To school for a bit of history about Charles Eames
What makes a 75-year-old school desk worth $15,000 or more?
On Thursday, the Chicago auction house Wright will offer more than 265 designs by the late Santa Monica-based Charles and Ray Eames from the JF Chen Collection, which was exhibited by Los Angeles antiques dealer Joel Chen and Eames scholar and collector Daniel Ostroff during the Getty’s 2011 Pacific Standard Time art initiative. Among the iconic Eames designs — fiberglass shell chairs, ESU storage units and Aluminum Group loungers — the highlights of the sale are rarities including 1946 radios. The earliest Eames design hitting the auction block — valued at $10,000-$15,000 — is a school desk designed in 1939 by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen for the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Ill.
“Saarinen’s father, Eliel, was one of the architects of the school and Eero worked on it, doing the seating with his friend Charles,” says Ostroff. “If you look at it carefully, you see how smart it is for a schoolhouse: The top surface is an early form of laminate, a surface that can’t be marred easily by pen or pencil, and the drawer pull that is easy for young hands to manipulate and also solid enough not to break off.”
Though Eames and Saarinen would design furniture for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Organic Design” competition in 1940, this early example of their collaboration, Chen says, has “beautiful proportions and is in its original condition.” The desk also has a serious civic architecture pedigree. “The Interior Department added the Crow Island School to its register of historic landmarks in 1990,” he says.
The estimated price for this classroom writing table reflects its rarity, Ostroff, author of four books on the Eameses, says. “As far as I know, this table and two chairs from the same school are the only three pieces that have ever come out of there.”