaled status as the epicenter of the modern art world. Nevertheless, the friendship between Jayakar and the Eameses that was first established here continued over the next three decades, resulting in a number of dynamic collaborations and initiatives that I will continue to explicate throughout this essay.<\/p>\n

To accompany Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India,<\/em> MoMA had organized a music, dance, and film program that was especially well received by the press. It included the American debuts of the master sarod<\/em> player, Ali Akbar Khan, and the legendary <\/em>Bharatnatyam <\/em>dancer Shanta Rao. Significantly, the program culminated on the final day in the world premiere of Satyajit Ray\u2019s Pather Panchali<\/em>. The Bengali director\u2019s first film, which inaugurated the Apu trilogy, received international critical acclaim and established the paradigm for a progressive Indian art in the first decade after Independence.27<\/a><\/sup> Although Ray did not attend the New York premiere, he wrote in his memoir, My Years with Apu<\/em>, of the rush to complete the film on time and the suspense in Calcutta as he waited for the response to the screening from Monroe Wheeler at MoMA.28<\/a><\/sup> The telegram, declaring the film \u201ca triumph of sensitive photography,\u201d came three weeks later, according to Ray, and it set in motion a set of events that forever changed his life and work. Half a century later, the event, along with Ray\u2019s own recollections, is s from the wider context of lore surrounding this legendary cinematic figure. The \u201cmemoir\u201d recalling this episode was, for instance, reconstructed from the notes for an unfinished draft, written by his widow several years after his death.29<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Ray\u2019s adaptation\u2014famously influenced by French and Italian Neorealism\u2014of the 1929 Bengali novel by Bibhuti Bhushan Bannerjee about a young boy, Apu, and the changes experienced by his village in Bengal evoked a set of iconic, liberal-secular symbols for the transformations occurring in newly independent India. Although Ray\u2019s distinct brand of poetic realism, which the Japanese master of cinema Akira Kurosawa praised as the \u201criver-like flow\u201d of his films, would later be criticized for its distance from the political, it signified to the world in the 1950s a \u201cprincipled stand on cultural expression, its economy being its gesture of refusal,\u201d and revealed his confidence in the value of the modern as he negotiated a vernacular cinema into a world cinema, a \u201cseminal repositioning\u201d for cultural practice in the subcontinent.30<\/a><\/sup> While interpretations of Ray\u2019s Bildungsroman<\/em> of Bengal vary a great deal, scholars of Indian cinema tend to agree on the trilogy\u2019s status as \u201cone of the artistic pinnacles of a specifically modernist art enterprise inaugurated by post-war Nehruite nationalism.\u201d31<\/a><\/sup> What precisely is meant by this \u201cpost-war Nehruite nationalism,\u201d epitomized by Ray\u2019s early cinema, will become clearer as I turn to investigate the Eameses\u2019 next set of involvements with India. For now, it is important to observe the spirited cosmopolitanism of the summer of 1955 in New York, when a variety of modernist forms and expressions\u2014in dance, music, cinema, and the visual arts, shaped by Indian artists and writers, and an international community of curators and scholars empathetic to this emerging vanguard\u2014came together at MoMA, the citadel of modernism, in defiance of the hard separation between \u201ccraft\u201d and \u201cfine art\u201d that was the dubious inheritance of colonial art institutions. Energized by the acts of self-assertion on the part of the \u201cunderdog nations\u201d occurring simultaneously in Bandung, the novelty of this historic exhibition is that it appears to have deflected, if only for the moment, the fate of Indian art within what James Clifford has called the \u201cart-culture system,\u201d that structure of overdetermination that has for too long decided the value of non-Western art as it enters into the Western museum.32<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

When the Eameses arrived in India in 1958, they joined a growing cadre of Western architects and designers, including Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra, and Grace McCann Morley\u2014the American woman who left the San Francisco Museum of Art to become director of India\u2019s first national museum\u2014who had all responded to the urgent call by the new nation-state to assist with its modernizing projects.33<\/a><\/sup> The moment had arrived, as Nehru stated in his famous \u201cTryst with Destiny\u201d speech delivered on the eve of independence on August 14, 1947, \u201cwhich comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.\u201d34<\/a><\/sup> Nehru\u2019s words also signal what Partha Chatterjee has identified as the \u201cmoment of arrival\u201d in the development of nationalist thought in India, the \u201cfinal, fully mature\u201d ideological form, which transformed nationalism into state practice and claimed a conception of social justice, however limited, as its legitimizing principle.35<\/a><\/sup> Nehru\u2019s hubris was to believe that India could catch up in its delayed modernity by accelerating the pace of industrialization\u2014by building new dams, offices, iron and steel plants, factories, airlines, and cities at a historically unprecedented rate. Buoyed by Nehru\u2019s intelligence and optimism (and the death of Mahatma Gandhi, for the latter\u2019s anti-industrialism and emphasis on the primacy of India\u2019s village society were a far cry from Nehru\u2019s plan for aggressive development), the nation set out to reinvent itself with an almost evangelical zeal. Indeed, Nehru\u2019s statement that the nation\u2019s hydroelectric dams were the new \u201ctemples of modern India\u201d perhaps best captures the spirited, secular drive of this moment, not to mention the irony that its righteous awakening was to be realized through the authority of science.36<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"
