The New York Times called PRITAM & EAMES the "Gallery of Original Furniture" when it opened on May 21, 1981, in a converted 19th-century steam laundry building in East Hampton, NY. In its opening show, the gallery exhibited work by makers who would become instrumental in shaping the course of the American studio furniture movement. The following selection of announcements and work from the gallery's first decade records its commitment to studio furniture and chronicles the strength and originality that establishes this field as a vital 20th century decorative art.

Founders, Bebe Pritam Johnson and Warren Eames Johnson, 1981.

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Introduction

The conversation of artistic and design styles that continues to give studio furniture its signature vigor today was set in play for the gallery by the work exhibited in its 1981 opening show. When pattern books are cast aside, all possibilities are open. This was the backdrop of energy from the 1970s when major currents of design philosophy were at work, some of which had begun decades earlier. Underlying all was the acceptance of function, and of wood as the preferred medium of expression. Because of its familiarity, furniture retains an intimacy in our lives and is in this sense always personal. But the idea that furniture could have a personality as individualistic as its maker defines studio furniture. The notion of the artist-craftsman -- the person who conceives the piece also makes it -- is the conceptual underpinning of this 20th century decorative arts movement.

About Pritam & Eames

One's forties is a time when altering choice can still be made. Bebe Pritam and Warren Johnson made theirs at 40. After working in New York City for 15 years -- she was director of Asian Program Operations at the Council on International Educational Exchange, and he was a freelance cameraman-editor in documentary films -- they knew by the mid-1970s that they were ready for a change. They decided to gamble on their own business, one in which they could combine their talents and about which they could feel passionate.

Once they made their decision, it seemed that disparate threads from their respective pasts pulled together. Warren Johnson's grandfather did coach work for the Pullman Company in Chicago, and he grew up with some of his grandfather's furniture as well as a sensibility for craftsmanship. Johnson also made a few pieces of furniture during the couple's graduate school days in Boston and New York. They were influenced when a good friend opened his store in Brussels in 1968 that featured high-end Italian and Scandinavian-designed furniture. Through colleagues at the Japan Society in New York, Bebe Johnson was introduced to the furniture of George Nakashima. While visiting friends on the eastern tip of Long Island in the early '70s, they came across a small house for sale in East Hampton in dire need of repair. It answered their needs exactly. They quit their jobs and, with their young daughter, established themselves in East Hampton.

There, the Johnsons sought out Warren Pedula, a former Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) student and sculptor whose Bridgehampton rocker they had noticed in a local store. They also met their first furniture maker, Peter Korn, who lived in nearby Wainscott, during this time. Korn introduced them to the writings of James Krenov, and Pedula told them about Fine Woodworking's design book series. This led the couple to John Kelsey, then editor of Fine Woodworking. Initially, Warren Johnson approached Kelsey with the idea of doing a documentary film about studio furniture making. However, it was Kelsey's advice in 1979 that led the couple on a yearlong odyssey of visits to furniture makers and schools in the Northeast. Kelsey pointed out there were many furniture makers creating fine pieces of furniture that were mostly sold privately. He observed that the entrepreneurial end of the field was wide open. The Johnsons sensed that this was the challenge they were seeking. They applied for and received one of the last Small Business Administration loans to help women and minorities get started in business. They were ready to take the plunge into a business of their own. The name for their business came easily enough: Eames is Warren's family name, and Pritam is Bebe's maiden name. Otherwise, they would have been Johnson & Johnson.

There were two early encounters that encouraged the Johnsons: in l979 they visited the Richard Kagan gallery in Philadelphia, and in 1980 they attended a furniture show hosted at the Roitman showroom in Providence. Kagan's sliver of a shop on South Street in Philadelphia was virtually the only place where an interested observer could get a sense of the maker energy percolating in the East. Kagan, a furniture maker himself, was an inspiration to the partners because of his knowledgeable selection of work.

It was Tim Philbrick who invited the partners to see a group show held at the Roitman furniture store in Providence, RI. The show was organized by Tage Frid and John Dunnigan, and included work by them as well as by other southern New England furniture makers including Philbrick, Hank Gilpin, Rosanne Somerson, Alphonse Mattia, and George Gordon.

The Design Book series by Taunton Press offered another important source of information for the Johnsons, as were catalogues from museum shows such as the 1972 Woodenworks exhibit at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, and the 1979 New Handmade Furniture exhibition organized by the American Craft Museum in New York.

