Review
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The book excels – it is a visual treat. It’s hard
not to enjoy Alexander Girard’s joyful work and you’ll spot
something aesthetically pleasing every time you open the book.
You finish the book with a balanced and rounded impression of the
designer who, despite the exuberance of his work, was as
disciplined and controlled as his mid-century contemporaries. And
it really is something you’ll want to pick up and be inspired by
again and again. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a reminder that
we all benefit from some colour in our lives – and, as Alexander
Girard so skilfully demonstrated, that pattern and colour can be
truly modern. (Mid Century Magazine)
This richly illustrated catalogue draws on the vast holdings in
Girard’s private estate, which were exhaustively investigated for
the first time at the Vitra Design Museum. The book presents the
oeuvre of the multitalented designer in all its facets, while
offering the first scholarly, critical examination of his work.
(Grain Edit)
Girard’s sophisticated sense of color and willingness to create
things that were more folksy, even charming, within high
Modernism is part of his continued appeal, bringing a warmth and
humanity to design in an era of hard-edged, gridded corporate
design that could appear cold and forbidding. (Angela Riechers
Eye on Design)
A rich testament to one of modernism’s most prodigious and
prolific talents. (Edward M Gómez Hyperic)
A beautiful and comprehensive survey. (Interior Design)
Alexander Girard’s collage principle is once again very much in
fashion, succeeding as it does in breaking both with the ideology
of the ‘new’ that underpinned Modernism, but also with the
indifferent anything goes attitude of Post-Modernism. In Girard’s
pieces, his own designs enter into a harmonious dialog with the
found, the glossy new with the signs of use. (Annette Tietenberg
StylePark)
Girard’s work restored what classical modernism had rejected in
design: color, ornamentation, and folk motifs. He combined
craftsmanship and pop culture with ingenious ease, and
anticipated the colorful language of postmodernism…. the first
scholarly examination of Girard’s oeuvre. (Jana Perkovic Blouin
Artinfo)
A landmark... looks beyond the iconic textiles and patterns to
reveal a hitherto unseen side of Girard. (Avinash Rajagopal
Metropolis Magazine)
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About the Author
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Born in 1907 in New York City, Alexander Girard and his family
moved back to Italy shortly after his birth. In 1932, Girard
opened his first design office in New York. Five years later, he
moved to Detroit, where he opened a second studio. His career
breakthrough came in 1949, when he was chosen to design the
Detroit Institute of Arts’ For Modern Living exhibition. In 1952
Charles Eames recruited Girard to become Herman Miller’s director
of design in the textile division. Girard’s tenure at Herman
Miller continued into the 1970s; while there, he designed the
interior for La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York’s Time-Life
Building in 1960. In the early 1960s he relocated to New Mexico,
where he began collecting folk art. Girard’s collection can be
found in the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. He
died in 1993.
Susan Brown joined Cooper Hewitt in 2001, where she is Associate
Curator of Textiles. She curated the highly successful exhibition
Fashioning Felt, and edited the accompanying catalogue. She has
co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Extreme Textiles:
Designing for High Performance, Color Moves: Art and Fashion by
Sonia Delaunay, Quicktakes: Rodarte, and David Adjaye Selects,
and contributed essays to these publications along with Design
Life Now: National Design Triennial and Making Design, the
museum’s collections handbook. She has published articles in
Hali, Surface Design, American Craft, TextilForum, and Modern
Carpet and Textile. She also teaches in the Masters’ Program in
the History of Design and Curatorial Studies offered by Cooper
Hewitt with Parsons/The New School for Design, as well as
lecturing regularly for the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. She
currently serves on the board of the Textile Society of America.
Jonathan Olivares was born in Boston in 1981 and graduated from
Pratt Institute. In 2006 he established his office, which is
based in Los Angeles and works in the fields of industrial,
spatial and communication design. His designs engage a legacy of
form and technology, and ask to be used rather than observed.
Recent projects include the Aluminum Bench, for Zahner (2015);
the Vitra Workspace, an office furniture showroom and learning
environment for Vitra (2015); the exhibition Source Material,
curated with Jasper Morrison and Marco Velardi (2014); and the
Olivares Aluminum Chair, for Knoll (2012). Olivares’ work has
been published internationally, granted several design
awards—including Italy’s Compasso d'Oro—and supported by the
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Alexandra Lange is a New York-based architecture and design
critic. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in
Architect, Dirty Furniture, Dwell, MAS Context, Metropolis, New
York Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She has
been an opinion columnist at Dezeen and a featured writer at
Design Observer. She is the author of Writing About Architecture:
Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton
Architectural Press, 2012) and the e-book The Dot-Com City:
Silicon Valley Urbanism (Strelka Press, 2012), as well as
co-author of Design Research: The Store that Brought Modern
Living to American Homes (Chronicle Books, 2010). She has taught
design criticism at the School of Visual Arts and New York
University. She was a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design.
Jochen Eisenbrand is chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum.
Working at the Vitra Design Museum since 1998, Eisenbrand curated
the exhibitions Airworld. Design and Architecture for Air Travel,
Hidden Heroes. The Genius of Everyday Things as well as major
retrospectives on George Nelson, Louis Kahn (with Stanislaus von
Moos), Alvar Aalto and Alexander Girard. His exhibitions have
been shown not only in Weil am Rhein but also at further venues
in Europe, the USA and in Asia. From 2007 until 2010 he served as
a member of the acquisitions committee of FRAC centre in Orléans.
Having earned a Master degree in Cultural Studies from the
University of Lüneburg (1998), Eisenbrand received his PhD in
design history at the University of Wuppertal in 2014.
Monica Obniski is the Demmer Curator of 20th and 21st Century
Design at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She was the inaugural Ann S.
and Samuel M. Mencoff Assistant Curator of American Decorative
Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and a Research Assistant in
the Department of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. She received an MA in the History of Decorative
Arts and Design from the Bard Graduate Center, and a PhD from the
University of Illinois at Chicago, where she wrote the
dissertation “Accumulating Things: Folk Art and Modern Design in
the Postwar American Projects of Alexander H. Girard
(1907-1993).” Obniski has taught art history at the University of
Illinois, Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, has received
fellowships from FIU-The Wolfsonian and the Center for Craft,
Creativity and Design, and has published a number of scholarly
articles and contributed to several museum publications.
Barbara Fitton Hauss is an independent American art historian and
translator based in southwestern Germany. Her authored works in
both English and German include a book on Renaissance
architecture north of the Alps (Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1991) and
numerous essays with a focus on midcentury modern design in the
USA and modernist art movements in Germany, which have been
published in catalogues by Vitra Design Museum, Museum für
Gestaltung Zürich, Dreiländermuseum Lörrach, and others. Her
translations in the fields of art, design and architecture have
appeared in noted books such as Women in Graphic Design (Jovis,
2012), Focusing the Modern (Bauhaus-Archiv,
2011), Migropolis (Hatje Cantz, 2009), Your Private Sky: R.
Buckminster Fuller (Lars Müller, 2000) and many exhibition
catalogues.
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