We are very happy to welcome Bebe Johnson to FS After Hours as our first guest author. The Honor Of Use was presented at the Furniture Society conference in Victoria, BC, Canada this past June. Bebe and Warren Johnson have owned Pritam and Eames gallery in Easthampton, N.Y. since 1981. - D. Richardson

The Honor Of Use

by Bebe Pritam Johnson

I’d like to tell you how I came to do what I do. And because I find my views today are clearer, simpler actually, than they used to be, I’ll begin at the end. For if I could reduce what I’ve learned in my life to one idea, to a single image, it would be this : the home, the home is the whole deal.

I understand now that this kind of thinking began to take shape in the mid-1950s. I was in school on the near north side of Chicago when my fifth grade art teacher, Dorothy Wisner, said to me, “Bebe, I think you might have some talent as a painter.” So she arranged for my scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, and every Saturday morning I would take the bus down Michigan Avenue to join, as its youngest member, the studio art class there. It became clear, fairly quickly, that I did not in fact have talent as an artist. I think I understand it a little bit better now, but I surely didn’t then. Nevertheless, despite this setback, I learned three valuable things about myself from that museum experience, and two were drawn from the studio art class. The first lesson was that even though I didn’t get it, I could recognize those who did. Then, I learned this about myself: I enjoyed watching them — I liked being around them.

The third and most important lesson, however, took place in another part of the museum. It was in a large, darkened room by the cafeteria in the basement where I encountered a primary truth that is at once both simple and clear- it is essential to be who you are. You must be comfortable in your own skin. It took some time for me to absorb this last lesson, probably longer than it should have. But for any of this to make sense, I need to tell you what I discovered in that room.

Within that large room were 65 or so smaller rooms, each constructed on a scale of one inch to one foot. These model rooms were conceived by Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago and constructed between 1932 and 1940 by master craftsmen according to her specifications. These miniature rooms provided glimpses into European and American interiors and furnishings from the late 13^th-century to the 1930s. The 17^th-century Massachusetts living room/ kitchen pictured above was never my home, but it might as well have been because of all of the time I spent studying it and the other models, drawn inexorably to what they represented to me — furniture presented in the context of the home.

A while later, I’m still in school, this time it’s the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and I’m doing philosophy when a nice-looking young man comes and sits down beside me in Existentialism class. That’s how Warren and I met, and we’ve been taking notes ever since. By the early 1960s, we had left the Midwest and headed east. We were still in school, this time it was graduate school in Boston : it was the 1960s, both the good and bad of it, and there was Vietnam, of course. We got our first apartment in Boston, but we had no furniture. However, the idea that you could make a piece of furniture was never foreign to us. Warren’s grandfather made furniture for the Pullman coach company in Chicago. He had grown up with his grandfather’s furniture, and the sight of his grandfather in his shop surrounded by his hand tools was familiar. When we needed furniture, Warren made it for us.

We finished school in Boston, moved to New York and, for reasons we still don’t understand, his number was never called for Vietnam. We got jobs and still managed to squeeze in some more school, this time it was film for Warren, and writing classes with Anatole Broyard for me. By the mid-1970s, we had lived and worked for others in New York for more than a dozen years. And, by this time, it has occurred to us that we could do this for the rest of our lives. Or we could pool what talents we had and work for ourselves. But the question became, “What would we do? What could be our fundamental project?”

In 1978, with our baby in tow, we left the city and followed friends to the east end of Long Island. We found what I’m certain was the last good deal in Hampton’s real estate and began searching for the project in which we could immerse ourselves completely. I think when you’re searching you’re open to ideas, and you see connections that you might not see otherwise. And we were open to suggestion, available to ideas.

So when Peter Korn, who lived nearby at the time, handed us a book called A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook by someone called James Krenov, we read it. Or when we came across a rocker in the window of a Bridgehampton housewares store, we went in and inquired about its maker. Warren Padula, a local sculptor, made the rocker and he had just dropped out of RISD’s furniture program. He told us about other academic centers that teach furniture making on the east coast. We heard about the Design Book series published by Taunton Press and edited by John Kelsey. Kelsey’s office was in Connecticut. Warren approached him with the idea of making a documentary film about furniture, but Kelsey told him something that set the course for us. He said, “There’s a lot of fine furniture being made on the east coast today but the makers don’t have any place to show their work. The entrepreneurial end of the field,” he observed, “is wide open.” We sensed immediately that this was the project we had been seeking.

We wrote 50 letters. This is the age before the personal computer, so these were 50 handcrafted letters. We waited for answers. Only one person did and this has endeared Tim Philbrick to me from the beginning. He said, “Sure, I’ll meet with you and discuss your idea for a store.” I asked him about the other 49 makers who didn’t reply. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t think furniture makers write letters generally. You better go see them.” So we tucked our baby in a packing blanket and began a year and a half odyssey in our red International Scout. We visited as many shops and studios as we possibly could. A furniture maker asked me recently what we thought of them when we first encountered them in the late 1970s. In truth, they didn’t seem strange to us at all; in fact, they seemed familiar.

I have no idea what they thought of us, however. We had no retail experience, no five-year business plan, and no gallery model to fit what we wanted to do. We were simply convinced by the work we saw. And once we made up our minds, nothing would stop us. We took a series of black/white photos of East Hampton that we pasted onto a big board, which we pulled out at each meeting to exult our proposed location to the furniture makers. The pictures were taken in November and, for those of you who know the northeast, you know there are few things grayer than a November day in the northeast. But we saw Technicolor, everything was potential, everything represented a possibility.