The partners' task for the opening exhibition was to choose work from a multifacted, multi-centered field. By 1980, they had met Jere Osgood in Boston. His steering would be invaluable to the gallery since the studio furniture landscape was largely unlit at the time of the partners' research in the late 1970s.

One of their most important discoveries, however, was closer to home. It was their future landlord, Leif Hope, without whose support and encouragement the partners acknowledge they surely would have had a more difficult road and possibly have failed. Tucked away on a back street in East Hampton, the 19th-century steam laundry building owned by Hope has been the gallery address for nearly 25 years. This location was perfect for the Johnsons because the stabilized rent not only made their expenses manageable, but also allowed an unhurried pace for them to develop an audience for studio furniture. One of their first acts as Pritam & Eames was to commission James Schriber to make an entrance door for the gallery. They reasoned that his padauk and aniline-dyed ash door would provide a clue from the outside as to what was inside.

Good friends and owners of New York's Soho Charcuterie catered the gallery's opening on May 21, 1981. Many of the furniture makers came, providing enduring insight into their love of a good party. One of them said to a Fine Woodworking editor, "If any gallery is going to make it, it'll be this one."

Although the gallery's first years were a financial struggle typical of a shoe string venture, the partners consider their timing extremely fortuitous. It was during this period that resilient friendships were forged with many of the furniture makers. During this first decade, the Johnsons' small house was often filled with visiting furniture makers who lived in a style similar to theirs. Many shared a '60s background fueled by the belief that you can make a living by doing work that you love, and that such work would be valued by others. The challenge for these artist-craftsmen, then as now, is how do they make this work their own. Pritam & Eames has been privileged to be in place to learn more about why these gifted individuals do what they do and to be there for them as a showcase for their ideas in progress.

Opening Exhibition - 1981
Bruce Beeken, Larry Bickford, Wendell Castle, Richard Cohen, Michael Coffey, Nancy Crow (quilts), Ron Curtis, Tom Duffy, John Dunnigan, David Ebner, Stephen Dale Edwards (glass), John Everdell, Hank Gilpin, George Gordon, Maurice Hopson (rugs), Thomas Hucker, Michael Hurwitz, Hunter Kariher, William Keyser, Peter Korn, Mark Lindquist, Judy Kensley McKie, Robert March, Wendy Maruyama, Alphonse Mattia, George Nakashima, Richard Scott Newman, Timothy S. Philbrick, Peter Resnick, James Schriber, Rob Sperber, Pam Topham (tapestries), Jeffrey Urciuoli, Newell White, Jonathan Wright.

NOTES: In the opening show, Wendell Castle contributed an elegantly mannered, but rakishly stated, walnut and elm game table with four chairs that the Johnsons had spotted in his studio in 1980. Although the partners were principally seeking the work of the generation that succeeded Castle, they knew that a contribution from someone as well regarded as Castle lent substance to their efforts and they appreciated his contribution to a completely untested gallery.

Judy Kensley McKie's work has much in common with the spirit-imbued carving of primitive cultures. Her images suggest energies beyond what you see. (See Notes, McKie l987 show). She was represented in the opening exhibit with a console table in the form of a pair of carved mahogany dogs supporting a glass top. She also showed a walnut blanket chest with carved bird and floral motifs in the facades, patterns that continue in her work today.

Bill Keyser, on faculty at the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), took his command of technique and applied it first to form and then to function. He was exceptional in the opening show in that he contributed a nonfunctional piece that was a wall sculpture made from long sections of walnut and cherry branches. He also showed a branched-formed clothes tree, that could stand alone as sculpture.

Alphonse Mattia's red mirror, which utilized exotic hardwoods and a red lacquer shaped form as part of its frame, also took a decided sculptural direction. Mattia began with a mirror as a starting point but otherwise, the piece was a study of pure form, material, and color. He would continue to develop a series of sophisticated mirrors that featured carving, color, texture, and imagery that served him well in the gallery world during the 1980s.