Page 14 from idc-output 3, 1973, an Indian design journal published in Bombay, from the collection of Charles Eames. Eames Papers, Box 45, Folder 8, Library of Congress, Washington DC (photograph \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In relation to modern art and architecture, part of the challenge of the Nehruvian vision was to liberate design from its traditional association with colonial art education under the British. As I have elaborated elsewhere,<\/em> the four major art schools established by the British in India during the nineteenth century were part of the wider program for \u201ccultural improvement\u201d in the colony; they served to institutionalize a sharp distinction between \u201cfine arts,\u201d on one hand, defined as Western-style painting and sculpture, and the sphere of Indian crafts, on the other, defined as the aesthetic output of the Indian village.37<\/a><\/sup> Design, in other words, until the time of independence was promoted as the traditional arts and crafts of the village and distinguished against industrial production. Moreover, the nationalist response to such a distinction in the first half of the twentieth century, in the form of the swadeshi<\/em> movement and Gandhi\u2019s khadi<\/em> campaign emphasizing homespun products for a self-sufficient India, did not present any real challenge to the terms of the aesthetic divisions established in the colonial period.38<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In response to this history, Nehru set out to forge a new relationship between design and industrial modernity for the decolonizing nation, one that was driven by an overriding concern, as I have noted, with the problem of India\u2019s \u201cbelated modernization.\u201d The Eameses were thus enlisted to assist with this challenge, along with a host of other scientists, engineers, designers, and architects from Europe and North America. But the goal was not simply to emulate the West or adopt its modernist styles and designs. Nehru\u2019s investment in modern architecture and design was, as Vikramaditya Prakash has argued in his account of Le Corbusier and the city of Chandigarh, ultimately <\/em>instrumental, privileged by the leader not because he believed in art for art\u2019s sake, but because he saw design as a catalyst for change, newness, and creativity for Indians. In Nehru\u2019s words:<\/p>\n

The main thing today is that a tremendous amount of building is taking place in India and an attempt should be made to give it a right direction and to encourage creative minds to function with a measure of freedom so that new types may come out, new designs, new types, new ideas, and out of that amalgam something new and good will emerge.39<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That something \u201cnew and good\u201d would emerge out of \u201cright direction\u201d and \u201ccreative minds\u201d is perhaps best represented in architecture and design journals of the period, which the Eameses studiously collected for their files. Proposals for \u201cimproving\u201d the design of such subcontinental classics as the auto-rickshaw, the tiffin lunch box, and devanagri<\/em> script, for example, serve to communicate the problem-solving spirit of the Nehruvian era, and the role of the specific conundrum that would be increasingly understood as \u201cdesign in a developing society,\u201d or design in an Indian idiom.40<\/a><\/sup> Although Nehru\u2019s sense of urgency summoned young architects and designers to think big and take risks, the general euphoria of the era did not, in hindsight, enable them to debate issues at length, or \u201cevolve a theoretical approach to design,\u201d leading to the much greater problem in the Indian case of an absence of criticism and theory within modernism, that is, a modernism characterized by \u201ctriumphant instrumentality\u201d without the disjunctures of an avant-garde, \u201cat best a reformist modernism.\u201d41<\/a><\/sup> The most powerful response to this problematic legacy is undoubtedly the foundational intervention made by Geeta Kapur, who has effectively managed to highlight this lack, and many of the substantive and theoretical issues it raises, through her short but haunting rhetorical question, \u201cWhen was <\/em>modernism in Indian art?\u201d42<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In 1958 the Eameses spent five months traveling in India, funded by the Ford Foundation, in order to produce a commissioned report on the future of Indian design. They visited factories and villages and met with artists, craftsmen, intellectuals, and government officials\u2014including Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi\u2014to familiarize themselves with Indian design traditions, especially those related to everyday objects. Ray Eames reflected on the experience in an interview some two decades later: \u201cCharles and myself,\u201d she explained, \u201ctoured all over India, finally stopping at the Hotel Cecil near a whitewashed mosque, and in 125 degrees in the shade, wrote a report called the Eames Report. . . . The report was inspired by the many bright children we saw in the villages\u2014curious, open, active, beautiful young people with tremendous potential.\u201d43<\/a><\/sup> The Eames Report<\/em> or The India Report<\/em> (1958), which began with a passage from the Sanskrit philosophical text, the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, recommended \u201ca sober investigation into those values and those qualities that Indians hold important to a good life.\u201d44<\/a><\/sup> As Ashoke Chatterjee, a leading figure in Indian design, has written, \u201cGovernment officials were expecting a feasibility report. What they got was an extraordinary statement of design as a value system, [and] as an attitude that could discern the strengths and limitations of both tradition and modernity . . .\u201d45<\/a><\/sup> The Eameses argued in the report for an assessment of \u201cthe evolving symbols of India\u201d and the need to connect these values and symbols to \u201cthe problems of environment and shelter,\u201d services and objects, and solutions to these problems \u201cin theory and actual prototype.\u201d The task of translating India\u2019s symbols and values into concrete details would be \u201cdifficult, painful and pricelessly rewarding,\u201d they acknowledged, but in light of the dramatic rate of change in Indian society, that task was more urgent than ever before.46<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"
