American Masters: Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect And The Painter

From 1941 to 1978, the husband-and-wife team of Ray and Charles Eames brought unique talents to their partnership. He was an architect by training; she was a painter and sculptor. Together, they are considered America’s most important and influential designers, whose work helped shape, literally, the second half of the 20th century and remains culturally vital and commercially popular today.

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Charles and Ray Eames.

Courtesy of Herman Miller

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Ray and Charles Eames examining the sling locations to be covered by fabric lapping in a prototype of the Aluminum Group Lounge Chair, 1957.

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Ray and Charles Eames photographing an early model of the exhibition “Mathematica: A World of Numbers … and Beyond,” 1960.

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Ray Eames with an early prototype version of The Toy, made of cardboard triangles; outside the Eames House, 1951.

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Charles and Ray Eames departing for Moscow and the American National Exhibition, 1959.

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Ray and Charles Eames selecting slides for the exhibition, “Photography & the City, 1968."

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Charles and Ray Eames posing on a Velocette motorcycle, 1948.

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Ray and Charles Eames at home, circa 1970.

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Charles and Ray Eames’ grandson Eames Demetrios at the Eames House.

Courtesy of Quest Productions/Bread and Butter Films

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DCW (dining height chair, wood legs); molded plywood dining chair, 1946.

Courtesy of ©2011 Eames Office, LLC

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Eames Lounge (full front, without ottoman).

Courtesy of Herman Miller

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Eames Aluminum Group Lounge (1958).

Courtesy of Herman Miller

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Molded plywood children’s chair designed by Charles and Ray Eames.

Courtesy of Quest Productions/Bread and Butter Films

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Blue molded fiberglass chair designed by Charles and Ray Eames.

Courtesy of Quest Productions/Bread and Butter Films

The Eames are, perhaps, best remembered for their mid-century modern furniture, built from novel materials like molded plywood, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, bent metal wire and aluminum — offering consumers beautiful, functional, yet inexpensive products.

Revered for their designs and fascinating as individuals, the Eames have risen to iconic status in American culture, but their influence on significant events and movements in American life — from the development of modernism to the rise of the computer age — has been less widely understood.

"The Architect And The Painter" crafts a fascinating, complex blueprint of two great American artists and provides a candid view of their emotional lives as they apply their genius to practical problems and innovation. The film draws extensively from a virgin cache of archival material, visually stunning films, love letters, photographs, and artifacts produced in mind-boggling volume during the hyper-creative epoch of the Eames Office.

Critics may argue about how to delineate Charles and Ray’s respective roles in their prodigious design output, but AMERICAN MASTERS reveals how they and the Eames Office designers actually dealt with questions of authorship and control.

Interviews with Charles’s daughter Lucia, his grandson Eames Demetrios, Eames Office designers, director/screenwriter Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, noted architect Kevin Roche, design historians, and others guide viewers on an intimate voyage through the “Eames Era,” shining a light on the genuine legacy of their design – that which elevated aesthetic refinement and functionality to a higher plane.

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