Rob Sperber, Hank Gilpin, and Peter Korn contributed work to the opening show that could be described as "Krenovian" in approach. While McKie might first bring the piece to life as a sketch, James Krenov evolved a philosophy that saw the piece in the material. He published his ideas in four books in the mid-1970s, starting with The Cabinetmaker's Notebook. Krenov was not an advocate of building furniture from drawings. He didn't want a student to be obsessed with dimensions. Instead, he wanted a maker to see a piece in the material itself. If you could envision an important aspect of the piece in the material, then the rest of the piece would follow. Krenov's approach involves "seeing" like McKie, but with wood as material poetry. Many makers would be affected by Krenov's message. Sperber's thread cabinet and tie cabinet are good examples of material poetry, with great skill lavished on minor utility. Peter Korn's dictionary stand is at once functional, has a gentle sculptural attitude, and presents its material as a major dimension. His rocking chair ventures into a functional form not encouraged by Krenov. Its simple and slender Shaker-like sensibility is complemented by hand-woven fabric on the seat. Gilpin, as well, had a passion for material-just-right, and his pieces in the opening show would forecast his direction for the upcoming decades. In thinking about furniture he might say, "First, see a piece and its use in a room that is lived in. Second, bring just the right materials together for this piece." A strong part of the freshness of Gilpin's work is the use of always unusual, but seldom exotic, material. This is particularly evident in his white oak chest on stand but also in his curly maple bench and tea cart. The low base of the chest, with its novel asymmetrical extension and the simple beauty of the repeating, swelled drawer fronts, is emblematic of what would make his work appealing to so many in the years to come. Gilpin's furniture goes to the heart of livable, serviceable work that is designed with a clean material appeal in mind.

Tim Philbrick's sophisticated Pier Table of East Indian rosewood represents fine furniture as an outgrowth of early 20th-century European design movements. Philbrick had apprenticed with an antique restorer and reproduction maker in Rhode Island before joining the Program in Artisanry (PIA) at Boston University. His hero was Louis Majorelle, 1859-1926, master of Art Nouveau, and Philbrick was one of several working this way in what would become a strong movement in the 1980s that reestablished neoclassical references in studio furniture. John Dunnigan's boudoir chair in walnut with its two tones of peach colored velvet fabric, and his wall-hung console and mirror, also make this aesthetic connection.

George Gordon's handsome sideboard represented the continuation of a strong furniture making program at RISD that had been established by Tage Frid, and where Gordon had studied under John Dunnigan.

David Ebner, RIT-trained, was influenced by Castle's design abilities as well as by the earlier work of Wharton Esherick. In his Wishbone Rocker, he is closer to Castle. One can see the hooped base used by Castle and Ebner in their chairs for this show. In both cases, the seat is cantilevered in form and the chairs' strength depends on the stile-to-hoop joint at the floor. In the rocker, the entire form uses bent lamination technique.

Also evolving from RIT and Castle's influence, Richard Newman was represented by two continuous veneer-formed low tables, as well as by the tour de force shaping of his solid Honduras mahogany blanket chest. He had not yet offended collegial sensibilities with his sumptuous neo-neoclassical work in ebony and gold, with which he would soon be identified.

The virtuosity nurtured by the PIA program was represented in the opening show in a minor key. Perhaps the most dramatic contribution by a PIA graduate was the entrance door in padauk and blackened ash commissioned of James Schriber. Both Wendy Maruyama and Bruce Beeken contributed free-form benches which are remarkably similiar in feeling considering the divergent paths these two influential studio furniture makers would take in the future. The absence of work from Jere Osgood was due to his continuing responsibilities as the director of the PIA program.

The opening was well attended, but the partners held their breath for the first sales. The early years would prove to be a financial tightrope for the gallery.

Commissions

The gallery's first commission came from a downtown Manhattan maritime law firm. Richard Cohen built a partners' desk in walnut, and George Gordon made a series of walnut arbitration tables as pictured. Commissions were a vital part of the gallery's activity in its first decade, constituting nearly half of its business. A short sampling of commissions during the year follows the end of each year's section.

Early on, the partners had been advised that dealing with the trade in commission situations would be essential to the gallery's success. However, this did not prove to be the case because few architects or designers at the time made an effort to include studio furniture in their residential or corporate projects. Two notable exceptions were the pioneering efforts of Patricia Conway, principal in the New York architectural design firm of Kohn, Pedersen, Fox and Conway, and David Schwarz, a Washington, DC, architect who worked with studio furniture makers on corporate as well as residential projects. Later, the partners surmised that there may have been a perception in the trade that studio furniture cost more, took longer, and did not offer customary trade discounts. From the furniture maker's side, working with an architect or designer in a commission situation often left the maker out of the design process. Makers ended up executing designs of others rather than their own. Some makers made a practical adjustment and built to specification as part of their production routine. Beyond that, the results of the commission process can be far from a surefire thing. It is fair to say that some furniture makers and clients ought not be placed together in a commission situation.