Charles Eames, Lota, ca. 1958 (photograph \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jayakar, who contributed to the catalogue of the Indian textile show at MoMA and was responsible for introducing the Eameses to Nehru, described the meeting in which the couple presented their report to government officials as \u201cunforgettable.\u201d Charles Eames began quoting from the Bhagavad Gita; <\/em>when puzzled government ministers sought feedback on industrial design. \u201cThere was utter chaos of communications,\u201d she wrote.47<\/a><\/sup> The report itself also reflects some of the discrepancies and missed communications of this encounter. Charles\u2019s fetishization of the lota<\/em> (or water vessel), which he called \u201cthe greatest, most beautiful\u201d object \u201cwe have seen and admired during our visit to India,\u201d and which he documented in hundreds of photographs, for example, elevated this everyday object to the highest of design ideals. \u201cHow would one go about designing a lota<\/em>?\u201d he theorized in the report, offering a list of twenty-some details, from the mathematical to the phenomenological, relevant to its construction.48<\/a><\/sup> The lota <\/em>was chosen, according to Ray, \u201cas a fixed symbol of utilitarianism in an evolving pattern of design. It could have been anything else from the day to day lives of the people.\u201d49<\/a><\/sup> Unfortunately, the cultural association in the subcontinent of the lota<\/em> with defecation, hygiene, and washing oneself appears to have eluded the couple, and Charles later included his discourse on the lota<\/em> in his lectures and slide-shows at Harvard and elsewhere.50<\/a><\/sup> The lota<\/em> would eventually appear, <\/em>along with the quote from the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, on the couple\u2019s Christmas card during the holiday season back in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Significantly, The Eames Report<\/em> also recommended the establishment of a permanent institute for design in India as a \u201csteering device\u201d in the \u201crelentless search for quality.\u201d The integrity and quality of design, the couple wrote prophetically, \u201cmust be maintained if this new Republic is to survive.\u201d The future lay in the training of students, they argued, who seemed \u201cmuch brighter than their designs\u201d; the student\u2019s drawings were, regrettably, in India in the 1950\u2019s, \u201can assemblage of inappropriate clich\u00e9s.\u201d51<\/a><\/sup> Nehru\u2019s response was to establish the National Institute of Design in 1961 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, a city that resonated, paradoxically, with a history of nonindustrial design practice, as India\u2019s textile capital and the site of Mahatma Gandhi\u2019s ashram, where the latter led the nation in his boycott of industrially produced British goods. Nevertheless, the National Institute of Design, or NID, the direct result of The Eames Report<\/em>, was the first attempt by a developing country to use the design principles inherited from the Bauhaus as a tool for national regeneration; it remains one of the premier cultural institutions in India today, setting the pedagogic standard for most other design schools in the country.52<\/a><\/sup> Moreover, the Eameses\u2019 attention to what they called the \u201cvernacular expressions of design\u201d and to \u201ceveryday solutions to unspectacular problems\u201d reflected their awareness of the specific dilemmas of design in a rapidly industrializing, ancient society\u2014dilemmas which are by no means resolved in India in the twenty-first century, a point to which I will return at the end of this essay.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Opening of the Eameses\u2019 exhibition Nehru: His Life and His India, Royal Festival Hall, London, 1965. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Work of Charles and Ray Eames, LC-E10-650622-A-20 (photograph \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After Nehru\u2019s death in 1964, the Eameses returned to India for three more months to plan, in conjunction with students and staff at the NID, a memorial exhibition about the man they had greatly admired. According to Ray Eames, the couple thought \u201clong and hard about how you treat the life of such a great man conceptually.\u201d53<\/a><\/sup> The exhibition that resulted, Nehru: His Life and His India,<\/em> incorporated some twelve hundred photographs, plus fabrics, art objects, and sound, as well as a re-created jail cell featuring Nehru\u2019s prison writings. Deborah Sussman, from the Eames Office, described working in Ahmedabad on the project: For several months, \u201cseven days and seven nights, interrupted by occasional fevers, our lives were submerged in the exhilarating, often maddening process of designing and building the exhibit. . . . Ray had been there most of the time, valiantly coping with the difficulties of life in India. . . . She subsequently became a vegetarian.\u201d54<\/a><\/sup> The Nehru exhibition was a great success when it opened at London\u2019s Royal Festival Hall in 1965 and was visited by some ninety thousand people, including the sole survivor in the Nehru family, Indira Gandhi.<\/p>\n

In her biography of Indira Gandhi, Jayakar reported that she seemed \u201cdazed after her father\u2019s death,\u201d unable to fully register the loss.55<\/a><\/sup> According to Jayakar, the memorial exhibition gave her a focus, an \u201cimmediate plan\u201d which she discussed \u201cwith passion,\u201d in part because she feared that an incoming government might create \u201ca new interpretation\u201d of Nehru\u2019s legacy.56<\/a><\/sup> By the time the exhibition traveled to New York, Washington, and Los Angeles in 1966, Mrs. Gandhi would herself be sworn in as India\u2019s first female prime minister, accepting the mantle of leadership from her father. The young Indira\u2019s concern with managing and interpreting the legacy of Nehru is revealing, because it was partly such a preoccupation that would play into her misguided censorship measures of the \u201cEmergency\u201d (1975\u201377), in which democratic rights and freedom of speech were suspended under her order, and coercive methods sanctioned by the state, for almost two years.57<\/a><\/sup> Nonetheless, she attended the opening of the Eameses\u2019 exhibition about her father in Washington in her official capacity as Indian prime minister, and was photographed there with Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman whose own loss in 1963 mirrored that of India\u2019s grieving daughter; the image of the two women played on the emotional links between them and their dynastic first families. The Nehru exhibition finished its run in the Eameses\u2019 own city, Los Angeles; it came to India in 1972, where parts of it remain on permanent display at the Pragati Maidan in New Delhi and the Nehru Center in Bombay.<\/p>\n

