Alexander Girard, When Modern Exploded with Color, Pattern, Primitive, and Pop
Lecture by Brad Dunning
As the founding director of the Herman Miller textile division Alexander Girard brought an ultra sophisticated and exuberant sense of color, style and pattern to mid century design. His own interiors and original furniture have been wildly influential and are particularly relevant today.
From the early industrial designs and his first museum curatorial effort of the important exhibition "For Modern Living" in 1949 (the first major exposure for post war mid century products and design) through his ground breaking designs for Herman Miller, the multi disciplinary collaborations with his good friends Charles and Ray Eames, and his wild and pop-infused branding for Braniff Airlines in the 1960s, the presentation will pay homage to this lesser known giant of modernism with rare video footage, archival photos and current evidence of his legacy.
Girard is perhaps best known for his playful, primitive, borderline Op-Art fabric designs and his important graphic style, which included an avant garde mixing of fonts and styles creating his own "look" which is currently very much back in vogue.
His warm embrace of Third World naïveté and saturated colors were woven into some of the most important textile designs of the mid century period. When paired with an Eames and or Nelson furniture piece these fabrics tempered and enhanced the high tech modernism of its day with a Pan American embrace of the handmade, playful, and, most of all, colorful. He possessed one of the greatest "eyes" of the 20th century. His sense of balance, arrangement and display is unequalled and legendary to this day.
Perhaps lesser known than some of his peers, Girard's genius is so highly respected and revered this is a chance to revel in his creativity, re-appreciate his work and his almost giddy sense of infusing playfulness, sheer joy, and downright sexiness into mid century design.
Brad Dunning is a designer known for working on architecturally significant properties. He has also written about design, architecture and architectural preservation for various publications including the New York Times, Vogue and GQ.