We’re going to enter an engrossing period of fast-paced change in the world of design!
Firstly, there would be a gathering…But, where? You know how it is. New beginnings always mean LOCATION, LOCATION! But which location?
Granted, the U.S. had Frank Lloyd Wright; Germany, the Bauhaus; and England, Wm. Morris, but Paris had a whole conglomeration of memorable characters who would flourish and create radical new design movements of
MINIMALISM, SURREALISM and MODERNISM.
They would entwine and develop almost simultaneously!
THE CORRECT ANSWER??? OF COURSE, PARIS!
Surely the most mixed bag of design diversity ever imagined. If the economy was a virtual roller coaster, the center of design was a giant ferris wheel, steeped in pomposity, going round and round.
The same thing over and over.
The new idealists were bored. They wanted their place in design history and all were ready. Combined with their human story, a perfect scenario was created for our vicarious visit as we navigate some important design history. Hop On Board!
One of the earliest of Minimalist’s ‘in the beginning was Adolf Loos who wrote in 1908 “Ornament can be equated with crime.” And he set forth his reductive principle of plain moldings and the barest of essentials creating furniture that was solid, stolid, and unadorned as shown in his hallway.
Loos was creatively unique and outspoken. He strongly supported an article with an awesome title discussing the value of having buildings designed by more than one architect expressing this view…”I am an opponent of the trend that considers it desirable that a building along with everything in it should be designed by one architect…the building can have a monotonous appearance as a result.” The title of this article doesn’t seem to have a lot of hope… “Spoken into the Void”.
He entered an international skyscraper competition and designed a colossal Doric column…
1922
the Chicago Tribune considered it a design travesty and it was easily rejected. It was a time for new design waves… design that was on the brink of fresh insights and innovative ideas.
Therefore, it seems to be expedient that for any of us experiencing run-of-the-mill closet overload——too much furniture and never enough wall space for art collections to consider implementing today’s motif:
MINIMALISM!!!
Loos studied internationally, Chicago, New York, Vienna, and Paris where he became enamored with the black American dancer who rose to phenomenal Parisian fame and popularity…her tribute to minimalism was in the form of dancing minimally, no clothing as Josephine quipped…
“I wasn’t really naked, I simply didn’t have any clothes on.”
On June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in the slums of St. Louis, MO. Growing up, she cleaned houses and babysat for the wealthy. She was a mere child when one employer burned her hands as punishment for putting too much soap in the laundry——Josephine was eight years old. Trying to get to a better place, she ran away at age 13, married and divorced in that year, learned to dance and was signed to dance for a vaudeville show. When she was a 15 year old, she met and married for the second time a railroad worker William Baker. Her second marriage was also short-lived but she kept the Baker name throughout her life.
From there, she went to Harlem where she performed in musicals, danced to bands led by Duke Ellington and other American jazz musicians eventually arriving in Paris at the time when there was a newfound obsession with black culture, and a generation of French men and women who collected African art, jazz, and danced the Charleston. When she swung onstage in her costume of bananas sewn to a skirt and a necklace of swinging beads er costume, consisting only of a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, she became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring twenties. Baker was stunning, as shown in this image by the artist Paul Colin, 1927.
She enchanted audiences by dancing a comic jungle-type Charleston. (Theatre des Champs-Elysees spokesperson Ophélie Lachaux in 1921 told the AP, “And, that’s why they asked Josephine to dance something ‘tribal’, ‘savage’, ‘African-like’.”)
She advanced her career in ways unprecedented for a woman of that time. Leading couturiers in the ’20s, dressed Baker, jewelry was designed and created for her that she sold along with her famous hair and skin pomades. With the profits, Baker moved into the Château des Milandes,
a 24-room mansion in southwestern France; adopted 12 children from around the world; called them her “Rainbow Tribe”
and kept a menagerie of exotic companions such as a cheetah.
Josephine was always a woman of the people and for the people: During World War II, she aided the French Resistance by using her celebrity status to capture information for that organization, smuggling secret messages in invisible ink on her musical sheets. Josephine housed resistance fighters at her chateau and supplied them with visas. She attended parties and diplomatic functions including parties at the Italian Embassy that brought her in the orbit of high-ranking Axis bureaucrats. She collected information on German troop movements, and which harbors or airfields were in action. After the war in her uniform of a Lieutenant in the Auxiliaire Feminine, the Women’s Air Auxiliary of France. 
Josephine was confident that her celebrity and connections would protect her, and that no one would suspect her of espionage. She wrote down intelligence on her hands and arms, pinning notes inside her underwear.
She said, when asked to volunteer, “France made me what I am. I will be grateful forever. The people of Paris have given me everything… I am ready, captain, to give them my life. You can use me as you wish.” And Josephine was ready!