Many of the design aspects of the Nehru exhibition, especially the time-line and historical events panels\u2014later known as the Eameses\u2019 \u201chistory walls\u201d\u2014became part of the couple\u2019s signature style. The panels depicted the events of one decade and presented Nehru\u2019s biography as intertwined with the history of the new nation-state. The first panel, for instance, \u201cThe India into Which He Was Born,\u201d began with the 1880s, the next, \u201cChildhood in Allahabad\u201d recounted the 1890\u2019s, and so on, eventually proceeding through such themes and events as nationalism, freedom struggle, Nehru\u2019s relationship to Mahatma Gandhi, satyagraha <\/em>(or the doctrine of nonviolence), the attainment of independence, and the Non-Aligned Movement. The result was an epic yet linear story that inevitably left the viewer in awe of Nehru\u2019s heroic leadership. Oddly, in their story of India\u2019s Nehru, the Eameses did not deploy more advanced technologies used in their other exhibitions, like video, film, or multiscreen projection, a great irony given the technological aspirations of the Nehruvian vision. Instead, Charles argued to keep the exhibition simple \u201cfor Nehru\/Gandhi\u2019s sake,\u201d an assumption that collapsed the notorious gulf between the two leaders on the question of technology, while also mounting a large installation about \u201cIndian weddings\u201d at the point in the history wall recording Nehru\u2019s marriage.58<\/a><\/sup> Here the couple seemed unable to contain their fascination with the exotic rituals of an Indian wedding, and they surrendered to the seductions of an anthropological gaze.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Charles Eames at the Nehru: His Life and His India exhibition, 1965, Union Carbide Building, New York (photograph \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In hindsight, it is additionally meaningful that in 1965 the Eameses\u2019 Nehru memorial exhibition did not find a home at MoMA in New York. It was mounted instead at the Union Carbide Building on Park Avenue, from January to March 1965. The Eameses\u2019 exhibition was undoubtedly a public-relations coup for Union Carbide, the American corporation that had recently joined India\u2019s government-sponsored \u201cGreen Revolution\u201d by establishing fertilizer factories throughout the country. Needless to say, public relations would never again be the same for the company after the disastrous 1984 accident at Union Carbide\u2019s pesticide plant in Bhopal, where five tons of toxic gas seeped out of the plant in a thirty-minute period, killing almost four thousand people and permanently injuring tens of thousands more. While much more can be said about this catastrophe\u2014widely regarded as the worst industrial accident in history\u2014it symbolizes for our purposes the ever-widening gulf between the modernizing ideals of the Nehruvian era and the realities unfolding on the ground in India. The Eameses could not have anticipated that Union Carbide would come to stand for the most devastating aspects of industrialization and the Indo-American relationship, or that the Nehruvian dream enshrined in their memorial exhibition might lead to the nightmare of Union Carbide in Bhopal. Indeed, the couple seemed too distracted by the task of commemoration to view the signs of crisis that emerged in the wake of Nehru\u2019s death. Indira Gandhi, for her part, sought refuge in her study where she was reportedly found during this period \u201ccurled up in her Eames chair.\u201d59<\/a><\/sup> It is important therefore to further situate the late 1960s and 1970s in India, in order to understand and critically assess why the Eameses\u2019 hopes for the country remain in large part unrealized, and how their liberal vision of industrial design has, paradoxically, reemerged in recent years to serve the needs and desires of India\u2019s neoliberal turn.<\/p>\n

The period following Nehru\u2019s death was marked by a growing climate of disaffection with the dreams of official modernization, resulting from the failure of Nehru\u2019s economic plans, the increases in population, poverty, and illiteracy, and the rise of student movements in solidarity with the 1968 generation in Europe and America. Artists and intellectuals in South Asia were particularly disillusioned by the continued catastrophic effects of partition in former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and, eventually, the crisis of the 1975\u201377 \u201cEmergency,\u201d when, as I mentioned, democratic rights were suspended by Indira Gandhi, who announced that such stringent measures must be taken \u201cjust as bitter pills . . . administered to a patient in the interest of his health.\u201d60<\/a><\/sup> In 1970 J. S. Sandhu, an early advocate of \u201cinclusive design,\u201d wrote a long report to Charles Eames to ask for his guidance in navigating what Sandhu viewed as a series of visibly dangerous trends. The problem, he stated, was not just a gap between The Eames Report<\/em> and its implementation, in part a manifestation of \u201cthe fatalism and inertia that are deeply engrained in Indian society,\u201d but that India had at best achieved something akin to \u201csymbolic modernization.\u201d For Sandhu, such a conceit was epitomized by Le Corbusier\u2019s Chandigarh, \u201cthe most un-Indian and expensive of cities,\u201d which had failed to respond to the needs of the rural masses, and was a \u201csad reflection of the priorities and value systems of the leadership.\u201d The future of Indian design, he argued, would be in a reorganized design profession committed to a much wider social demographic, and in a greater investment in design education \u201cas a matter of social priority.