Spring 1983
Lecture by James Krenov at Pritam & Eames

NOTES: The spring of 1983 marked the arrival of two cabinets by James Krenov, pieces that remain among his strongest work today. More than two dozen Krenov cabinets would be exhibited at the gallery during the ensuing years. Krenov also chose this occasion to visit Pritam & Eames for the first time, where he delivered a lecture to a full house. The first of his two cabinets is a maple case seated on a red oak stand. The concave flared panels of the two front doors, although not the first time Krenov used this feature, set this cabinet apart. The outward flare of the panel actually allows it to stand free of its frame at the outside of the door. The two small interior drawers are notable for the delicate pulls fashioned by carving into the partridge wood of the drawer front itself.

The second cabinet was built as a single integrated structure. Its frame is of mahogany and the panels are yaca-wood. By integrating the cabinet and the supporting frame, the legs could be joined at a 45-degree angle. This is a very satisfying feature that appears in a number of Krenov cabinets and later turns up in the work of Bill Walker (a student of Krenov's) and Hank Gilpin (a RISD graduate who did not study with Krenov). This cabinet's façade is so simple that the two pulls set into the doors act as a riveting focal point and express a powerful animus spirit. The animism is further enhanced by the extension of the stiles at the top of the cabinet. This carved extension of just a few inches has the symbolic quality of ears or horns. The pulls and the stile extensions provide a decorative emphasis that, overall, is compelling. Both Krenov cabinets contain wooden shelves as well as small drawers. The shelves carry a Krenov trademark that reflects his sensitivity to line: on the underside of the front edge there is a hand-planed bevel that delivers a slight visual lift. The effect is subtle, but real.

The Fine Art of Craftsmanship - Design and Process - 1983
Wendell Castle, Michael Coffey, John Dodd, David Ebner, Glenn Gordon, Tom Hucker, Michael Hurwitz, Hunter Kariher, William Keyser, James Krenov, Charles Mark, Richard Scott Newman, Russell Riscoe, James Schriber.

NOTES: This exhibit included drawings, photos of the production process for pieces in the exhibit, as well as an installation of the bending jigs and tools that David Ebner used to build his wishbone rocker. In an example of the drawing process, Michael Hurwitz showed a 20-foot piece of brown kraft paper with drawings of the evolution of a furniture idea that began as a table but wound up as a child's chair. The ornamental style of the chair's apron and crest rail evolved from Hurwitz's observations of historic buildings and decorative cornices. Cynthia Porter wove the fabric of the seat.
John Dunnigan was represented by another version of his Versailles Table. This time he utilized black lacquer for the base instead of wenge, which emphasized the top as a showcase for exotic wood. Note in the detail picture that the role of the apron is more decorative than functional, and that the stretcher system for the legs is a bent laminate structure. Also, the drapery-like aprons are turned and support the tabletop while the positions for the legs are cut out -- an unusual approach to table construction.

In 1964, Wendell Castle designed his music stand and determined it would be an edition. The one in this show was an unusual combination of purpleheart and maple. The viewer can't help but notice the similarity of the stand and a musical note. Although elements of the form would change in future editions, the spirit of its calligraphic gesture remained constant and made the music stand a classic in Castle's career.

Tage Frid's three-legged stools are animated work from Frid, you could say even anthropomorphic in that the group projects an assembly of personalities. You can also almost see these stools as Mattia's inspiration for his valet series.

David Ebner's Renwick Stool is an earlier design that brought him recognition from its acceptance by the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

The low table by Bill Keyser exhibits his creative use of steam bending, sculptural awareness, and technical intelligence in creating mystery for the eye. The arching legs appear to pierce the solid top.

Glenn Gordon's sturdy bench in lacewood is a compact composition of line and material. Although he would turn to writing in the future for creative outlet, this early small bench remains a strong piece.

Bruce Beeken's cedar Adirondack Chair was the earliest piece shown at the gallery to have been designed to be made in limited groups and marketed at a reasonable price. It took a discerning eye, nonetheless, to appreciate the differences between this chair and what was readily available in catalogues. The gallery itself would begin its effort to market an edition series in 1995; and by 2001, Beeken himself would be ready to launch his own line of Vermont furniture.