During the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, D.C. in 1963, she was, notably, the only official female speaker to give an address at the March on Washington. Josephine stood alongside Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In her speech in front of a sea of people, she declared:
“You know, friends, that I do not lie when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents… But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out ‘cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world…”
She hid Jewish refugees and weapons in her château. The Bakerskin cosmetics she had developed and sold helped pay for the poor and wounded after the war. Never once did she ask for or receive compensation for her wartime activities.
She received the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille de la Résistance, and Légion d’Honneur.
She died on April 12, 1975 and more than 20,000 people crowded the streets of Paris to watch the funeral procession on its way to L’Église de la Madeleine. The French government honored her with a 21-gun salute, making Josephine Baker the first American woman buried in France with full military honors! (* Vogue 1916)
Loos was not the only man enamored with Josephine, there were scores of others.
Ernest Hemingway described his fascination with Josephine Baker and later added that she was “The most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will.”
This is the house Loos designed for her to be built in Paris with horizontal bands of black-and-white marble, (some say this was because she was a mulatto, probably far-fetched).
An enclosed swimming pool taking up two floors would be a dominant focal point. Skylights and a circular cafe was included for an entertainment center.
(One writer suggested the stark and cantilevered design baffled Josephine.)
EUGENIA ERRAZURIZ offered an admirable & exceptional second example of Minimalism!
Born in Chile of enormous wealth from family silver mines, she married a rich landscape painter Jose T. Errazuriz and moved to Europe. And yet, Eugenia made this quote her mission—— and she meant it… “Throw out and keep throwing out!
Elegance means Elimination! Eugenia Errazuriz!”
She introduced the color, Inca Pink to Parisiennes from her native Chile. It became a popular sensation when it was reintroduced as Shocking Pink by the Couturier Elsa Schiaparelli who made it her signature color by mixing just a little white into magenta in the late 1930’s. A new fashion color was born. Other couturiers would follow!
Eugenia charmed, captivated and influenced society, poets, musicians, writers and designers.
Her path to elegance was light years ahead of its time. It consisted of simple materials – brass, cotton, linen, muslin curtains, whitewashed walls and highly polished floors of fir, pine and stone.
“A house that does not alter,” she liked to say, “is a dead house.” “If the kitchen is not as well kept as the salon … you cannot have a beautiful house,” she declared.
The entry level to her home in Paris.
She combined her living and dining rooms into a single space.
Eugenia loved using antiques in her selective displays where her table was set with eighteenth century silver flatware saying, “It would be wrong to forget that people of taste existed in the 18th century.”
Living Room
Eugenia kept two paintings in her living room.
Both by Picasso
She stood out for the unconventional sparseness of her rooms.There were no formal bouquets. Instead, plants were displayed in their own containers. She was partial to the scents of jasmine, lavender, lemon verbena, and rose geranium.
Eugenia launched a vogue for integrating garden furniture into upper-class interiors. The rudimentary original models of public gardens tables and chairs would emerge in the most elegant classic modernist forms.
In his book, “The Glass of Fashion, 1944 “
Cecil Beaton paid this compliment to Eugenia, “Her effect on the taste of the last fifty years has been so enormous that many of the concepts of simplicity, can be laid at her remarkable doorstep.”
She forever valued art and sent Stravinsky 1,000 francs a month, plus a supply of tobacco. He was HER composer. Picasso became HER painter, completing twenty-four drawings of Eugenia. Their friendship spanned 42 years.
White on White Portrait of Eugenia Errazuriz by Picasso 1921
Eugenia sent Picasso to her Biarritz villa to honeymoon with his first wife Olga.
“The pianist Artur Rubinstein:” I have never known anyone with the unfailing uncanny taste of this woman. Whether in art, music, literature or interior decoration, she see, hears, feels, smells the real value, the real beauty.” But Eugenia’s pursuit of exquisite simplicity and her generous donations to artists would not be cost-effective.
As the Second World War ended, her money had dwindled and she sold her belongings.
She was unable to restore her spirits. She returned to Chile and when seriously injured in an auto accident, said, “I am tired of living. I wish to help God to take me out of this life.”
Eugenia stopped eating and died in 1954,—
“a minimalist to the end!”
Sy’s Salient Points: I had the privilege of meeting one of Josephine Baker’s adopted sons in New York City. My husband, daughter and I were there when I was scheduled to give a lecture on this very topic Minimalism at the Javits Center during a Thanksgiving Holiday. We had been told there was Restaurant and Supper Club called Chez Josephine on Theatre Row owned by Jean-Claude Baker. As I understand, he was not officially adopted by her, but became a part of her life when young and took her name.
We made reservations for six, two family friends joining us. Someone in our party asked if the owner was there that evening——he was and Jean-Claude joined our table for a bit in our front window alcove table.
Needless to say, it was a lovely interlude as I shared some snippets about my lecture of Josephine, and he shared a story of the woman he called his Mother.
Jean-Claude Baker in Chez Josephine
Blog illustrations are from my original slide presentation for ASID, a design organization and various internet sites. Part 2 of Minimalism soon to follow…
Happy May Day and almost summer vacation Darling Blaire!