\u201d61<\/a><\/sup> But the Eameses did not seem to know how to respond to the failures of the Nehruvian vision or the pleas for assistance that came throughout the 1970s from friends and institution-builders like Jayakar, and Ashoke Chatterjee at the NID. Meanwhile, trends in America\u2014like feminism, Pop art, and the antiwar movement\u2014increasingly placed the Eameses, with their public identity as apolitical and nonideological, on the margins of the avant-garde. Their final exhibition in the United States, The World of Franklin and Jefferson <\/em>(1971\u201377), which the couple viewed as their crowning achievement and which brought the paradigm of heroic national leadership developed for their Nehru show to the grand narrative of American nationhood, was also among their least successful. In an era of social crisis and disillusionment with the US government caused by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and Watergate, the exhibition\u2019s corporate sponsorship, along with its populist account of the Revolution and upbeat message about westward expansionism, simply did not fly.62<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Charles also cautioned, in a long letter to the organizers when the Nehru show returned to India in the 1970s, against turning the exhibition into some \u201ctasteless Chamber of Commerce pitch.\u201d63<\/a><\/sup> His concern was no doubt a response to a growing trend of the time toward a commercial orientation for cultural exhibitions and the emerging modalities of the international trade fair. By the end of the decade, the first Festival of India\u2014a spectacular showcase of Indian art in Britain heavily promoted by Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher\u2014inaugurated a new era of exhibition culture, both a sign and a symptom of the increased competition among developing nations in the emerging neoliberal global economy.64<\/a><\/sup> There are hints in the archive that the spectacular showcase of the Festival of India, with its goal of imprinting a new era of \u201cIndo-American dialogue,\u201d as stated by the Eameses\u2019 old friend-turned-festival chairperson, Pupul Jayakar,65<\/a><\/sup> was not the kind of show Charles would have liked. But it is difficult to know with certainty due to his death in 1978, which was, in the words of one obituary from the subcontinent, \u201can irreparable loss to India too.\u201d66<\/a><\/sup> The NID in Ahmedabad posthumously established an endowed fellowship and design award in his honor: it is sometimes referred to in an ironic manner as the \u201cEames Chair\u201d in memory of his pioneering vision.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Charles and Ray Eames photographing two women, India, February 1965. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Work of Charles and Ray Eames, LC-E10-650107-E-19 (photograph \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This other Eames chair\u2014the NID award in Ahmedabad\u2014is an apt motif for the nearly three decades of involvement by Charles and Ray Eames in the Indian subcontinent, until now overlooked in the growing scholarship on mid-century modernism, or presented in the hagiography as an eccentric aside. Yet the Eameses\u2019 involvements with India span a remarkable period of historical change, and the various activities, projects, and relationships they forged provide a glimpse of the successive contexts, mutual dependencies, and competing agendas that have characterized the cold war, decolonization and its modernizing projects, the social crises of the 1960s and 1970s, and the beginnings in the 1980s of the restructuring of the new global economy. The Eameses\u2019 internationalism was clearly made possible by the rise of American cultural hegemony in the world, which, as Serge Guilbaut has argued in the case of Abstract Expressionism, consolidated itself in the postwar period in the new alliances and values of the New York art world.67<\/a><\/sup> As I suggested at the outset, however, the exotic objects collected by Charles and Ray along the way do not merely represent another moment in modernism\u2019s insatiable appetite for the non-West; nor can their presence be adequately understood through the lens of an early-twentieth-century primitivist paradigm. The new world order of decolonization that led the Eameses to the subcontinent in the first place dramatically transformed the historical equation and presented a new horizon of agencies and possibilities for sovereignty and citizenship for the countries of Asia and Africa in the postwar period. In their response to the modernizing projects of the Nehruvian era, their humanist commitment to enabling India\u2019s modernity, and their uneven attempts to comprehend the vexed questions of design in the subcontinent, the Eameses in India represent both <\/em>the beginnings of an era of US hegemony, and a set of creative aesthetic responses to it, a paradox that was ultimately expressed and codified in their design manifesto and ethical vision for the new republic, The India Report<\/em> of 1958.<\/p>\n

More than fifty years later, The Eames Report<\/em> has acquired something of the status of scripture in India, and it is frequently cited in the explosion of contemporary discourses surrounding design, in spite of its sentimental identification with the vernacular embodied by Charles\u2019s preoccupation with the lota<\/em>. The new visibility of design in India is undeniably linked to the centrality of new media, digital technologies, consumerism, and advertising to the neoliberal economic revolution that has meant an unprecedented expansion of the consumer class, but that has nevertheless excluded the large swath of the population that remains in poverty. In 2007 the government articulated a new set of design ideals, radically different from the socialist paradigms of the Nehruvian era, in an official National Design Policy, which posited as one of its main goals the \u201cglobal positioning and branding of Indian designs\u201d within the international marketplace.68<\/a><\/sup> The self-stated ambition of the policy is to \u201coutsource design,\u201d and to promote the phrase \u201cDesigned in India\u201d as a symbol of innovation and quality, in contrast to \u201cMade in India,\u201d which hints of cheap labor and poor production quality. As one Indian journalist noted, every iPod carries the inscription \u201cDesigned in the USA, built in China,\u201d which underscores Apple\u2019s \u201cjustly deserved reputation for understanding the value of design and its relevance to corporate strategy.\u201d69<\/a><\/sup> In the area of design, the journalist argued, India should aspire to the global success of the iPod, a mission which the Eameses as the architects of India\u2019s first policy statement on design would have endorsed. In other words, the problems of American hegemony in design that the Eameses simultaneously represented and confronted during the 1950s persist in powerful ways in an era in which design innovation is increasingly bound up with corporate strategy and the dreams of US-led capitalism on the world stage, as symbolized by the example of the iPod.<\/p>\n