So this 19^th-century steam laundry building, situated down by the railroad tracks where no one walks, without a tree in sight, not a sidewalk in place, was to be the future site of our store. And I say store because gallery was not yet part of our vocabulary. We got one of the last Small Business Loans to help women and minorities get started in a business. That, plus a few friendly loans, and then, in 1981, we hung out our shingle that proclaimed, “Pritam & Eames- Purveyors of Fine Furniture.”The first five years were a financial challenge typical of any shoestring venture. We lived simply, frugally, raised our daughter, and gave our business what time it needed.

This picture says everything to me: furniture and the home, they are two sides to the same coin. And it has been ever thus, ever since our nomadic forerunners gave up hunting and gathering in favor of cultivation of the land, furniture has been part of the human experience. Home, then, may have been nothing other than simple huts of wood and reed, daubed with clay or mud, made later with stone and baked clay bricks. And furniture, nothing but a log. But it was this idea of home, established beside cultivated land that gave rise to community gathering, civilizations, and created the need for furniture.

La mobilia, los muebles, les meubles — consider how many European languages have some version of the word mobility to mean furniture — furniture as movable object. So that when you move from country to country, province to province, place to place, what do you bring with you in order to make you feel at home?

Like the writer Rose Slivka, I think of furniture as both artifact and allegory, one that anchors us in our chosen space and articulates that place and us within it. It is ever itself — stable, supportive, singular safe harbor. Furniture acts as both mute witness and participant in our lives, day in and day out. And it is in the home over time and with familiarity that furniture takes its character, establishes its provenance, and realizes its essential nature through the honor of use.

Since all furniture is about sitting, sleeping, containing or propping up people, objects, or even reputations, what is the essential ingredient that distinguishes studio furniture, our kind of furniture, from all other kinds of furniture?

The man who made the furniture in this room at Jack Larsen’s LongHouse in East Hampton created the definition and cast the direction for our field. Wharton Esherick’s sole visionary authorship provided the conceptual underpinning for the studio furniture movement — the notion of the artist-craftsman — the person who conceives of the piece, makes it.

Now, the idea that furniture can have a personality as individual as its maker has been a trademark of this field since the first group of self-taught practitioners worked in the first part of the 20^th century. People like Esherick, George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, Art Carpenter, Walker Weed, James Krenov and others, worked alone and were largely unaware of each other, but they shared certain qualities: They came from disciplines other than furniture, and they worked without pattern books. But they all made functional, wood pieces of furniture as a means of personal expression.

In the second half of the 20^th century, a second group of woodworkers emerged from a new training ground — America’s colleges. These academic training centers changed the landscape from a field of solitary craftsmen to a community with its own voice and publication. Pritam & Eames is mostly associated with this second group, but it seems to me that their challenge is pretty much the same as that of the first: namely, how do you make this work your own?

This hickory table and chair set has been the hub of many fine meals and conversations over the years at Jack’s house. It also represents the first public appearance, insofar as we know, of studio furniture. Esherick made the set for the “America at Home” room in the 1939 World’s Fair. He made all the furniture in this room, including the red bench. You don’t necessarily think of Esherick and painted furniture in the same breath but he painted this bench in 1953, and it is a favorite piece for reasons that I can’t fully explain.

I can show you some pictures of furniture that we’ve seen over the years that I think would be great to live with. Time will tell if they’re great pieces of furniture — there is a reason that antiques bear a 100-year marker. These pieces reflect the training, experience and vision of their creator: they illustrate how these furniture makers have made this work their own. In other words, the DNA in this work is clear — no one else would have made it.

Well, here’s some of the gang in our backyard. It’s probably 1991, and we’re celebrating the fact that we made it through the first decade. Not long ago, someone asked me if I would love this furniture as much if I didn’t know who made it. It’s a good question. I think my answer is, “If I didn’t know them, I would want to know them.”

Leaving a mark is a great human gift. For those of you who make furniture, I see what you do as akin to giving a gift. I can’t imagine what it would be like to begin with a feeling, an idea, chase its shape into a form, and end up with something that hasn’t existed before. And then what must it be like to have what you’ve made be something others will value and want to include in their lives? I wish I had a tiny percentage of this gift that you do to make things. I guess my gift is that I get to live with some of this work.

Well, I see we’re back at the beginning.

A couple of years ago, the artist and critic, Art Spiegelman, observed that the two biggest changes in art in the past 50 years have been the proliferation of art fairs and museums of contemporary art, and the advent of budget travel.”Wait, wait. Art, Art, help me out here. What does this mean?” “This means,” he says, “that more and more artists make works today that they never expect will be lived with, looked at day in and day out by the same person, because this art is made for fairs or museum shows designed to grab a distracted passerby’s attention without needing to be experienced twice. In this way,” he observed, “culture slides into the realm of entertainment.”

What then saves our furniture from this terrible fate? Dear audience, you know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Over the years at Pritam & Eames, people have said to me from time to time, “This isn’t furniture: it’s art. It belongs in a museum.” I must say to you when I hear this I have a sense of lost energy. For this is not to devalue the importance of the museum, but to suggest that when the museum — which unavoidably detaches art from everyday life : is the chief end and sole logical repository of art in society today : then we are presiding over the end of art as a vigorous form of life. It is in the home, precisely, where furniture is invigorated, where it is engaged — not in a gallery, not in a museum, and not on the auction block. It is in the home, over time and with familiarity, that furniture is validated because it is part of someone’s life, day in and day out. It is in the home where furniture attains value because it contributes meaning to our lives through the honor of use.

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See the full presentation here in flash format with additional photos of work by the Pritam and Eames artists.

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