In contrast to arguments about the value of design for global economic success, and the reception in India, for instance, of Richard Florida\u2019s contentious, best-selling books on the economic role of the \u201ccreative class,\u201d70<\/a><\/sup> prominent theorists in India have also returned to the Eameses\u2019 vision of the designer as a facilitator who empowers social groups and more broadly to their program for a socially conscious design to confront the homogenizing forces of globalization.71<\/a><\/sup> To such thinkers, the Eameses\u2019 conception of design as a bridge between the traditional and the modern has a new urgency and resonance in the face of a growing gulf between the urban, international locations for design, and the rural, vernacular basis of India\u2019s craft communities. They point, in other words, to a set of possibilities emerging from The Eames Report<\/em> different than those adopted as corporate strategy in the interest of quality, profit, and the outsourcing of design. How these varied uses and abuses of the Eameses\u2019 legacy in India will enhance or hinder the nation\u2019s aspirations for design, or serve to activate the social conscience of its public, is something that is continually unfolding and remains, of course, to be seen.<\/p>\n

In the end, however, these sorts of concerns cannot be said to belong specifically to India. They point instead to the larger dilemmas that Hal Foster has linked to the new \u201cpolitical economy of design\u201d in his self-described diatribe against the \u201ctight consumerist loop\u201d of contemporary design, Design and Crime<\/em>.72<\/a><\/sup> For Foster, the inflation of design, where \u201ceverything from jeans to genes seems to be regarded as so much design,<\/em>\u201d has followed the \u201cspectacular dictates of the culture industry, not the liberatory ambitions of the avant-garde,\u201d and it appears to reach its point of excess at the moment of its globalization, as in the turn to the cities of Asia by Rem Koolhaas, or the worldwide implications of the Bilbao effect, \u201clikely to come to your hometown soon.\u201d73<\/a><\/sup> My account of Charles and Ray Eames in India has been an attempt to situate these contemporary processes within the long global career of design itself, and to map the specific contours and limits of a dialogue between two very different utopian investments in modern design (i.e., American and Nehruvian) in the middle of the previous century. My study is by no means a dismissal of the Eameses, but rather a bid to reposition their significance, at least partially, in this neglected episode of their career. My argument has been that the Eameses\u2019 involvements with India make visible a set of historical interconnections between a postwar modernism and the particularities of a postcolonial one, which allow us to sketch a more global genealogy in response to the needs of our ambiguous present.<\/p>\n

\n

Saloni Mathur is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display <\/em>(University of California Press, 2007), editor of The Migrant\u2019s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora <\/em>(Yale University Press\/Clark Art Institute, 2011), and coeditor (with Kavita Singh) of No Touching, Spitting, Praying: Modalities of the Museum in South Asia<\/em> (forthcoming, Routledge India).<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I am grateful to the people and resources of the Clark Art Institute, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the Getty Research Institute for supporting different stages of this project. Thanks also to David Hertsgaard at the Eames Office for his generous assistance with the images.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
    \n
  1. Quoted phrases are from Beatriz Colomina, \u201cReflections on the Eames House,\u201d and Joseph Giovannini, \u201cThe Office of Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser: The Material Trail,\u201d in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention<\/em>, ed. Donald Albrecht (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997), 144 and 45, respectively. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Alexander von Vegesack, preface, The Work of Charles and Ray Eames<\/em>, 7. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. See for example Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 183. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Donald Albrecht, introduction, The Work of Charles and Ray Eames<\/em>, 16. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Pat Kirkham, \u201cHumanizing Modernism: The Crafts, \u2018Functioning Decoration,\u2019 and the Eameses,\u201d Journal of Design History <\/em>11, no. 1 (1998): 25. The idea of \u201cextra-cultural surprise\u201d as part of the Eames aesthetic appears to begin with Peter Smithson, \u201cJust a Few Chairs and a House: An Essay on the Eames-aesthetic,\u201d Architectural Design<\/em> 36 (September 1966): 443\u201346. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. See Karen Fiss, \u201cDesign in a Global Context: Envisioning Postcolonial and Transnational Possibilities,\u201d Design Issues <\/em>25, no. 3 (2009): 3\u201310; and Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other Diatribes <\/em>(London and New York: Verso, 2002). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  7. See Esra Akcan, \u201cCritical Practice in the Global Era: The Question Concerning \u2018Other\u2019 Geographies,\u201d Architectural Theory Review <\/em>7, no. 1 (2003); and Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  8. See Zeynep Celik, \u201cLe Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,\u201d Assemblage<\/em> 17 (April 1992): 58\u201377; and Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  9. Charles Correa quoted in Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh\u2019s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India <\/em>(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 32. See also Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth <\/em>(New York: Grove, 1965). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  10. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism <\/em>(New York: Vintage, 1993), 293. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  11. Ibid., 22. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  12. Giovannini, 48\u201358. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  13. Smithson quoted in Colomina, 127. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  14. Cited in Albrecht introduction, 15. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  15. Hilton Kramer article quoted in Helene Lipstadt, \u201cNatural Overlap: Charles and Ray Eames and the Federal Government,\u201d in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames<\/em>, 166. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  16. Ibid., 160\u201366. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  17. Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  18. Edgar Kaufman, Jr., \u201cPreliminary Report on the Indian Voyage,\u201d Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records, II.1.83.2.1, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, 2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  19. Edgar Kaufman, Jr., letter to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Chairman of the All-India Handicrafts Board, October 25, 1954, Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records II.1.83.2.1, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  20. Edward Steichen, introduction, The Family of Man <\/em>(New York: MoMA, 1955), 4. See also <\/em>Eric Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950\u2019s America <\/em>(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  21. Edgar Kaufman, Jr., Preliminary Report on the Indian Voyage, 1. See also Donald Albrecht, \u201cDesign Is a Method of Action,\u201d in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames,<\/em> 33. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  22. See Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference <\/em>(New York: World Publishing, 1956) 12. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  23. Sukarno quoted in Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People\u2019s History of the Third World <\/em>(New York and London: New Press, 2007), 34. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  24. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art <\/em>(London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Irving Sandler, \u201cAbstract Expressionism and the Cold War,\u201d Art in America<\/em>, June\u2013July 2008, 65\u201374. For an alternative perspective, see John Clark, \u201cArt Goes Non-Aligned,\u201d Art AsiaPacific<\/em> 2, no. 4 (1995). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  25. Okwui Enwezor, introduction, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945\u20131994, <\/em>ed. Enwezor <\/em>(Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2001), 15 and 16. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  26. See Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images <\/em>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  27. See Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India <\/em>(New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 201\u201332. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  28. See Satyajit Ray, My Years with Apu <\/em>(London: Faber and Faber, 1997). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  29. See Bijoya Ray, preface, ibid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  30. Moinak Biswas, \u201cIntroduction: Critical Returns,\u201d in Apu and After: Re-visiting Ray\u2019s Cinema<\/em>, ed. Biswas <\/em>(London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2006), 1; see also Ashish Rajadhyaksha, \u201cSatyajit Ray, Ray’s Films and the Ray-movie,\u201d Journal of Arts and Ideas<\/em> 23\u201324 (January 1993). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  31. \u201cPather Panchali,\u201d in Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema<\/em> , ed. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 343. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  32. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture <\/em>Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  33. See Kristy Phillips, \u201cGrace McCann Morley and the National Museum of India,\u201d in No Touching, Spitting, Praying: Modalities of the Museum in Modern South Asia<\/em>, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh <\/em>(New Delhi: Routledge India, forthcoming 2012). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  34. Jawaharlal Nehru, \u201cTryst with Destiny,\u201d in Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches<\/em>, ed. Brian McArthur (London: Penguin Viking, 1992), 234\u201337. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  35. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse <\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  36. Nehru quoted in Vikramaditya Prakash, 10; see also Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India <\/em>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  37. Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  38. See Chatterjee; also Rebecca Brown, Gandhi\u2019s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India <\/em>(London: Routledge, 2010); and Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi\u2019s Nation: Homespun and Modern India <\/em>(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  39. Nehru quoted in Vikramaditya Prakash, 10. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  40. For example, Ashoke Chatterjee, \u201cDesign in Developing Societies: Problems of Relevance,\u201d Address to the Tenth International Congress of the International Council of Societies on Industrial Design, Dublin, Ireland, September 20, 1977. Eames Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 46, Folder 2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  41. James Belluardo, \u201cThe Architecture of Kavinde, Doshi, and Correa in Social and Political Context,\u201d and Kenneth Frampton, \u201cSouth Asian Architecture: In Search of a Future Origin,\u201d in An Architecture of Independence: The Making of Modern South Asia<\/em>, ed. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and Belluardo <\/em>(New York: Architectural League of New York, 1998), 14 and 10; and Kapur, When Was Modernism, <\/em>202. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  42. Kapur, \u201cWhen Was Modernism in Indian Art?,\u201d in When Was Modernism,<\/em> 297\u2013324 (my emphasis). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  43. Ray Eames quoted in Reena Pinto, \u201cEast Meets West (Interview with Ray Eames),\u201d Inside Outside: The Indian Design Magazine<\/em>, February\u2013March 1988. Eames Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 46, Folder 3. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  44. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report, <\/em>1958, rep. Marg<\/em> 20, no. 3 (June 1967): 22\u201323. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  45. Ashoke Chatterjee, \u201cDesign in India: The Experience of Transition,\u201d Design Issues <\/em>21, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 5. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  46. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report<\/em>, 22\u201328. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  47. Pupul Jayakar quoted in Eames Demetrios, An Eames Primer <\/em>(New York: Universe, 2001), 29. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  48. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report<\/em>, 25. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  49. Ray Eames in Pinto interview, n.p. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  50. See Demetrios, 32, and Albrecht, 35\u201336. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  51. Charles and Ray Eames, The India Report<\/em>, 26. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  52. See Ashoke Chatterjee, 5; and Singanapalli Balaram, \u201cDesign Pedagogy in India: A Perspective,\u201d Design Issues <\/em>21, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 15. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  53. Ray Eames quoted in Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames<\/em>, 284. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  54. Deborah Sussman quoted in \u201cAppreciations,\u201d in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames<\/em>, 184. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  55. Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography <\/em>(New York: Pantheon, 1988), 122. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  56. Ibid., 123. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  57. See Emma Tarlow, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India\u2019s Emergency<\/em> (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  58. Charles Eames, personal note, January, 1972, Eames Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 45, Folder 2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  59. Jayakar, 184. The Eames chair remains on display in her house, now the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum in Delhi. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  60. Indira Gandhi quoted in Tarlow, 25. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  61. Report from J. S. Sandhu to Charles Eames, September 16, 1970, Eames Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC,. Box 44, Folder 3: 1, 3 13. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  62. See Lipstadt, 167. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  63. Charles Eames, letter to Pupul Jayakar, February 16, 1972, Eames Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box 45, Folder 2: 2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  64. See Brian Wallis, \u201cSelling Nations: International Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy,\u201d in Museum Culture<\/em>, ed. Dan Sherman and Irit Rogoff <\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  65. See Pupul Jayakar, foreword, Festival of India in the United States, 1985\u201386 <\/em>(New York: Harry Abrams, 1985), 14. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  66. Tushar Bhatt, \u201cA Working Philosopher of Things Passes Away\u201d (obituary), September 30, 1978, Eames Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC,. Box 44, Folder 5. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  67. See Guilbault. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  68. Government of India Press Information Bureau, \u201cNational Design Policy,\u201d press release, February 8, 2007, available online at http:\/\/pib.nic.in\/release\/release.asp?relid=24647. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  69. Niti Bhan, \u201cA Competitive Nation, by Design,\u201d BusinessWeek<\/em>, <\/em>December 27, 2005. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  70. See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It\u2019s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life <\/em>(New York: Basic Books, 2002); Cities and the Creative Class <\/em>(New York: Routledge, 2004); and The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent <\/em>(New York: Harper Collins, 2005). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  71. See Ashoke Chatterjee, 2005. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  72. Foster, 18. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  73. Ibid., 17, 19, and 42 (italics in original). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Saloni Mathur<\/p>\n

    A photograph of the living room of the Eames house in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles has proven rather puzzling to historians of design. It depicts the famous Case Study House as full of exotic collectibles. Hopi kachina dolls, seashells, craft objects, silk textiles from Nepal and Thailand, and elaborately patterned rugs from Mexico and India all crowd and assault their modernist frame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1750,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[74,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}